Well, RobGea suggested the "family of healers".
No the drawings are certainly made by a person with understanding of what's being drawn, how it's to be drawn and knowing how to draw large circumferences, spirals etc. in a proper manner. And if we recall the consideration that at least some labels are put by the person who did the drawings, this brings it further apart from the family affair.
Diebold Lauber's scriptorium was a family affair. Diebold Schilling was part of it as well (possibly a son-in-law? I can't remember exactly how Schilling was related, it was years ago that I researched the family relations).
In the Middle Ages, some villages were made up almost entirely of relatives. A "tribe".
But why does it matter if it is in a family or not? If there is a mentor-pupil relation involved (which is one option), then this might also be between non-family members.
This also touches upon the subject of sources. How many manuscripts do we assume the VM creators had access to? Which of the echos we see are based on imagery in other works? If it was made within a family, how rich were they to possess various illuminated manuscripts?
Edit: true JKP, but then the relevant relation would be the fact that they worked at a scriptorium more so than the fact that they were family.
I don't care whether it was a family or monks or a scriptorium... but I do care about there being good arguments in whatever direction the discussion takes.
Many businesses in the Middle Ages were very strongly family oriented. It's how they retained their guild memberships and how they kept their trade secrets.
Merchant families wrote textbooks for their own children, teaching them math, navigation, etc. These books were full of the kinds of problems you see in modern math books.
Maybe the VMS was created for some of the same reasons, even if it was for a different set of subjects.
(09-05-2020, 05:38 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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This also touches upon the subject of sources. How many manuscripts do we assume the VM creators had access to? Which of the echos we see are based on imagery in other works? If it was made within a family, how rich were they to possess various illuminated manuscripts?
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You don't have to own them all yourself. You just have to be rich enough to have rich friends or access to places only rich people could go. My friends and I swap books all the time. They don't cost what they cost in the middle ages (a year's wages for a working person, sometimes more), but the discrepancy in income between landowners and others was also very great.
(09-05-2020, 05:36 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Diebold Lauber's scriptorium was a family affair.
The VMS is obviously not a product of scriptorium.
(09-05-2020, 05:38 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But why does it matter if it is in a family or not?
The discussion is about what might have been the exact case or scenario when a book that noone can read would be created by a number of five persons working in collaboration. In my opinion, a family is not a very viable scenario.
Once again, to emphasize that:
a book that noone can read.
I wasn't saying it was the product of a scriptorium. I was saying that many businesses and many things created in the Middle Ages were family affairs. Lauber is only one of a zillion examples of a "family affair" business. Trade secrets and guild memberships were critical to survival in those days and if you had a family member who was already a member, you had a better chance of getting in. It was difficult to go off somewhere else and be accepted. Some people even lost the rights of local citizenship if they left a village for any period of time.
These were the days of walled cities.
There is a serious problem with the Voynich manuscript as a "secret" text. Namely that if the underlying language has an established orthography/standard, why does the text vary throughout? The variability suggests a language without an existing standard.
The text may vary if the source plain text varies or if algorithms vary. But yes that's a good point against the "father and sons" scenario.
In any case that means different "manner" for different scribes. In case of natural language, than means different languages. A family would not write a book collaboratively each in different language, unless it's a family of the Tower of Babel builders.
It points toward a natural language community. A group of people who speak the same language but not the same way. They also don't agree exactly on how their language should be written but use varying orthographies. There's a number of languages in or near Europe which were unwritten (or little written) at the time the manuscript was made. I believe these should be our main interest.
(09-05-2020, 07:12 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There's a number of languages in or near Europe which were unwritten (or little written) at the time the manuscript was made. I believe these should be our main interest.
Do you have certain languages in mind ?