Hello,
a certain question that me and one of my friends just had was: what would be the expected time for a scribe to write a Voynich-like text? Specifically, I'm wondering because while we have some inkling (hah!) about rates of work of professional scribes in the medieval times (it seems to be 4-8 folios a week depending on the source), this would be a faithful copy of a meaningful text!
So, perhaps producing text would take a different amount of time depending on how the Voynich was created. Here are some interesting things that could impact it, broken down by theory:
- A faithful copy of an earlier draft. Presumably, we could take the standard rate of text production as a good rule of thumb, though the Voynich alphabet seems easier to copy than gothic script, for instance.
- A sloppy copy of an earlier draft. This would probably take less time, but presumably one would expect more errors being corrected - though perhaps the scribe(s) didn't care. If that is the case, what could be the rate of production that would satisfy whatever patron asked the scribe for the copy?
- The first draft of a meaningful text: where are the corrections? Composing meaningful text takes time, too, so it could take longer than copying.
- Intuitive gibberish, as in the Gaskell & Bowern paper 'Gibberish after all.' Presumably, since one neither has to copy anything nor worry about exactness, but simply put quill to paper and maybe reference other nearby words while writing, this would be the fastest method. With that stipulation, what's the fastest one could do?
The reason I'm wondering is we're putting a lot of stock into this being an extreme amount of effort; but maybe, if the manuscript is meaningless either due to being a sloppy copy or an outright gibberish hoax, the production period would be relatively brief. This has some implications for whether it would be worth writing it as a hoax or for sale.
Cheers
(13-03-2026, 12:57 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So, perhaps producing text would take a different amount of time depending on how the Voynich was created. Here are some interesting things that could impact it, broken down by theory:- A sloppy copy of an earlier draft. This would probably take less time, but presumably one would expect more errors being corrected - though perhaps the scribe(s) didn't care. If that is the case, what could be the rate of production that would satisfy whatever patron asked the scribe for the copy?
I believe this is the right option.
And the copy is sloppy because the Scribe, while experienced with handling pen and ink, apparently had no experience with creating a book or doing illustrations. Professional book scribes would score guide lines with a stylus, before writing any text, in order to get straight horizontal baselines and straight vertical text margins. The VMS has no hint of those, except on one page (f67r2).
The VMS Scribe made some use of a compass and straight-edge in the diagrams, but his circles fail to close and are all of different sizes, and sometimes run into the edges or folds of the vellum. Those straight lines that should go through the center of the diagram almost always fail to do so. He could not divide a circle into N equal parts, not even when N was 4.
Apart from the diagrams, the illustrations are simple freehand outlines, apparently drawn without much planning or any underlying sketch. They were not painted originally. Thus they do not compare to the carefully drawn and painted miniatures of luxury manuscripts, which are often as good as the best paintings of the period.
So my estimate is that it took the VMS Scribe between half an hour and two hours to do one page, depending on its complexity and amount of text. Maybe a bit more for Pisces, or the Bio pages, or heavily decorated pages like f86v4. That would mean about 200 hours total for the whole book. Less than 2 months if working 40 hours a week. Less than six months if working only 2 hours per day, five days a week.
All the best, --stolfi
It's all extremely speculative.
If they copied, were they necessarily in a hurry? Or did they attend to other obligations in between? How experienced were they?
If they generated the text through some mechanical means (dice, cards, grids...), how long did this take them and how much did they hurry? If we calculated how quickly it could be done, then why should we assume that it actually was done that quickly? Why not ten times slower?
If they generated the text through some mental process, how much effort did this take? How long did they think before writing down each word or sentence? How many breaks did they take?
How much time did they have in a day to spend on this project?
These are all things we simply don't know. I guess one could calculate a minimally required amount of time for each scenario, but even then we don't know how fast the race was actually run.
(13-03-2026, 02:19 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's all extremely speculative.
If they copied, were they necessarily in a hurry? Or did they attend to other obligations in between? How experienced were they?
If they generated the text through some mechanical means (dice, cards, grids...), how long did this take them and how much did they hurry? If we calculated how quickly it could be done, then why should we assume that it actually was done that quickly? Why not ten times slower?
If they generated the text through some mental process, how much effort did this take? How long did they think before writing down each word or sentence? How many breaks did they take?
How much time did they have in a day to spend on this project?
These are all things we simply don't know. I guess one could calculate a minimally required amount of time for each scenario, but even then we don't know how fast the race was actually run.
Of course, but if writing an enciphered text would take three years but writing gibberish ala gaskell & bowern would take a month (these are just random numbers for the sake of illustration), the effort is easier to justify for the second case and the balance of probability changes.
Also, the text was apparently written with ink from similar batches, which could be taken to imply a quick turnaround.
For that reason, some inkling WHAT the speed would really be in each case is useful.
One thing I would say is one can probably arrange these options in a sequence of slowest to fastest. My personal ranking would be:
enciphered text > faithful copy > sloppy copy > meaningless gibberish
and the Voynich glyphs take very few strokes to write, which would imply choice of speed (as opposed to distinguishing glyphs) as a priority when designing the alphabet. But what would exactly be the expected difference? And is that order actually accurate?
(13-03-2026, 12:57 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The reason I'm wondering is we're putting a lot of stock into this being an extreme amount of effort...
...
This has some implications for whether it would be worth writing it as a hoax or for sale.
The amount of work put into making the Voynich Manuscript (I'm not talking about the design or the underlying text, just the implementation), doesn't seem to exceed the amount of work many modern hobbyists put into their pet projects that they don't even show to many people besides friends and family. I'm sure that the amount of time spent by some of the VMS researches exceeds the amount of time put into making the manuscript itself. So, I don't think we can exclude any purpose of the manuscript by just the amount of time and effort it would have taken to produce it and I don't think most of the popular theories actually depend much on the amount of effort by the author or the scribe.
(13-03-2026, 02:33 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (13-03-2026, 12:57 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The reason I'm wondering is we're putting a lot of stock into this being an extreme amount of effort...
...
This has some implications for whether it would be worth writing it as a hoax or for sale.
The amount of work put into making the Voynich Manuscript (I'm not talking about the design or the underlying text, just the implementation), doesn't seem to exceed the amount of work many modern hobbyists put into their pet projects that they don't even show to many people besides friends and family. I'm sure that the amount of time spent by some of the VMS researches exceeds the amount of time put into making the manuscript itself. So, I don't think we can exclude any purpose of the manuscript by just the amount of time and effort it would have taken to produce it and I don't think most of the popular theories actually depend much on the amount of effort by the author or the scribe.
While I agree that it can't be used as a definitive way to exclude a purpose - indeed, it might even be purposeless, people are weird and you are right that some people spend months and years on a hobby (including some of the posters here on the topic of the manuscript!) - the assessment of motive does have impact on how likely a hypothesis should be judged to be. For instance, a hoax made for monetary gain you can knock out in a month needs to be far less lucrative in the mind of the forger than one that takes you years.
It depends a lot if it was done by just one man or several scribes like Lisa Fagin Davis suggests.
Then we have an alternative if it was done in a hurry or not.
- if it was done on a hurry to deliver the ready product on some tight deadline then it would take few weeks to few months
- if it was one man not in a hurry then it could take years
For example Goethe was writing Faust for 60 years
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(13-03-2026, 02:49 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- if it was done on a hurry to deliver the ready product on some tight deadline then it would take few weeks to few months
See, this assesment is interesting to me. I could see some scribe bragging about having a book and then someone offering to buy it and the scribe making something up in a month. But if it would take half a year even in that scenario, surely that makes the scenario much less plausible, no?
There is of course no upper bound on how long it would have taken, I agree
But I am wondering if we can put an educated lower bound on the time for each of these scenarios.
My guess is someone adept at writing + writing plausibly looking gibberish (like the gaskell & bowern experiments) could knock it out under a month. But I may be entirely off base since I am unfamiliar with scribal speeds in late medieval times, hence my question. I am wondering if such questions have even ever actually been investigated beyond the standard scenario of 'a scribe copying faithfully'.
It would be good to know how much time the participants of the g&b experiment had for the creation of their document. Does anyone know? If it's in the article I missed it.
Personally I can knock out pages of freely written handwritten text in an hour, but I am not using a quill pen or ink. If I were to make a faithful copy, I would need orders of magnitude more time. That probably held true even in the past, but to what extent do the supplies limit writing speed, and hence the magnitude of the difference?
(13-03-2026, 02:39 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While I agree that it can't be used as a definitive way to exclude a purpose - indeed, it might even be purposeless, people are weird and you are right that some people spend months and years on a hobby (including some of the posters here on the topic of the manuscript!) - the assessment of motive does have impact on how likely a hypothesis should be judged to be. For instance, a hoax made for monetary gain you can knock out in a month needs to be far less lucrative in the mind of the forger than one that takes you years.
But this also depends on the circumstances of the hoaxer. If it was person who had plenty of time but no extra money (which would explain the poor quality materials), then it's still quite possible that a lot of time was spent on an object or relatively low value. Also, if the idea was to forge a specific book of roughly known size, then the forger had to produce 240+ pages one way or the other (again, explaining the desire to save on materials). I'm not sure we can assess the likelihood of different plausible scenarios, there are just too many unknowns. It may be possible to separate implausible from plausible, but I think that's about it without some additional data.