(27-08-2022, 07:45 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (27-08-2022, 07:04 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Clearly there are well known examples such as the works of Giovanni Fontana.
Giovanni Fontana was also the first one that came to my mind. I suppose his cipher was more of a "finger exercise" than an attempt to seriously hide anything. This is exactly the difference with diplomatic ciphers. Here, the information should be hidden as well as possible. What is striking about the VMS is the fact that there is not a single reference to a key in plain text ( like Fontana in Cod.icon. 242 ). This would indicate, if it really is a cipher, that the entire document should be seriously protected from access by others (non-initiates?). I know of no other manuscript from this period that would be comparable in this respect.
The thing is that the Voynich manuscript always suffers from what I call "The Problem of One". There is no parallel document, it is an isolated island, so comparison is difficult. Really the Voynich manuscript shouldn't exist as it doesn't fit in easily in known history. But the Voynich does exist, I believe, though I have never seen it, as I haven't visited Yale. So when you say "I know of no other manuscript from this period that would be comparable in this respect." that is an illustration of one kind of uniqueness we find with the Voynich.
What I have to say as follows is very much speculation->
Personally, I am inclined to think that the biggest reason it was written in cipher was, because he/they could. If you have just bought a fancy new carpentry tool and someone suggests you make a table then you would be very tempted to use your new tool even if it was not actually necessary. I think there was a temptation to use the latest cryptographic techniques they had developed in the project of writing a scientific/medical manuscript. I can imagine a cipher expert suggesting that one really ought to write the manuscript in cipher. Do I think for practical purposes it was necessary to write it in cipher? Absolutely not. I think given there was a plan to write a scientific manuscript then that was an excuse to write it in the most advanced cipher they could based on his/their professional expertise. In a sense by being written in cipher cryptography is just another topic covered in the manuscript alongside plants, astrology, astronomy etc.
Ultimately this is a problem of understanding human psychology. Humans sometimes do things that are not absolutely functionally necessary, but have other motives. Some people are quite secretive about what they do, take Henry Darger who wrote long novels that were only discovered on his death.
I think the work of Giovanni Fontana is the closest parallel to the Voynich manuscript in the sense of the type of document it is. However it appears one difference is that the authors of the Voynich were much less interested in making their manuscript public.
(27-08-2022, 07:45 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you mean this work ?
Übersicht über die nichtdiplomatischen Geheimschriften des Mittelalters by Bernhard Bischoff
Yes. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any other work covering non-diplomatic ciphers from the early 15th century. If you know of any, I would certainly be interested.
(27-08-2022, 09:20 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any other work covering non-diplomatic ciphers from the early 15th century. If you know of any, I would certainly be interested.
I do not know other texts either. In the section "freely invented character alphabets" Bischoff has a whole list of references to corresponding manuscripts. My random research, however, showed only simple substitutions of the letters. Here is an example from the 14th century:
BSB, Clm 14684, Natural science collective manuscript, 14th century, fol. 100v
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bi3mw wrote:
" What is striking about the VMS is the fact that there is not a single reference to a key in plain text ( like Fontana in Cod.icon. 242 ). This would indicate, if it really is a cipher, that the entire document should be seriously protected from access by others (non-initiates?). I know of no other manuscript from this period that would be comparable in this respect."
This is true of the extant manuscript, but there are pages missing. It is possible there was a plaintext key and it's been removed. It is exactly the sort of page that might have been removed, a page of significance rather than any other page. We have no way of knowing, of course, but the absence of a key (and thus a motive to seriously conceal) isn't entirely for certain given that we have lost what are possibly crucial pages.
If it's a cipher I'd be surprised if there wasn't a key, but there's no key now. I don't detect anything in the illustrations and diagrams that might require serious concealment, but who knows?
It is not unusual for documents in cipher to have an entry for the key or keys.
However, in all such cases that I am aware of, the cipher is a simple substitution, and the key consists of a character translation table.
We already know that that won't work.
In fact, the Voynich MS has exactly such a table on f1r, and because we know that this can't work, it is generally believed not to be the key, but to be a decipherer's failed attempt.
After all these years, I have no concept what a 'key' for the Voynich MS might look like, but it won't be a simple or homopohonic character substitution table.
More on the topic of this thread, while it may seem a logical step to consider that the author of the Voynich MS could be someone in the forefront of cipher develpment, this is actually speculation, and there are quite a few good reasons (though none I would call prohibitive) why this is not necessarily logical. Some examples:
- a top cipher developer would know very well that it is a very bad idea to encrypt a very long text with a single method/key
- a brother of a top cipher developer would not necessarily have access to such secrets. (If my brother had access to state secrets, I would most definitely NOT know them).
I do wish to add that I consider the on-going search for lost cipher keys and cipher text of significant interest by itself.
(28-08-2022, 07:46 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- a top cipher developer would know very well that it is a very bad idea to encrypt a very long text with a single method/key
Why would it be a very bad idea?
(Also it is possible that the Voynich uses more than one key, hence the appearance of different languages/dialects)
(28-08-2022, 07:46 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- a brother of a top cipher developer would not necessarily have access to such secrets. (If my brother had access to state secrets, I would most definitely NOT know them).
I have over time been warming to the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may have been the project of brothers. This has been influenced in part by the idea suggested by specialists that the Voynich was written by multiple authors, but also due to my reading indicating the brothers Abbot Antonio Barbavara, Ducal Secretary Francesco Barbavara, Ambassador Marcolino Barbavara, Bishop Giovanni Barbavara, Apostolic Protonotary Pietro Barbavara and Mayor Nicolino Barbavara were very close. My Rosettes analysis points towards Abbot Antonio and also his biography fits with the subject matter of the Voynich and my Cipher analysis ties neatly with Francesco Barbavara and Marcolino Barbavara. The attendance at the Council of Basel in Basel, Switzerland fits with many of these brothers for political or religious reasons.
It is worth noting that Antonio played a diplomatic role in some respects as is stated in a book about the Abbey where he was Abbot. This is not unusual as religious figures were often involved in politics then. Before entering the church Antonio had trained as a young man to become the mayor in Alessandria, but had clearly then chosen a different career path.
So it is true the question remains how the cryptographic knowledge was transferred from Francesco(or Marcolino) to Antonio. At the moment I am inclined to the view that Francesco Barbavara was the one who designed the cipher as he was head of the Ducal chancellery, but it could have been Marcolino.
@Mark
This is how a direct connection can be explained.
If you suggest a person that he may have something to do with the VM encryption, in this case one of the brothers.
Do you have examples of other encryptions of this person?
You can make a connection.
In most cases you just change the symbols but not the system.
(28-08-2022, 07:02 AM)Hermes777 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't detect anything in the illustrations and diagrams that might require serious concealment, but who knows?
Yes, especially in the plant part, the encryption actually seems unnecessary. But if it should be e.g. about plants for abortion, it looks quite different. Dioscorides mentions in his "Materia medica" more than 100 plants with the indication "fruit expulsion" ( source: Deutsche Apothekerzeitung ). In German translations, the applications were often rewritten as "labor-promoting". It is not at all unlikely that the original text also appear in the VMS. Also recipes with hallucinogenic plants were better concealed in the Middle Ages to avoid a conflict with the church.
Unique is and remains the fact that the entire VMS can not be read. It would have been more likely to encrypt only relevant parts of the manuscript.
(28-08-2022, 12:36 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, especially in the plant part, the encryption actually seems unnecessary.
Getting into the realms of the psychology and thought processes of the authors(s) in deciding for example that it was necessary to encrypt the Voynich is very difficult. Understanding human motivations can often be hard, I find. Frankly I sometimes don't understand why I do some of the things that I do, so constructing a rationale for other people can also sometimes be very tough. Why are we here commenting about the Voynich manuscript instead of playing sports or gardening or doing something else? Why do we find this topic so interesting when someone else might not? Why do we all have different perspectives on the manuscript?
From my perspective I really think it was most probably quite unnecessary to encipher the Voynich manuscript, so why did the author(s) think it necessary or desirable? My best guess is that they had developed the most advanced cryptography of anyone ever in the history of the world at that time in their professional capacity and they couldn't resist using that skill to write a scientific document that they were intending to write anyway.
I enjoy speculating about the mindset of the authors, but ultimately it is just speculation. Human beings are very complex and their behaviour is often hard to understand and can vary a lot from one human to another. So unless we find writing by the author(s) saying why they chose to write the Voynich in cipher or why they drew so many nude women, I think we should be careful of making presumptions about it.
(28-08-2022, 01:05 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I enjoy speculating about the mindset of the authors, but ultimately it is just speculation.
Yes, that is indeed true. Without evidence, it's always just a guess as to how things might be. To test my guess about the plants, I would have to make (extensive) comparisons between the illustrations. Even if similarities were found here, it would still be speculation without knowledge of the text.