The Voynich Ninja

Hello Voynich ninja, 

Reading Rene Zandbergen's blog, a few things jumped to my mind. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., he retraces the most probable evolution of the manuscript in these terms :

Quote:The points that have been presented in relation to the order of production of the MS may now be summarised.

• The MS was produced in a bifolio-per-bifolio manner, with the drawing outlines inked first, followed by the inking of the text;
  
• The quire numbers were added before the folio numbers;
  
• The page order has been disturbed, and this happened before both sets of numbers were added;
  
• The painting was done before the present binding;
  
• The quire and folio numbers were added before the present binding;
  
• Some of the painting appears to have been done after the folio numbers were added;
  
• Twelve of the fourteen missing folios were lost after the folio numbers were added, but before the present binding.
  

This leads to the following tentative reconstruction:

• All bifolios of the MS were prepared: the drawing outlines and the text were added in ink;
  
• Sometime after this, the planned order of the bifolios was disturbed. The bifolios were stacked anew in an incorrect order (implying that the person who did this was not the original author) but the set was still complete. (The interesting task of identifying the original page order has not been completed, and has mainly been driven by Nick Pelling);
  
• The quires were numbered first, the MS may have been bound, and the folios were numbered after that. (This initial binding is not necessary but would explain the inconsistency of the quire and folio numbers of quire 9);
  
• At this point, the book had all folios including the now missing ones, and was not painted, or only partially painted. Folio 42 would not have been painted yet;
  
• The MS was disassembled and painted (or the partial painting completed). Six bifolios were lost or removed at this point;
  
• Shortly after the painting, the MS was rebound in the same order, but with the six bifolios missing. Folios 12 and 74 would have still been there. Especially the blue paint transferred on opposite pages;
  
• Folios 12 and 74 were cut out sometime later
  

We know that the quire numbers were added before the folio numbers, and that this indicates the presence of a first binding, or at least that the manuscript was prepared for binding (the same page mentions earlier that the marks on q9 only show a preparation for binding but no trace of finishing it at this point). 

Is there ANY reason that this first preparation for binding might prepare quires consisting of only one bifolio, and that it woud put those single-bifolio quires at any other point than the edges of the finished product ? If there is not, it indicates that q16 and q18 were composed of 4 bifoliae each, like most of the others, but that 3 of those had disappeared by the time the folio numbers were added (Looking further, I suppose it is likely that those pages were foldouts, like q14 through q19 have in abundance, but this doesn't prevent the existence of more missing unnumbered bifoliae)

Then, for which reason would the first preparator prepare uneven quires (I can see two of them, but none can apply to q8 : either a clear semantic/stylistic link, which explains q20 but q8's remaining bifoliae aren't clearly semantically tied, or the physical unwieldyness of long quires with foldouts, which explains q14 through 19 but can't explain LONGER than usual quires) ? q8 is longer than all other quires (except q20, with its very different text layout than the rest), and as long as q13, which is stylistically coherent, but f57, 58, 65 and 66 are quite different to each other, and they aren't even consistent recto to verso (f57r and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can be in the same section, but they are clearly different from the pair f57v-f66r). Currier finds both Language A and Language B in this quire, and the images look to belong in different sections, which indicates one of the following :

• There is a hidden semantic connection justifying to join together bifoliae like that, and the quirer understood the language (very unlikely, as Lisa Fagin Davis' work tends to suggest that quiring itself was a misunderstanding of the book, which should have stayed as a collection of loose leaves, or should have been quired as a thick pile of singulions)
  
• The missing bifoliae contain drawings and text bridging the gap (possible, but unhelpful)
  
• Q8 was from the start a patchwork quire, gathering everything that doesn't fit (this indicates that q16 and q18 were bigger than a sigular bifolio without foldouts each, as else they could have been joined into q8 and the resulting quire would still not have been thicker than q20, which by its existence, shows that quires this big are practical ; it doesn't explain, though, why it would have been numbered this low, rather than being put at the end)
  
• All quires were initially this big and we shouldn't read into 8's length (not really realistic, as it means 7 bifoliae are missing, one in each of the first 7 quires; the most probable outcome would have been to have unequal quires at the start)
  

The most probable outcome, for me and for now, is the proposition 3 : q16 and q18 were longer than one standard bifolio each, but all the unnumbered ones were lost between quiring and foliating. I still don't have a good idea of why the quirer would create distinct-length quires in the middle of the book rather than counting the extra leaves at the end of the quiring process, but that might be tied to the process itself, in which case I'd love an idea

(10-12-2025, 04:48 PM)Cuagga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Then, for which reason would the first preparator prepare uneven quires (I can see two of them, but none can apply to q8 : either a clear semantic/stylistic link, which explains q20 but q8's remaining bifoliae aren't clearly semantically tied, or the physical unwieldyness of long quires with foldouts, which explains q14 through 19 but can't explain LONGER than usual quires) ? q8 is longer than all other quires (except q20, with its very different text layout than the rest), and as long as q13, which is stylistically coherent, but f57, 58, 65 and 66 are quite different to each other, and they aren't even consistent recto to verso (f57r and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can be in the same section, but they are clearly different from the pair f57v-f66r). Currier finds both Language A and Language B in this quire, and the images look to belong in different sections, which indicates one of the following :

• There is a hidden semantic connection justifying to join together bifoliae like that, and the quirer understood the language (very unlikely, as Lisa Fagin Davis' work tends to suggest that quiring itself was a misunderstanding of the book, which should have stayed as a collection of loose leaves, or should have been quired as a thick pile of singulions)
  
• The missing bifoliae contain drawings and text bridging the gap (possible, but unhelpful)
  
• Q8 was from the start a patchwork quire, gathering everything that doesn't fit (this indicates that q16 and q18 were bigger than a sigular bifolio without foldouts each, as else they could have been joined into q8 and the resulting quire would still not have been thicker than q20, which by its existence, shows that quires this big are practical ; it doesn't explain, though, why it would have been numbered this low, rather than being put at the end)
  
• All quires were initially this big and we shouldn't read into 8's length (not really realistic, as it means 7 bifoliae are missing, one in each of the first 7 quires; the most probable outcome would have been to have unequal quires at the start)
  

The most probable outcome, for me and for now, is the proposition 3 : q16 and q18 were longer than one standard bifolio each, but all the unnumbered ones were lost between quiring and foliating. I still don't have a good idea of why the quirer would create distinct-length quires in the middle of the book rather than counting the extra leaves at the end of the quiring process, but that might be tied to the process itself, in which case I'd love an idea

I'm not very familiar with all these topics, but I have one question: given you find that the present arrangement requires some explanation, is there an alternative arrangement of the existing folios that you would call definitely more logical?

' Wrote:[*]The MS was disassembled and painted (or the partial painting completed). Six bifolios were lost or removed at this point;
[*]Shortly after the painting, the MS was rebound in the same order,

Sorry, what is the evidence for the un-binding before painting, and rebinding afterwards?  Why couldn't it have been painted while bound?

All the best, --stolfi

(10-12-2025, 05:02 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(10-12-2025, 04:48 PM)Cuagga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Then, for which reason would the first preparator prepare uneven quires (I can see two of them, but none can apply to q8 : either a clear semantic/stylistic link, which explains q20 but q8's remaining bifoliae aren't clearly semantically tied, or the physical unwieldyness of long quires with foldouts, which explains q14 through 19 but can't explain LONGER than usual quires) ? q8 is longer than all other quires (except q20, with its very different text layout than the rest), and as long as q13, which is stylistically coherent, but f57, 58, 65 and 66 are quite different to each other, and they aren't even consistent recto to verso (f57r and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can be in the same section, but they are clearly different from the pair f57v-f66r). Currier finds both Language A and Language B in this quire, and the images look to belong in different sections, which indicates one of the following :

• There is a hidden semantic connection justifying to join together bifoliae like that, and the quirer understood the language (very unlikely, as Lisa Fagin Davis' work tends to suggest that quiring itself was a misunderstanding of the book, which should have stayed as a collection of loose leaves, or should have been quired as a thick pile of singulions)
  
• The missing bifoliae contain drawings and text bridging the gap (possible, but unhelpful)
  
• Q8 was from the start a patchwork quire, gathering everything that doesn't fit (this indicates that q16 and q18 were bigger than a sigular bifolio without foldouts each, as else they could have been joined into q8 and the resulting quire would still not have been thicker than q20, which by its existence, shows that quires this big are practical ; it doesn't explain, though, why it would have been numbered this low, rather than being put at the end)
  
• All quires were initially this big and we shouldn't read into 8's length (not really realistic, as it means 7 bifoliae are missing, one in each of the first 7 quires; the most probable outcome would have been to have unequal quires at the start)
  

The most probable outcome, for me and for now, is the proposition 3 : q16 and q18 were longer than one standard bifolio each, but all the unnumbered ones were lost between quiring and foliating. I still don't have a good idea of why the quirer would create distinct-length quires in the middle of the book rather than counting the extra leaves at the end of the quiring process, but that might be tied to the process itself, in which case I'd love an idea

I'm not very familiar with all these topics, but I have one question: given you find that the present arrangement requires some explanation, is there an alternative arrangement of the existing folios that you would call definitely more logical?

I am not familiar with all the scholarship, but at least since Currier in the 70s, scholarship has recognised that the VMS seems to be written in two different "languages" (Currier's term, I think I would prefer "styles" while we don't have more info but I'm a newbie myself so for now I just follow the established vocabulary) with distinct character usage statistics, blended together, some bifolia with one language and some other with the other one, languages rarely varying across the same bifolio. Meanwhile, in the current day, paleograph Lisa Fagin Davis seems to recognise the hand of five different scribes in the manuscript, all interspersed in the same quires but each scribe seems to have worked on complete bifoliae. Then, her current research looks to use some machine learning techniques (Latent Semantic Analysis) to make stats on the words used in each page to compute similarity between pages, and from there, the original order of the pages (using the assumption that consecutive pages are most similar to each other, which is most reasonable). And her preliminary results seem to indicate that at least for q20, the intended reading order should have been to unbind all bifoliae and read one completely, front (both halves) and back, before starting another one. If the whole manuscript follows this formula (and it looks like it does), then binding is a mistake that someone understanding the text wouldn't have done

(10-12-2025, 05:07 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

' Wrote:[*]The MS was disassembled and painted (or the partial painting completed). Six bifolios were lost or removed at this point;
[*]Shortly after the painting, the MS was rebound in the same order,

Sorry, what is the evidence for the un-binding before painting, and rebinding afterwards?  Why couldn't it have been painted while bound?

All the best, --stolfi

That comes from the fact some paint spots cross the binding gutter and reappear on the other side of the bifolio several pages later. The example Rene gives in this page is the continuity in painting between You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (main drawing) and details on the left side of f40r.

All the best,
Cuagga

(10-12-2025, 07:10 PM)Cuagga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And her preliminary results seem to indicate that at least for q20, the intended reading order should have been to unbind all bifoliae and read one completely, front (both halves) and back, before starting another one. If the whole manuscript follows this formula (and it looks like it does), then binding is a mistake that someone understanding the text wouldn't have done

Are there historical examples of large collections of texts that were written on individual bifolios and were supposed to be kept as separate bifolios and read bifolio after bifolio? Seems like a strange arrangement to me.

Note that with a few exceptions that could very well be designed for centerfolds, texts and designs do not cross the centerline of bifolios, which to me suggests that these were likely intended to be bound.

(10-12-2025, 07:23 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(10-12-2025, 07:10 PM)Cuagga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And her preliminary results seem to indicate that at least for q20, the intended reading order should have been to unbind all bifoliae and read one completely, front (both halves) and back, before starting another one. If the whole manuscript follows this formula (and it looks like it does), then binding is a mistake that someone understanding the text wouldn't have done

Are there historical examples of large collections of texts that were written on individual bifolios and were supposed to be kept as separate bifolios and read bifolio after bifolio? Seems like a strange arrangement to me.

Note that with a few exceptions that could very well be designed for centerfolds, texts and designs do not cross the centerline of bifolios, which to me suggests that these were likely intended to be bound.

The analog Lisa Fagin Davis brought up in her Toronto lecture were Corans used for teaching in some regions of West Africa, allowing the pupils to pass around singular leaves, but such things are almost unheard of anywhere else. She also mentioned that binding bifoliae without assembling them first into quires was impossible, but I am not versed enough in the book production techniques to know why this would be impossible, so for my money, there could have been a first binding of the manuscript without quires. But you probably need to watch her lecture (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), the actual research presentation is less than an hour long and there is a bit of questions after that ; the mention of the Western African Corans is around 50min in, and the article she gives as ref is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The actual and intended binding of the manuscript are not really my area of interest, a lot of people much more knowledgeable than I am put a lot of effort into researching this, so I just prefer reading the conclusions. As far as I understand, without known medieval traditions of keeping texts in separate bifolios, this doesn't give us any new ideas for the possible contents of the manuscript, even if it was intended to be unbound.

I've checked the paper on ResearchGate, it appears that the known unstitched manuscripts, in any location, are from the XVII century on, and the existence of earlier examples, including in West Africa, is only a conjecture: "Unfortunately, there is no evidence of the loose-leaf type in the central lands of Islam during the period of early contact with sub-Saharan Africa, from the ninth to fourteenth centuries. But it is not impossible that unstitched binding existed outside West Africa, as suggested by Duncan Haldane. Nuria de Castilla and Karin Scheper also pointed to the existence of unsewn binding in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. And if loose-leaf form occurs in the seventeenth-century manuscripts, why should it not exist in earlier times?"

Given that it's quite easy to identify an unstitched manuscript by the absence of stitch holes, I guess if they were widespread, they would probably be quite known.

What's your opinion, are there any implications for the possible contents of the Voynich MS, if it was designed to be unbound?

(10-12-2025, 07:10 PM)Cuagga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And her preliminary results seem to indicate that at least for q20, the intended reading order should have been to unbind all bifoliae and read one completely, front (both halves) and back, before starting another one. If the whole manuscript follows this formula (and it looks like it does), then binding is a mistake that someone understanding the text wouldn't have done

I’ve watched Prof Davis’s presentation too, and this is my take away point as well. The VMs was composed and published as a series of pamphlets. Evidence that the manuscript’s creators ever intended for their creation to become a codex is wanting. On the other hand, evidence is ample that if the original creators did foresee their creation becoming a codex, they wouldn’t have chosen to arrange the leaves the way either of the binders we have evidence of did.

(10-12-2025, 09:02 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Evidence that the manuscript’s creators ever intended for their creation to become a codex is wanting.

It was possible to do the binding in a way that nowhere (?) in the manuscript the text crosses the vertical central line of a bifolio. While the Rosettes and 101r show clear examples of writing across a fold. To me this looks like the designer of the manuscript specifically reserved folds on each bifolio for binding purposes. 

I haven't seen any strong evidence to the contrary, that it was not intended as a codex. As far as I understand, there is some evidence that it was kept as separate leaves for a while, which could just as well mean the production took a long time. Evidence from the statistics of the text may point to the order or writing, which may be naturally bifolio by bifolio, and not the intended order of reading. For example, if auto citation was used in the process of writing a meaningful text (by reusing recent codes in a one-to-many encoding scheme), it's natural the auto citation patterns would evolve in the order of writing and not in the order of reading.