The Voynich Ninja

I have recently read a blog post in which it is assumed that the VMS is a work of women. Addressees of the manuscript are also ( mainly ) women. This thesis raises a number of questions, here are some of them:

Are there coded works which were demonstrably created by women ?

Is it possible to deduce from the pictorial representation in the VMS in any way that the themes are primarily women-specific ?

Can the low number of depictions of male characters be explained by the assumption that mainly "women's issues" are dealt with?

What kind of topics can be addressed concretely ( for example bathing rules / hygiene ) ?

Which female authors would come into question in the period of origin of the VMS ?

To be clear, I think this thesis is rather questionable but at least worth to be discussed. Until now it seems to me to be an unspoken basic assumption that the VMS is a work of male authors.

It would be interesting to hear why some people are so convinced that the VM was made by women. Does it go further than "many pictures of women, so made by women"?

To play the devil's advocate, I might say that for example it would be unlikely for a medieval male author to devote a work entirely to women. After all, people in those days were often utterly misogynistic by today's standards.

But there are counterexamples. The first one that comes to mind is the 14th century work "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view." by the very male author Boccaccio. Even the title says "this book is about women", yet it is authored by a man. And conversely, Hildegard was a woman but there are plenty of men in the Scivias illustrations (Prophets, other biblical figures, normal people...). Here female figures are often allegorical, like the "bride of the Lamb" for the Church/Ecclesia; and Synagoga. I'm not 100% certain but I would guess there are considerably more men than women in her images.


Synagoga is full of bearded men.



My own opinion: we cannot say anything about the gender of the maker(s) based on the images. Especially since certain allegorical representations leaned towards the female. For example, there is ample evidence that male authors thought of their own soul (Latin anima ) as a female entity.

But again, I would be interested to hear arguments in favor of female authorship that are not simply based on the amount of female figures in the imagery.

Can gender be decided by handwriting?

(04-11-2021, 10:11 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Can gender be decided by handwriting?

I think that graphologists can determine the gender of the writer with some certainty. However, I do not know if the analysis must be based on a text in Latin alphabet.

Here is a link to background on women in book arts.

Quote:In Bruges in 1480, however, a surprising 25% of the guild of book illuminators were women.

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(04-11-2021, 10:11 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Can gender be decided by handwriting?

Yes, it certainly can! Just look at the abstract of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

Quote:There is an ongoing debate about whether, and to what extent, males differ from females in their language skills. In the case of handwriting, a composite language skill involving language and motor processes, behavioral observations consistently show robust sex differences but the mechanisms underlying the effect are unclear. ....This study identifies a novel neural signature of sex differences in a hallmark of human behavior, and highlights the importance of considering sex as a factor in scientific research and clinical applications involving handwriting.

Now to find out how to recognize male vs. female handwriting and apply this to quill-on-vellum writing and Voynichese script



(note: graphology is about personality traits, not gender. It is a pseudoscience.)

(04-11-2021, 10:53 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.note: graphology is about personality traits, not gender. It is a pseudoscience.

Alright, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. one is probably more serious. However, it is not clear to me whether other components (e.g. sentence structure ) play a role besides the font.

(04-11-2021, 11:38 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Alright, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. one is probably more serious.

It would be cool if we could show a picture of the VM to a handwriting analysis AI. But from the abstract of that link it seems to me that they are talking about text patterns (vocabulary?), not handwriting per se.

In the abstract, there is talk of a "Support vector machine" which, as far as I know, is aimed at recognizing type within OCR for example. So one could assume that this technique is used here to recognize the gender.

See here:
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Great, so one just has to apply this whole‐brain activation analysis and other trifles (any enthusiast volunteers out there?), and we have the answer. If it's male, then we can imagine only a possible cornercase of a female author and male scribes; if it's female at least in part, then that's intriguing.