(07-09-2025, 01:26 AM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.An issue is the MS was something like £10,000 to produce, and a years work.
Where does that estimate come from?
I read somewhere on the internet that the price of parchment or vellum at the time was the equivalent of about US$ 2 per folio in today's money. The ink and quills must have cost pennies per page. If that value is correct, it would mean about US$ 300 for the whole book.
Still, that must have been a significant sum for the Author, considering that he chose to use every inch of the bifolios, including undersize flaps with irregular edges and several folios with holes right in the middle of important diagrams. Or maybe he could not buy more parchment for some reason, so he just used some limited stock that he had.
As for the time, I estimate that each single-panel page must have taken 2 hours of Scribe time, at most. That would be 300 hours at most for the whole book. If the Scribe worked two hours per day, five days per week, that would be 30 weeks, or about 8 months. If he worked 8 hours per day, it would be about 2 months. If five Scribes worked in parallel, it would take only a couple of weeks.
Either way, the scribing may well have been spread out in sessions over several years.
As for the Author's work before the final scribing on parchment: if he wrote the draft by copying the contents from other books, it must have taken him only a fraction of that time --- 15 minutes per page at most.
All the best, --jorge
(07-09-2025, 02:43 AM)GrooveDuke Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.All argue against language
This one here does not...
What can we say if estimates of the vellum cost alone differ by several others of magnitude? And how can we even begin to guess how much time it took to write each page if we don't know how easy or arduous of a task it was to produce the text? Flow of consciousness is one extreme, copying is the next quickest, then a light encoding, then a complex code. It could be minutes to hours to days for a single page. So many variables one can toggle at a whim.
I agree. The main argument against it being a "forgery" is that it would be too costly to fake and therefore not worth it. Except that forgers and embezzlers specialize in exactly the kind of knowledge that makes it worth while and then exploit the general public belief that no one would go to that kind of trouble for a hoax.
This theory isn't about how it was produced, but why. That being said, and the question of when being answered to my satisfaction, it still begs the questions of who and where and how. And seeing the investigations going on now to answer those questions is exactly why I decided to post here at all. Somewhere there is a reference to the manuscript or to the community or person holding it that predate the current earliest reference. Somewhere there is a sample of writing that matches the marginalia handwriting. This can't possibly be the only thing that person ever produced. (Well, anything is possible. I suppose every other sample of their hand might have been destroyed... fires etc.)
(07-09-2025, 01:56 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What can we say if estimates of the vellum cost alone differ by several others of magnitude?
Well, I hope paleographers and medievalists can give a better founded estimate. (The articles I saw seemed authoritative, but who knows...)
(07-09-2025, 01:56 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.how can we even begin to guess how much time it took to write each page if we don't know how easy or arduous of a task it was to produce the text?
Indeed, but I was careful to say "if he created the draft by copying the text from other books". I don't think the contents is the Author's own ideas or experience, because of the variety of themes. Again, I believe that each section was copied from a different book, with little or no change.
And, needless to say, I am assuming that it is plain text, with no encryption.
All the best, --jorge
"This can't possibly be the only thing that person ever produced. (Well, anything is possible. I suppose every other sample of their hand might have been destroyed... fires etc.)"
Only about 5% of manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages/Renaissance survive. It is not at all surprising that there haven't been more examples of Voynichese found - even if they once existed, the odds are always against survival of any particular manuscript.
As for it being the forgery, for me the issue isn't the cost, but the actual material evidence. The provenance evidence, the binding evidence, the annotations, the different styles of additions and annotations, the effaced inscriptions, etc., all speak to its authenticity. I'll be speaking about these issues in my lecture on 9/26.
It might be gibberish and nonsense, but that's different from "forgery." The word "forgery" implies a modern object presented as an authentic ancient object, which is a completely different question from whether the manuscript has semantic meaning. It's of course possible that someone in the fifteenth century created the manuscript to trick someone into buying it, but that doesn't make it a "forgery."
I would add that for me, the question of "made to fool others or not" is irrelevant. In a medieval context, there would be no perceivable difference between a meaningless text the maker actually believed in or one intended to deceive.
Take the trade in relics as an example. Does it matter if the seller actually believed they had a piece of the cross on their hands? The scientific analysis of the object should be the same regardless.
(07-09-2025, 03:53 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Only about 5% of manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages/Renaissance survive. It is not at all surprising that there haven't been more examples of Voynichese found - even if they once existed, the odds are always against survival of any particular manuscript.
As for it being the forgery, for me the issue isn't the cost, but the actual material evidence. The provenance evidence, the binding evidence, the annotations, the different styles of additions and annotations, the effaced inscriptions, etc., all speak to its authenticity. I'll be speaking about these issues in my lecture on 9/26.
It might be gibberish and nonsense, but that's different from "forgery." The word "forgery" implies a modern object presented as an authentic ancient object, which is a completely different question from whether the manuscript has semantic meaning. It's of course possible that someone in the fifteenth century created the manuscript to trick someone into buying it, but that doesn't make it a "forgery."
When I mentioned production, I also immediately mentioned survivability. Which are two different things, I realize. And when I was speaking about the handwriting, I didn't really even mean Voynichese. I meant specifically the marginalia.
The marginalia was the main reason I watched the recent Voynich day video. I really thought that an exhaustive study was going to nail down a region and I was going to see if it fit with my theory. But as pointed out in that presentation it would really only prove where the scribe may have been educated, not necessarily where it was produced.
Also, I am still undecided about the best word to use, so I do ask a little "indulgence" if I use a term whose technical meaning is established outside of my field of experience. When I hear people talk about medieval or ancient forgeries, they usually mean items forged in ancient times. That is my meaning when I use the term. If there is a better accepted word. I'll happily defer and use that.
So in terms of material evidence, I quite agree it is not a modern forgery. And I am convinced that it was produced within the first couple of decades of the 15th century. And your observations in no small part convinced me of that.
Again my "theory" which I see now is not mine alone, or even original to me. Is not that it was produced to be sold, but produced to be used as a prop to perform some sort of repeatable service. As far as what that service was, why there were so many different sections when one might have sufficed, even the narrative of what they claimed it was etc: There are still a lot of holes. Still, for me, absent a deciphered text, an ancient hoax is still the best guess as to what it is.
My final question for you is, I believe you were the one to notice the signs of heavy use in certain sections. Do you have any more information on that? If there is a section that shows more signs of wear, that might give a clue as to its use. I haven't seen anything or anyone else really diving deep into that particular question.