The Voynich Ninja

JKP

Doesn't bombast start with Wilfrid himself - filling in holes like a snake-oil salesman? And yet not knowing much of what the VMs actually contains.

(09-04-2020, 10:15 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
JKP

Doesn't bombast start with Wilfrid himself - filling in holes like a snake-oil salesman? And yet not knowing much of what the VMs actually contains.

LOL! Yes, that might be true. He was a businessman first and foremost.

Hyping the VMS was the way to get the best price. But you know, despite all this, I think he had a soft spot for the VMS. He spent more resources than were needed to give it some authenticity as a medieval item. Most of his research was to confirm age and provenance, the job of a bookseller, not to solve the VMS. But there may have been a part of him that really wanted to know what it contained.

I'm not a real student of this aspect of VMs investigation, I know Voynich wanted to sell it, and that he apparently believed it to be a Roger Bacon manuscript, or just claimed that it was as part of the hype. Unfortunately, I became interested before the hoax theory, otherwise I'd be doing something else.

There is, of course, the physical history of the book itself. It's probably genuine, but possibly fake.

Much early research either went into plant identification or language investigations, and these continue to persist, without reaching beyond their closely defined limitations.

What has happened with the combination of an interested VMs community and improved internet access to illuminated manuscript images, is the potential for matching certain authentic medieval images with specific folios in the VMs. What sort of relationship explains the existence of the similarities and the differences in the comparable representations? But there is more to it than that. Knowing the history of the Voynich involves knowing the traditions of the VMs era - the cosmos, cloud-bands, heraldry in both armorial and ecclesiastical forms, the Agnus Dei, the laws of Deuteronomy, etc. All of which have been carefully manipulated and transformed to remain just inside the bounds of recognition for those also familiar with the same traditions. I believe we are on the right path when rediscovered tradition helps to explain something in the VMs.

With respect to quoting earlier work, if one is knowingly basing one's work on previous work by other people, the only correct thing to do is to state this and/or quote it, of course.

If one is writing about a topic that was previously discussed by someone else, one may or may not mention this other work, depending on its relevance. General courtesy is never a bad idea.

However, it is better to quote no source than to give an incorrect or inappropriate one.

The problem was that we didn't want to use 'c' both for (part of) ch and for e