The Voynich Ninja

Quote:Could it be possible, that someone loaned the Palatino 766 to an itinerant clerigi, or perhaps allowed him/her to view it for a few days or hours?

I wonder how that would even be possible, these books were highly valued and guarded, probably.

I believe that it was possible around 1400 to borrow a book from  university library for some time.
Thats what Gemini says:

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With the rise of universities in places like Paris, Oxford, and Bologna during the 13th century, the demand for books skyrocketed. Universities had to create highly strict, structured lending rules.
Universities typically split their libraries into two sections:

• The Magna Latinitas (The Chain Library): The most important reference books were literally chained to desks or shelves so they couldn't leave the room.
  
• The Parva Latinitas (The Lending Library): Duplicate copies or less critical texts that could be checked out.
  

To borrow from a university library, you usually had to follow a strict protocol:

The Security Deposit
To take a book, you had to leave an object of equal or greater value behind as collateral. This could be a valuable piece of jewelry, a silver cup, or even another rare book. If you didn't return the library's book, they kept your treasure.

Strict Time Limits
By the late Middle Ages, libraries used formal registers to log loans. For example, the University of Angers in 1431 charged a fine to anyone who kept a borrowed text for more than 30 days.

Anti-Fraud Protections
Because manuscripts looked different depending on the scribe, sneaky students would try to borrow a beautiful, expensive copy of a textbook and return a cheap, poorly written copy of the same text. To stop this, librarians started recording "identifying codes"—such as documenting the exact first few words written on the second page of the book—to ensure the exact same physical copy came back.

See also description of Sorbonne library: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

So to have access to cheaper manuscripts you didn't even have to be a student. It was enough if you knew some student.

What about influences from Parisian sources?

BNF Fr. 565, the posthumous 'Oresme' cosmos, with a very simplified structure without any planets and with 43 undulations in its elaborate, scallop-shell cloud band.

Harley 334, an even more posthumous 'de Metz' version of cosmic illustrations, lacking the elaborate cosmic boundary, but has a mermaid with four "companions".

Morgan M.133, The Berry Apocalypse, which has examples where a plain nebuly line is used as a cosmic boundary - as is seen in the VMs cosmos.
 
Harley 4431, the Book of the Queen, the illustration of the nine Muses bathing in an arcaded fountain. Other versions show nine ladies, but the tub / fountain is different. In the VMs, the only pool with nine women is curvy, and only arcaded on the distal portion. Pretty tricky, eh? Creating ambiguity, just like that.

(13-06-2026, 10:38 AM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Name five.

While, on the face of it, that seems like a reasonable request, it would only lead to a pointless discussion about which "qualifications" are important or good. In order to be at least fair, I'll name one: Konrad von Butzbach.

Now first of all, I do not think that he is the author of the Voynich MS, for exactly the same reason: there are too many other candidates with the same or better qualifications.
He is not on anybody's radar because he is barely known outside the specialists' world.

Let me exemplify the issue with judging qualifications, by presenting my opinions on the bullet list:

(13-06-2026, 09:32 AM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[*]She was in the court of Sigismund, with access to a huge number of manuscripts, including the Pal. Lat. original Taccola De Ingeneis,

[*]Was interested in mining and construction, and personally owned gold mines, hence has probably read Taccola,

[*]Voyaged in Northern Italy, Switzerland, Tyrol, South Germany,

[*]Went on diplomatic missions throughout the Holy Roman Empire,

[*]Was exiled in Melnik Castle, where by chance Tepenecz lived personally a few years later (who we know owned the VMS because he signed it),

[*]Was a woman, so probably interested in women's health more than men,

[*]Was widely known to practice alchemy and occultism,

[*]Had the means and resources and manpower to write, or have someone write, an extensive cipher book,

[*]Was fluent in at least 6 lanuguages, including South German, which the VMS marginalia is thought to be written in,

[*]Her royal crown matches that in the illustrations of nymph's crowns in the VMS.

Access to a library or manuscript collection seems to be useful, but there are thousands of people who fall into that category.

Mining and construction has only a hypothetical connection with the Voynich MS. If any.

Voyaged around the Alps: not a particularly necessary qualification, and again thousands of candidates lived and travelled there.

Diplomatic missions: no relation with the Voynich MS

Melnik castle: this is just (cool) piece of trivia but plays no role

Alchemy and occultism: not at all sure that the Voynich MS is about this. Medicine and herbalism is what we should be looking for.

Means and resources: that applies to hundreds or thousands of people

Fluent in six languages: not a necessary condition. Two would be enough, three a bonus.

Her royal crown: we don't know if the crown is hers, and even if so, it would have been sufficient to have seen it, not to have worn it.

Yes, I know I skipped one.

(14-06-2026, 12:16 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Means and resources: that applies to hundreds or thousands of people

Isn't it a bit more likely that the creators of the Voynich MS were actually limited in means and resources? Even if intended as a travel/pocket book, I think better quality parchment would be readily available at the time?

For me, this is subjective.
A cheap car may be cheap, and they are certainly readily available, but lots of people still can't afford one.

It must be mentioned that real wages in pre-modern Italy peaked in the first half of the 15th century. This means the share of the ppopulation that could have "afforded" to create the VM was likely higher than at any other point in time prior to the 19th century. Possibly the absolute number as well, given the evolution of GDP per capita.
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Quote:It must be mentioned that real wages in pre-modern Italy peaked in the first half of the 15th century.

I haven't heard about the wages but I've seen data that manuscript production peaked in the 15th century

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If something becomes a mass production that it is no longer an luxurious item, right?

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of manuscript on paper vs on parchment for those centuries.

I think enough had been said about the financial feasibility: it would have cost money, but nothing that's out of reach for the middle class. The manuscript was made on poor parchment, but that doesn't mean that this was all the makers had available to them. It just means they had parchment of this quality and made the MS with it. So going by financial means, you could have anyone from a worker to a king as the maker.

A more distinguishing question might be: who would have been interested in making a manuscript? We are used to literacy being the norm. All but the most unfortunate individuals in Western society can go to the store, pick up a notebook and start writing. Or type on their phones. Read a website. Participate in the group chat. Post on Facebook. But it takes some effort to us to imagine the scenario where the contents of books were the domain of the learned, and the ability and willingness to write restricted to certain parts of society.

Maybe making books was more like publishing in high ranking journals today. It's only about financial means to a certain degree, but the main question is: who is able to do this, and how many non-scholars would even be interested in this kind of thing? If you go out on the street and ask random people "have you ever wanted to submit a paper to a peer reviewed journal?", how long will it be before you get a yes? (Unless you're hanging out around a university campus).

Wasn't literacy the norm among middle class people? Any one of them could have "picked up a notebook" (acquired parchment) and "started writing." In the 16th century, the Friulian miller Menocchio was burned at the stake for his religious writings. In the seventeenth century, the cobbler Hans Heberle wrote his Chronicle of the Times (Zeytregister) after witnessing a comet. 
From the introduction to Dana Sajdi's "The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant": 

Quote:This book arises from a footnote—note 13 on page 188 of Tarif Khalidi’s book Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period—upon which I chanced more than a decade and a half ago. Envious of the feats of modern European historiography, which had managed famously to uncover the history and reconstruct the worldview of the sixteenth-century Friulian miller, Menocchio, I set out to retrieve “commoners” from the history of the medieval Levant (by which I mean Bilād al-Shām—thearea covering the present day states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel, (see Map 1). Individuals wiser than me warned of the monumental obstacles ahead: our main (perhaps only) sources for the medieval period are histories written by `ulamā’ (singular,`ālim, scholars of religion,who are equivalent to today’s academics), largely about themselves and for themselves. The social historian, then, is left with only one textual window to the social history of the medieval past, and it is a window with a very limited aperture. Obstinately, and all-too-naïvely, I decided to prove that“`ulamology” could not possibly be “almost all the social history that wewill ever have.” I spent a year canvassing the historiographical productionof medieval Levantine `ulamā’ in the hope of delivering up the commoners,but to no avail. I was in a state of dejection when I chanced upon footnote 13, which mentions “‘popular’ historiography [by] . . . the 18th-centuryDamascene barber or the 18th-century South Lebanon farmer al-Rukaynī. ”Barber historian! Farmer historian! I immediately resolved to desist, once and for all, from lamenting the irretrievability of medieval Arabic-Islamic commoners—and from indulging in bouts of “source envy” of the European historians—and switched to eighteenth-century Ottoman Levantine history. Here, I discovered that the Damascene barber and South Lebanon farmer(s) were not the only commoner or unusual authors to write contemporary history; such chronicles were also written in the eighteenth-century Levant by a couple of soldiers, by a court clerk, by Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests, by a Samaritan scribe, and by a merchant.
While I was conducting my research on these histories, there was an extraordinary occurrence: a serendipitous discovery of the original and unique manuscript of the chronicle of the aforementioned Damascene barber: Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Budayr (fl. 1762). The version that I—and the rest of the field—had been using is one bowdlerized and significantly altered in language and content by a scholar in the late nineteenth century. Given that Ibn Budayr’s chronicle is the only one in Arabic-Islamic history known to have been composed by a barber, the discovery was most auspicious. I had finally found my Menocchio, or his Arabic-speaking Muslim counterpart.

All this happened in the Ottoman Empire, where the literacy rate was less than 5%, perhaps only half of that, and functional literacy barely existed. Yet even in this context, it was not unusual to find elaborate works written by commoners, and one can only wonder how many similar manuscripts were lost. 
What makes the VM unique is that the community that wrote it also produced their own parchment (from about 10-11 sheep, iirc). None of the writers mentioned above is known to have attempted such a feat. Who and how many people could have done it in early fifteenth-century Italy or southern Germany? How many modern people have made their own notebook?

Keep in mind that the printing press meant a huge shift in book culture and was one of the most transformative events in human history. Menocchio was tried 150 years after the VM was written. In between them is the introduction of movable print to Europe and the whole incunabula period. So we're already well beyond the early adopters now and moving towards a situation that's much more recognizable by today's standards.

Regarding the parchment I agree, this fits into my "being able to publish in a top journal" analogy. Although, do we know for certain that they made it themselves? Did parchment makers have different qualities available?