(08-11-2021, 06:50 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As already mentioned, In Bruges in 1480 a surprising 25% of the guild of book illuminators were women. One could therefore speculate that a number of roughly the same magnitude were employed as scribes in the workshops. This at least does not seem unrealistic.
Of course, this says nothing about a possible female authorship.
That is a valuable point. Though, of course, as you say it is different from authorship. I think one can ask what other examples from the time are there of women collaborating on their own work not on behalf of a man?
As an aside, I wonder whether one can really say that the Voynich had a professional illustrator.
If female illuminators are 25%, then female authors were probably less. So 25% is 3 to 1, then it's 4 to 1, or 5 to 1, or even less than that. Perhaps these VMs illustrations were partly drawn by a female artist. And then there are scribes and the author.
Even at 5 to 1, Pizan is the one. Who are the other five?
The VMs is a unique item, its source will also be unique.
More important than gender would be the artist's sense of humor. Whether male or female there are several examples of illustrations that make use a sort of sophisticated disguise through the use of combined images in the cosmos, the mermaid, the Golden Fleece and other tricks, intentional ambiguity, in White Aries. Why would deception be employed?
The artist has used certain tricks, yet also follows certain rules. If we learn the tricks and follow the rules, and know the history that is relevant to the early 1400s, esp. the 2nd quarter, then some bits of VMs impenetrability might be better resolved.
(08-11-2021, 08:49 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VMs is a unique item, its source will also be unique.
This is one of the fundamental questions which always arises with the Voynich.
The Voynich is a unique historical document, but it is also a product of it's time and history. How do we understand it in the context of its contemporary documents?
The Voynich is an anomaly, on the basis of most known contemporary documents it should not exist.
One might almost wonder if the Voynich is just a made up rumour and in fact doesn't exist at all. I mean how many people have seen it?
(08-11-2021, 08:46 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As an aside, I wonder whether one can really say that the Voynich had a professional illustrator.
That is doubtful, and so is a professional scribe. The assumption that the VMS may have originated in a writing workshop ( including text ) stands on "clay feet". The VMS is and remains unique. Imagine a professional scribe writing down the text of the VMS. The writing runs against every routine, but the text is written down altogether (almost) error-free.
Sorry. I have already seen that some of you are skeptical that the book was written by women. I made my previous comment after reading what Monica Valentinelli wrote. I had already seen a similar opinion of another woman in a video.
This opinion is mainly based on the so-called biological or balneological section, as if the VM were a women's health book. I don't believe that at all, mainly because there are no real women drawn, only allegories. I believe that all those naked women represent the stars. I believe it because they are the same ones that are seen in the zodiacal section carrying a star each.
And there are other clues, one of them fundamental. Some of these naked women carry spindles in their hands. It was Koen who I believe first noticed this fact. And I corroborate it because it is a way of representing that the stars spin time in an eternal circle
(08-11-2021, 04:33 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In our century I don't think anyone dares question this idea that the VMS is a work of women. It is very difficult to go against the current and it can end up succeeding. In the last century no one thought of that. We are a product of history, as Gadamer said.
I'm not following what you mean here, even after your latest reply.
(08-11-2021, 10:07 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....the text is written down altogether (almost) error-free.
This, or some variant of it, is a statement often made. Given that we can't decipher the text we cannot say how many or how few errors there are in the manuscript. One can say something about the number of apparent corrections, but there may well be many uncorrected errors.
I have no opinion about how professional the scribe was, but someone who is trained to neatly outline his text in nice blocks can still use a quicker hand if needed. The VM looks more "casual" than the kind of MS one would present to a wealthy client, but that does not necessarily mean that the scribe was unable to produce such a high standard work.
I have taken a collaborative work from the database mentioned in post #40 and looked at it more closely. This manuscript was written in the late fifteenth century at the Cloister of Jericho in Brussels by eleven nuns. Maybe I lack the eye for details, but I couldn't even tell that it was a collaborative work. The typeface seems to me very homogeneous (and accurate). So you don't necessarily have to recognize that so many ( female ) writers were involved.
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I'm sorry I missed this thread when it was ongoing, because I have a lot of thoughts about this question. There is significant evidence of female scribes, professional scribes as well as nuns, in the late Middle Ages, so there is really no good reason to assume the VMS
couldn't have been written by women. The best work by medievalists on female scribes is being done by Alison Beach. She's written extensively on the subject (including this recent book about nuns in 12th-c. Bavaria: You are not allowed to view links.
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The content of the VMS absolutely speaks to women's knowledge and women's wisdom. But it is not an easy matter to distinguish medieval women's writing from men's. This kind of paleographical analysis depends on comparison with known samples...obviously with the VMS, there are no samples for comparison. But I would not be surprised if we eventually discover that the manuscript was made by women for women.