22-03-2025, 04:45 PM
Were the archives of Collegium romanum (the last pre-voynich owner as I understand) ever queried for more voynichese related documents? What if the manuscript is just a book explaining voynichese grammar and all the illustrations are just allegories for its intricacies lol.
But seriously, if someone made such a good job at making sure that nobody unqualified will understand something they wanted to share, would they really do so within the location of one community ? Im assuming that when there is no need for the information to travel long distances, there is also less motivation for security of the transfer. If the six or more scribes who wrote the VM all lived in one place at one time, and they all knew the same info they put into the book, would they really be motivated to do so with such a centuries-of-attempts-defying level of security, if the information wasnt meant to travel through space and time ? If the members of the community which wrote the manuscript really all lived in place at one time, wouldnt it be much easier for them to simply hide their valuable information and only access it during initiation of new members since the current ones already knew well what they themselves wrote and could afterall explain verbally ?
But it was more or less proved that the manuscript was intended for repeated use. Given that the book is small (not sure on this but werent medieval books usually larger than VM ?), fitting perfectly even into womans hands and also that it is probable it had a wood cover, the more likely it seems fit for traveling. If the information that the book contains was meant to be shared locally, they probably wouldnt need to spend such an effort to assemble the folios into a book when they could simply keep it as scrolls which are cheaper and easier to hide.
Also, it just doesnt seem likely to me that a community of 6 or more people would write this book at one time and place, if each one of them knew all the info that the book contains. There are cases of savant polymaths, but those people are rare. Usually, one is expert at one subject at a time, be it botany, astrology, balneology, pharmacy or literature. If all the scribes or non-scribing members of the community lived in one place, they could simply teach each other their respective craft without the need for making a secure and scalable means of transporting the data throughout the times and locations of other members. This would mean that the manuscript traveled across places of residency of each of the experts who kept adding to and possibly copying the current data.
Another thing is that no christian church, or any other medieval authority tried to destroy the manuscript, given that it often reached higher levels of society, it seems that nobody has ever considered the manuscript dangerous or heretical. If there was no danger in writing about bathing ladies, plants and stars, then why encipher it ? There could be many reasons, but the one which works in this scenario, is that the authors were actually embarassed sharing the information in the manuscript. Either because they were men who wrote about naked ladies performing health rituals (which was probably too gay even for a time when men wore tight yoga pants), or they were the naked ladies themselves.
Thats why I think the VM could have traveled between nunneries where each expert nun added her piece of research in a possibly different dialect or language (latin for speakers of other than the biggest languages back then whose speakers wrote in their native language), which would explain why we see variations of text structure between individual entries, with seemingly the same type of encoding which rearranges the symbols in some sort or which only serves as a reference to a key text (we all know that substitution cipher is out of the play by now).
That brings me to another possible clue, the bible. Did anyone ever tried finding correlations between VM and the bible ? All nuns had it or had access to it, it contains enough words to assemble a language out of and alot of the nuns probably had the bible memorized so well that they didnt have much trouble decoding the text. So what if its the key text ?
Finally, if the VM manuscript really traveled between places, accumulating knowledge, I think its more likely than not that there were more books like this. We just havent found them yet.
Thanks to everyone willing to talk about this and or correct me about stuff.
That brings me to another possible clue, the bible. Did anyone ever tried finding correlations between VM and the bible ? All nuns had it or had access to it, it contains enough words to assemble a language out of and alot of the nuns probably had the bible memorized so well that they didnt have much trouble decoding the text. So what if its the key text ?
Finally, if the VM manuscript really traveled between places, accumulating knowledge, I think its more likely than not that there were more books like this. We just havent found them yet.
Thanks to everyone willing to talk about this and or correct me about stuff.