The Voynich Ninja

That there were 2 people in the VM was always clear. I thought a 3 person was quite possible.
5 persons was a surprise.
Families with 6-10 children was not uncommon around 1400. Rather the normality.
Many children were considered as security for the age. Something like a pension plan.
My grandfather also had 6 siblings = 7 children.

According to the motto, is a doctor, so all doctors only the youngest goes to church.
Reading something about history gives you a better overview, and it does not hurt.

(09-05-2020, 07:36 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(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 ?

I used to favour a Turkic language. I thought it would make a good match and there were lots of Turkic speaking communities in the eastern part of Europe. As far west as Poland there were settled Lipka Tatars by this time. I now think that the sounds and word structure of Turkic don't match well enough with what we know.

My favourite now is a Finnic language. Very few phonemes, simple syllable structure, and a word structure which could be decomposed into multiple smaller morphemes. Finnic speaking people lived very much within reach of other populations who might have brought the culture of this manuscript to them. Yet Finnic languages themselves were mostly unwritten at this date (interestingly, a related language Permic was first written in Cyrillic shortly before this time). This suggests that the manuscript could have been an attempt to originate literacy in Finnic. This, however, is all speculation.

The potential VMs Artist does not need to be the owner of the comparative illustrated manuscripts. All that is needed is access to the manuscripts, which means access to the libraries. BNF Fr. 565 started out in the library of Jean, Duke of Berry (d. 1416, Paris). It probably stayed in the family for a while after that. The 'Apocalypse of S. Jean' (1313) came to the Library of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (ruled 1419-1467).

In the history of the Hundred Years' War, Anglo-Burgundian forces held Paris from 1420 to 1435. An educated person, a cleric or some such, coul easily have had access to both libraries any time during this period - or subsequently. The VMs could have been started in one decade, revised over the years, and finished in another. There may be significant variables between various scenarios, but can they be distinguished?

One aspect of Lisa Fagin Davis's recent article about multiple scribes and her identification of scribes per folio,
is that Quires 9,10,11,12 are all by Scribe4, that is the entirety of the 'Astro.Zodiac.Cosmo' section.

Now we consider bifolios f57, f58, f65, f66.

f57:  f57r( Herbal ) by scribe5 and f57v( text/drawing ) by scribe1
f58: scribe3  - all-text
f65: scribe3  - Herbal
f66: scribe5  - f66r( all text), f66v( Herbal)

we can see a mixture of Herbal and all-text folios either by scribe f58( all-text ) ,f65( Herbal ) by scribe 3
or by bifolio with bifolio f66 being both Herbal and all-text.

Therefore the hypothesis that (granted that there are some folios missing here)--

The text folios f57v,f58r,f58v,f66r are an addendum / epilogue to the 'Herbal' section

as opposed to being an introduction to (or included within) the 'Astro.Zodiac.Cosmo' section.

And via similar logic,
As all 'Astro.Zodiac.Cosmo' are by scribe 4  and all 'Balneo' are by scribe 2,
therefore the all-text folios You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and v76v,
should be considered an Introduction to the 'Balneo' section
as opposed to an ending of the 'Astro.Zodiac.Cosmo' section.

--is strengthened.

NB I fully realize this has been said before
but here i'm illustrating that now theres some evidence to back up this hypothesis.
PS Apologies for not writing clearly, as said elsewhere its hard to put ideas into words.

It appears with this idea of multiple scribes discussed here that we are talking about a group of semi-autonomous agents working to produce the manuscript; this being opposed to one individual dictating to other individuals what to write.

If one has one "author" and many scribes working under that author each scribe having a different handwriting then that is one scenario.

If one has multiple authors each author having a different handwriting then that is quite another scenario.

My understanding is that the implication from Lisa Fagin Davis's analysis seems to be that there were multiple authors.

Both scenarios could be possible given my theory. The 2nd scenario would fit quite neatly for a variety of reasons, however I find it a bit disconcerting. It feels like a multiple author scenario would make the Voynich not least a folie a deux, but rather folie a cinq. The idea that one person might of their own will decide to produce such a document could be put down to their own personal peculiarities. The idea that this was a collaborative exercise seems very strange with each of them enabling each other's folly.

If we have brothers here, then maybe shared family closeness and interests and peculiarities may have made it seem to be a reasonable family project. Nevertheless this all sounds very strange. For a group of people to agree to write a book together that was only readable amongst themselves seems odd; though is it really so odd, I don't know. Looking back writing such a book readable or unreadable seems a bit odd anyway. I suppose such a thing could start as a small exercise and through being added to cumulatively become a big project, that does seem quite reasonable. It may never have been planned or expected to become such a large text.

Understanding why people do the things that they do is a mystery which makes the Voynich manuscript mystery seem trivial.

Some might say that the authors of the Voynich just had too much time on their hands and too much money to spend and they certainly had no idea of the consequences of their actions. I suppose there were few alternative hobbies or distractions then and I guess they thought that what they wrote had utility. I suppose there were a lot of manuscripts written then that the authors of which thought they had utility, even though from a modern perspective in a practical sense they were useless.

Brothers at the Council of Basel, which ran for many years and achieved nothing, could easily have been distracted; assuming there is truth to my theory, which of course there may not.

(10-05-2020, 09:30 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
...
For a group of people to agree to write a book together that was only readable amongst themselves seems odd; though is it really so odd, I don't know. ...

Keep in mind that this was around the time that several secret societies were forming, and also a time when ciphers were fairly popular (not saying the VMS is a cipher, but it could be).

With travel improving, and archaeologists bringing back artifacts, there was a growing interest in "hieroglyphics" (which was a more general term then than it is now) and a few decades later a very strong interest in creating a "universal" language, since the use of Latin was fading and scholars were concerned about being able to intercommunicate in a Latin-less future (as they saw it).


Working in secret was not unheard-of. Gutenberg knew there was a danger in his new technology getting out before he had printed his first book, so he worked in secret for several years (I can't remember how many, but it was quite a while).

(09-05-2020, 09:18 PM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.NB I fully realize this has been said before

Robgea,

I appreciate the summary, it's an important topic, and in previous extended discussions it became hard to tell what the final decision was.

I'm not arguing for multiple authors at all - in fact, I'm not drawing any conclusions about authorship. That's not my field and it's not my purpose. My argument is that there were five different scribes. The implications of that observation are not clear to me. It could have been five people taking dictation from one author, it could have been five authors, it could have been five people copying from a lost exemplar, or none of the above! 

Some of the confusion, I think, stems from my use of the word "writer". I don't mean that the way we use it today, where the term is often synonymous with author. I mean the literal physical act of writing the text, which, in the Middle Ages, rarely also implied authorship. In fact, medieval manuscripts known to have been physically recorded by the author are extremely rare. In the vast majority of cases, the manuscript is recorded by an emanuensis (secretary) taking dictation or cleaning up the author's notes, or the manuscript is a copy (or a copy of a copy of a copy...) of the autograph manuscript, or it's produced by a monk or a professional scribe copying an exemplar.

It becomes slightly more common in the humanistic period (and I know there are many of you who would place the VMS in the context of the humanistic period in Italy) as writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio hone their calligraphic skills and start recording their own work. But it is still relatively rare.