The Voynich Ninja

I've searched through the forum and elsewhere on line, and I haven't seen any exploration of an idea that's been running through my mind. Mind you, I'm not a scholar and haven't submerged myself in the existing scholarship. 

Most discussions relate to whether the manuscript is a hoax or has meaning encoded in the text, but what if only part of the manuscript is something of a hoax? The 15th century was a time of religious persecution and forced conversions, and it could have been dangerous for folks to have, say, a Jewish text in their possession (such as with Crypto-Judaism). In order to protect the content of an unauthorized manuscript, two strategies might have been taken: 

• Encode the text so that outsiders would not be able to read its contents
  
• Adorn the encoded text with spurious and misleading images to serve as something of a misdirection; if someone was caught with a dangerous religious manuscript, outsiders might assume it was a simply a commonplace alchemy text of herbs, recipes, and incantations
  

A few other possible clues could support the theory that the manuscript is a secret religious (particularly Jewish) text: 

• The parchment was carefully prepared, as might happen for a community's sacred manuscript: "prepared with so much care that the skin side is largely indistinguishable from the flesh side." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) 
  
• The manuscript was heavily used: "Medievalist Lisa Fagan Davis describes the parchment as soft - a texture found in books that have been heavily thumbed.' This indicates the manuscript was handled or paged through a great deal." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) 
  
• The VM word count is "35,000 to 38,000 words and around 170,000 characters," and could be even longer as it is hypothesized that several pages of the VM are missing; this number is within a magnitude of the Torah, with 79,000 - 80,000 words and ~304,805 letters, especially if abbreviations or shorthand might be used 
  
• Some analyses show the VM text has an affiliation with Hebrew (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) 
  

Curious to hear what others might think!

Like all things Voynich, it is certainly not impossible---and speculating heretical content is definitely a genre. It does seem the drawings were done first in a lot of places, and are integrated carefully with the writing all over, which to me indicates that they were probably related to the text that was added after. This too is no guarantee, I'll be the first to say, but all the same, I think the most straightforward assumption is the herbal really is just a herbal

(13-01-2026, 10:35 PM)funkylibrarian Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Encode the text so that outsiders would not be able to read its contents

Well,then they did an amazingly good  job at that ... 

Quote:Adorn the encoded text with spurious and misleading images to serve as something of a misdirection; if someone was caught with a dangerous religious manuscript, outsiders might assume it was a simply a commonplace alchemy text of herbs, recipes, and incantations

The problem with this idea is that the VMS images are all but commonplace, and would have created the suspicion of heretical contents, not avoided it.  If that was the intention, the images should have contained at least some Christian imagery.  But there is none; not even a church.  (On the other hand, there is a tower in f85v2 that looks like a minaret.  And the Jews were given the choice "convert or get out" in Spain, in the late 1400s, because they had been too much at home with the recently expelled Moors...)

Quote:The parchment was carefully prepared

However it is full of defects like stains, holes, creases, and irregular edges.  It looks more like "factory rejects" than just "second choice".  From what I know, it would have been totally unacceptable for a Torah scroll. 

Quote:The manuscript was heavily used: "Medievalist Lisa Fagan Davis describes the parchment as soft - a texture found in books that have been heavily thumbed.' This indicates the manuscript was handled or paged through a great deal."

 
But most of the handling must have happened from the late 1500s onwards, when the VMS was in possession of Christians who could not read it.  So this detail does not point to a Jewish origin or religious use.

Quote:The VM word count is "35,000 to 38,000 words and around 170,000 characters," and could be even longer as it is hypothesized that several pages of the VM are missing; this number is within a magnitude of the Torah, with 79,000 - 80,000 words and ~304,805 letters, especially if abbreviations or shorthand might be used

I am not sure I get the point here.  But vellum manuscripts of the time came in all sizes, some much larger than the VMS or the Torah. 

Quote:Some analyses show the VM text has an affiliation with Hebrew

Newbold was one of earliest modern "Voynichologists", and his opinions are now generally seen as naive.  I believe that others have tried to match "Voynichese" to Hebrew or Arabic, but apparently no one succeeded.  Those languages have a peculiar word morphology that does not match the structure of the VMS "words".

So what can I say... I am not impressed...

All the best, --stolfi