The Voynich Ninja

(07-03-2024, 05:26 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are there any known examples of someone in medieval times forging something for financial gain? And if so, which types of forgery are we looking at?

A few Google hits:
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MEDIAEVAL FORGERS AND FORGERIES: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Thanks! I did not read much of the second text - it is very dated, entertainingly so. The first link is very interesting though. Robert F. Berkhofer III has investigated medieval forgeries for his book. Examples he gives are all of the "white collar crime" type:

"Of course, forgers can take advantage of this to present documents which LOOK LIKE what the old boss granted, but might be subtly (or not so subtly) changed to their advantage when confirmed by the new boss. Consequently, there are a lot of forgeries of the acts of Edward the Confessor (and about as many survive as genuine ones)."

In this case, we are talking about forged official documents. Note that I did not capitalize"LOOK LIKE" myself. Essential to the forgery and the fake is that something very specific is expected, and the fake is not a genuine version of this thing. This cannot be the case with the VM, since as far as we know, there is only one thing like it. Something so unique cannot be a fake. It is genuine by definition - a genuine version of itself. 

For those who are not yet convinced, another quote from the article:
"Medieval forgeries were designed to imitate the genuine, and so can be quite difficult to detect then and now."

If the Voynich is a medieval forgery, which "genuine" does it imitate? Which features make it hard to tell it apart from the genuine? Where can I find these genuine items the VM is a fake version of? What exactly makes it more fake than medieval books about magic?

Mentioned in the third reference above.

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And not quite mid 15th century.

The shroud of Turin, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., is also interesting.

It was venerated as the burial shroud of Jesus, but in 1988 it was carbon dated to 1260–1390 AD. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is about the analysis of DNA fragments which, because of contamination, could not add much to the picture.

EDIT: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Hugh Farey argues against the idea that it is a forgery. The author thinks that it was likely created for a liturgical purpose.

There are passages that (together with analysis by McCrone and the crucial carbon dating) show some parallel with the VMS, e.g.

Quote:It may also be that the very uniqueness of the cloth and its image, which seems so clearly not to fall into any particular research category, is the reason for it being sidelined from academic study. It may be an altar-cloth, liturgical vestment, table cloth, theatrical prop or even a shroud, but as it does not resemble any such things that we know of, specialist scholars may say, “Well, it doesn’t look like one of mine,” and leave it unexamined. I would like them to reconsider. A unique object should not be neglected on that basis alone, but considered carefully as a possible ‘outlier’ to some more recognised artistic tradition.

The shroud of Turin is an interesting parallel indeed. It shows similarities, but also some crucial differences, in my opinion. 

Similarities between the Shroud and the VM:
* Unique objects
* Infamously mysterious objects, unsolved mysteries that spark the public imagination
* (periods of) a difficult relation with the academic world, in part due to the two previous points
* "Medieval hoax" as a commonly proposed explanation

The differences are a bit more subtle, but they illustrate why I am personally struggling with the concept of the VM as a medieval "forgery" or even a medieval hoax. I would say the main difference is that the shroud of Turin immediately falls into a known category of fakes: medieval relics. Some of those would have been genuine (I'm thinking well-attested bones of important figures), but a large portion would have been fake. So if one were to find the shroud of Turin being advertised as the real burial shroud of Jesus, our default assumption anno 2024 should be that it is, in fact, not the actual burial shroud of Jesus.

My favorite example of the way relics were treated in the Middle Ages is the foreskin of Jesus, known is the holy Prepuce. From the wiki: 

Quote:According to Farley, "Depending on what you read, there were eight, twelve, fourteen, or even 18 different holy foreskins in various European towns during the Middle Ages."

So I'm just saying, if the Shroud of Turin is fake, it falls into a very well established and well motivated category of medieval fakes. We would have plenty of parallels for the possible motivations behind the fakery. There is even a Wikipedia page with similar items: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Solving the problem would involve determining its provenance and determining how it was made.

In contrast, someone claiming the VM is a fake, has to invent a whole new category. This involves much more speculation than the assumption that the shroud of Turin could fit into the category of (Jesus) relics.

Finally, and this relates back to the forgery discussion, I think the question "what it is a fake of" reveals important differences. The shroud of Turin would be a fake version of Jesus' burial shroud. There is a specific expected object in the audience's mind. We cannot say the same of the VM, since nothing like it exists, nor does it, as far as we know, in the public imagination. In that case, if it is a novel creation altogether that does not aim to be a specific, expected object, wouldn't we be better off calling it genuine? A genuine "whatever it is"?

Another interesting point about the Shroud is that it is obvious that it is not the authentic shroud of Christ,  yet this does not prove that it's a fake. The idea of a fake depends on the intentions of the makers and these are hard/impossible to assess. Similarly, if the VMS was proven to be meaningless, the book could still not be a fake. The Book of Soyga and Dee and Kelley's Enochian languages are (partially) non linguistic, but it is well possible that they are not "fakes"; we don't know enough about the intentions of their authors to tell.

I agree, the notion of "fake" in this case depends entirely on the intentions of the makers: did they believe the thing they were making was genuine or not? A book of spells might be "fake" or a hoax if the maker knew well that he was inventing things and he would be fooling his audience. But the exact same book of spells might have been made by someone who actually believes in the power of these spells, which would make the book's contents only "fake" in the light of a modern scientific assessment of its effectiveness. But from that point of view, even the stories from the Bible would be fake, since serpents can't talk. (By the way, some biblical books are much more deserving of the term "forgery" than the VM, since they are written under false names, and thus are forged testimonies of people who have known Jesus.)

It is for this reason that I find the question of "fake" not very interesting, at least at this point of our investigation. A book that was intended as a hoax by its makers might look just the same as one that was made with good intentions.

Once we know (if ever) how the text was generated, then we may still not be certain whether the MS is a hoax or not. That is one reason why I find this term less desirable than, for example: the term meaningless, which is far less subjective.