The Voynich Ninja

In a different thread Lisa Fagin Davis says: "I think it is extremely unlikely that we will ever have a name to attach to the origins of the manuscript. We may be able, someday, to narrow down a more specific place of origin, and perhaps a community, but a name? I doubt it."

I wonder though how one can say that with such confidence.

It seems unlikely to me that the author of the Voynich was an average European peasant. 90% of people then were illiterate. The author(s) of the Voynich seem to be someone who was very educated given the content of the manuscript and it is often argued must have been quite wealthy to have afforded the vellum and inks needed for the manuscript as well as available time to work on it. If the manuscript is written in cipher as most Voynich researchers have said they believe in a survey then the author could well have been particularly well educated and able to produce such a difficult cipher to crack. So, as with the works of Giovanni Fontana or Trithemius why should we assume the author was an ordinary unknown peasant?

There are many records of named individuals from 15th century Italy and other parts of Europe, so to assume that there would no records of the author(s) seems unwise.

How many medieval scribes do you know by name?

(26-01-2026, 08:58 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How many medieval scribes do you know by name?

I don't think I know any. How many medieval authors do I know by name? Quite a few.

Hi, Mark, 

Sorry, but I disagree with nearly everything you've written here. In the fifteenth century, literacy was on the rise, especially among women and those beyond the nobility. The Voynich is not an expensive object...the opposite, in fact. The parchment is low-quality, the pigments are the most common and least expensive types (no lapis, no malachite, etc.), and the artistic quality is very poor. All of these qualities point to an amateur collaboration, not a professional workshop. Also, "unknown" doesn't equal "peasant," and there are more strata in medieval society than simply noble vs. peasant. To me, the illustrative content suggests folk-knowledge and women's wisdom, not "learned" science. Of course it is possible that we will someday be able to attribute name(s) to the authorship or writing or decorating of the manuscript, but given the kind of manuscript this appears to be (low-quality, communal, relatively inexpensive to produce), the odds are not in our favor in that regard. If we ever manage to associate any names with the production of the manuscript, I think it is more likely that they will be gleaned from the manuscript itself when we can finally read it, not from external research.

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There are tens of thousands of named scribes, including thousands of women. Here's some recent extrapolation:
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Hi Lisa,

What is wrong with the 90% illiteracy figure? As far as I tell from reading online this is either around 90% or 95%. What do you think is the correct figure?
I have long said that the manuscript was an amateur collaboration, not the product of a professional workshop and I haven't said otherwise recently. I have been lead to believe that the cost of the vellum and inks required to produce the manuscript would have been expensive, if you are telling me otherwise then that's news to me, I don't know the cost, but it goes against what I have been consistently told since I started looking into the Voynich. I didn't mention nobles or say there were only two strata in medieval society. Do you think the manuscript is written in cipher? And if not what do you think is going on with the unreadable script?

I am not a linguist or a cryptologist, so I have no opinion about the nature of the script. No one knows what the literacy rate was, but we do know that literacy was expanding during the fifteenth century, which means that the group of people who could have created the manuscript is larger and more demographically diverse than it would have been if the manuscript had been produced in, say, the twelfth century.

(26-01-2026, 09:40 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am not a linguist or a cryptologist, so I have no opinion about the nature of the script. No one knows what the literacy rate was, but we do know that literacy was expanding during the fifteenth century, which means that the group of people who could have created the manuscript is larger and more demographically diverse than it would have been if the manuscript had been produced in, say, the twelfth century.

But how can you be confident about your theory about who produced the manuscript and why when you have no opinion on the most significant and distinguishing feature of the manuscript namely its unreadable script? Any theory surely has to provide some explanation for that.

(26-01-2026, 08:29 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.90% of people then were illiterate.

10% is still vastly more than the people from that time that we know something about...

Quote:The author(s) of the Voynich seem to be someone who was very educated

He was educated, probably.  But "very"?  I don't see why...

The fact that the Author invented a very distinctive script and wanted to have a book written with it tell us that he was a "scholar", but only in the  very broad sense by which Marco Polo and the Rohonc author were "scholars".  The breadth of topics, and the very distinctive formats of each section suggests that he was not writing his own knowledge or experience, but was copying/translating/summarizing other books.  

We now know that the Scribe was copying figures from other European books, and we have even identified some of those books.  But apparently he did not understand what he was copying.  So probably those books were provided by the Author.  In all, I think we can say only that the Author was at home among books. 

On the other hand, if we ignore the decoration and figure details that were probably cribbed by the Scribe from other books, the actual contents of the VMS seems quite "alien".  For instance, some of the illustrations of Bio may have been cribbed from the Balneis Puteolarum, but then others can only be about human anatomy. 

Thus it does not seem that he was part of the community of scholars of the time, in the Church or outside it.  He may have been a "genius of the first class" in the sense of Lem's story...

Quote:he must have been quite wealthy to have afforded the vellum and inks needed for the manuscript

On the contrary. As Lisa already noted, the vellum is of poor quality and he used every inch of it, down to its irregular edges.  The Scribe(s) that he recruited were not professional and apparently had no experience writing illustrated books.  Or maybe books of any kind.  And I have reasons to believe that the Scribe(s) had never written on vellum before.

Quote:If the manuscript is written in cipher as most Voynich researchers have said they believe in a survey then the author could well have been particularly well educated and able to produce such a difficult cipher to crack.

No "cipher" is as hard to "crack" than a language that is not related to any that you know.  Especially if it is written in an letters that you don't even know the sounds of.  I could stare at a book in Georgian, Malayalam, or Berber for my whole life and not make any sense of it.  

So, for me, the fact that the "cipher" has resisted 80 years of computer-assisted analysis is strong evidence that the underlying language is not "European".  In which case it would not need to be encrypted at all...

All the best, --stolfi

(26-01-2026, 10:01 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:he must have been quite wealthy to have afforded the vellum and inks needed for the manuscript

On the contrary. As Lisa already noted, the vellum is of poor quality and he used every inch of it, down to its irregular edges. 

I have been trying to get a clearer answer to this question as I had always heard from other researchers that the materials used to produce the manuscript were expensive. This seems to be the impression online from searching. So, how much do you think the vellum would have cost?

"Expensive" is a relative term, and the Voynich materials were not at all expensive, relatively speaking. No one can really say how much the parchment would have cost, because 1) we have no idea what the market was like, since we don't know specifically where the manuscript came from, and 2) the parchment could have been produced in-house, as it were, instead of being purchased.

As for the text, all of us who express opinions about the manuscript must do so without the benefit of being able to read it. My opinions are based on the manuscript's physical features, supported by thirty-five years of studying hundreds, if not thousands, of medieval manuscripts as a cataloguer, researcher, and consultant. Others may base their opinions on different forms of expertise, which is of course legitimate as well.