So I'm at loose ends here. If the script was written by multiple individuals, instead of some aging wizardly nutter, who badly burned her index finger, then how might VMs creation have come about? Is the VMs complied of disparate sections, in which case divisions should very clear, or were there entries by several persons on a single page, as the tilted lines might suggest?
While reasonably considered valid in the early centuries of its existence, the interpretation of VMs text as a lost 'tribal' language doesn't hold much water any more. While there is the intention to create the appearance, there is no actual "lost culture" or society behind this. There was no culture from which different parts of a combined text could originate. Unbreakable encryption and meaningless content are also investigative dead ends. What possibilities are left? It's the combined work from a cabal of wizardly nutters using set of secret symbols to unintelligibly record their foibles and flights of fantasy in their own private language?
(08-05-2020, 06:09 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What possibilities are left?
Yes, that's the question. This somehow narrows the scenario space and makes weird what is weird already. What community would that be? Monks is first what comes to mind, but the contents don't hint at that. Family business? Secret society? Doubtful.
On the other hand, a weird community would be more noticeable than just a single secretive individual. More chances that some traces are left in history...
Anton Wrote:a weird community would be more noticeable than just a single secretive individual. More chances that some traces are left in history...
This is precisely why I find Lisa Fagin Davis's breakthrough such good news. It raises the odds that Voynichese contains some sort of real human communication.
A beautifully written and important article.
My own tentative working hypothesis has always been that this could be a family affair -"Let's help grandpa finish his book" or some such.
That's my feeling too Don, that it may be a family project.
At first, I thought maybe the kids helping grandpa, and grandpa recording his trade secrets or travels (or something else)... but now I'm leaning more toward grandpa helping the kids. Not only by leaving behind knowledge (or possibly a puzzle-with-educational-value) but maybe also a manuscript that could be taken by a teenaged son to a scriptorium in another city to present as an example of basic skills: illustrations, plants (which were hugely popular as decorative items but which also required knowledge of plants by the latter 15th century), script, pilcrows and other decorative letters, rota (which require a compass), etc.
It might seem crude by scriptorium standards, but it would be a fine resume for a 16-year-old on his way to college in another town (the first years of college in those days were a bit like the last couple of years of high school these days), someone who normally would have little or no training.
There was a strong guild and apprenticeship system (some of the guilds were extremely powerful and even called their guild presidents "kings") and getting into them was difficult. But if you had a portable example of what you knew, what you could do, maybe it could get you a foot in the door.
Lately I've been trying to keep my eyes open for someone who might draw "sort of" like the illustrator of the VMS, but perhaps after 6 years of apprenticeship (they could last a long time in those days) and practice.
Yes, this article really puts me in mind of the 'Iatrosophion' idea.
I think it was Alain Touwaide ( and probably others) who noticed the structural similarities between the VMS and an iatrosophion,
and now with more evidence for multiple scribes, that concept is an even better fit.
A family of healers who over a generation or more, accumulated knowledge and wrote it down in their family book [and then obfuscated it for reasons unknown ]
(09-05-2020, 09:37 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's my feeling too Don, that it may be a family project.
At first, I thought maybe the kids helping grandpa, and grandpa recording his trade secrets or travels (or something else)... but now I'm leaning more toward grandpa helping the kids.
If my thoughts wander in this direction, i'd like to take the middle ground. I can vividly imagine Papa Quack sitting at the kitchen table, surronded by his Quack sons (and maybe one or two Quack apprentices) guiding them through a project that would help them gain more reputation in crowded market places, where you have to compete with tose other quacks. Maybe he was not a Quack for all of his life, maybe he was a miller or something, and you would see that his hands are still those of a labourer - and also his writing was not the most refined. The young ones would do better with there soft hands, but he was the one overseeing the whole process and teaching them how to arrange the glyphs on a page -> he is Scribe 2, the "collaborative scribe".
Of course this is pure imagination, but:
(08-05-2020, 09:05 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is precisely why I find Lisa Fagin Davis's breakthrough such good news. It raises the odds that Voynichese contains some sort of real human communication.
I completely disagree with this!
I think the "family business" is problematic, considering how families lived in Middle Ages, I think fathers and sons got dispersed and separated, and even if each of them had business of the same kind, he would have it on his own. Beside that, I can't imagine a family of five healers. I've never heard of such a thing.
But a quick You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. hints that there are examples of iatrosophia created by a "community of physicians in a hospital setting". That option is interesting.
(09-05-2020, 05:17 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think the "family business" is problematic, considering how families lived in Middle Ages, I think fathers and sons got dispersed and separated, and even if each of them had business of the same kind, he would have it on his own. Beside that, I can't imagine a family of five healers. I've never heard of such a thing.
But a quick You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. hints that there are examples of iatrosophia created by a "community of physicians in a hospital setting". That option is interesting.
Five healers? You don't have to be a healer to be a scribe or an illustrator. The book might be for the eldest son.
And I didn't say family business (I don't know if the others were thinking "business"). A family project is not the same as a family business. The drawings could have been done by a teenager. Same with the script. Maybe grandpa or dad was the mastermind.
If it was a family, it was a literate one with money for parchment and inks and access to exemplars. A professional family or part of the nobility (not necessarily the high nobility).
I think I better split this thread - hold on.