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| Could the Voynich Manuscript be a private educational system? |
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Posted by: barienka - 18-05-2026, 11:00 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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I have been thinking about the Voynich Manuscript from a more psychological and human perspective rather than as a pure cryptographic problem.
What strikes me most is the contrast between the highly disciplined writing system and the relatively naive illustrations. The text appears systematic and internally consistent, while many drawings look almost childlike or non-professional.
This made me wonder whether the manuscript could have been a deeply personal knowledge system rather than a book intended for the public.
One idea that especially interests me is the possibility that the manuscript may have been connected to teaching or transmitting knowledge within a very small private circle, perhaps even between a parent and child, or a mentor and a younger student.
The botanical drawings often look less like professional scientific illustrations and more like functional memory-images. Some plants appear to combine several stages of growth or important identifying features rather than trying to represent a realistic botanical specimen.
Another reason why I am drawn to this interpretation is the strange linguistic behavior of the text itself.
Perhaps the manuscript is not a true spoken language at all, but a hybrid system somewhere between language, classification, memory aids and personal notation.
This could explain why modern linguistic and AI analyses detect patterns that resemble real language, while at the same time many sections appear repetitive, mechanical or algorithmic.
If the author was organizing knowledge through a highly personal symbolic structure, then parts of the manuscript could naturally behave like technical notation or internally coded reminders rather than normal human communication.
I also wonder whether the author could have been someone highly intelligent but outside formal academic structures, possibly even a woman with limited access to official education in the 15th century. Such a person might have created a private symbolic system to organize botanical, medical and astrological knowledge gathered from fragments of learning available around them.
The astrological sections seem especially important because they connect the manuscript to real medieval systems of knowledge that remained relatively stable over time.
To me, the manuscript feels less like a hidden universal language and more like the internal operating system of a very unusual human mind.
I would be curious whether other researchers have explored similar psychological, educational or family-based interpretations.
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| A One-Page Ledger Method for Generating Voynich-Like Text |
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Posted by: Dunsel - 16-05-2026, 08:43 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Evidence for Local Copy–Mutation in the Scribe 1 Corpus - note: not peer reviewed.
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Github Repository
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Related paper
Beyond Currier A and B: ED-Defined Folio Regimes and Lexical Continuity in the Voynich Manuscript - note: not peer reviewed.
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That paper is regarding my earlier posts: The oddities of the bigram ED
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So, there you have my work to date. My helmet is on, prepared to duck.
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| New Article by Layfield and Davis |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 16-05-2026, 04:45 PM - Forum: News
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I am thrilled to announce the publication of the first of two articles by myself and Colin Layfield (Computer Science, Univ. of Malta) about the application of Latent Semantic Analysis to the Voynich Manuscript!
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| Vegetius De re militari - the origin and purpose of military literature |
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Posted by: Bernd - 16-05-2026, 12:36 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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We have looked at Kyeser, Taccola, and other late medieval engineers as an inspiration for the VM, noticing they all contain highly similar illustrations. I would like to find the source for these illustrations. But while Kyeser as a person clearly pre-dates Taccola, this is hampered by the fact that manuscripts of those authors were copied over a considerable time-frame, likely copying from each other.
The main source of medieval siege and military literature was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a Late Roman writer from the 4th century. His work De re militari, or Epitoma rei militaris remained a popular military literature until the 19th century. However, for different reasons that one might think. Jorge asked why many illustrations in the works of all authors who copied him make no sense and look like the artist had no idea about the machine depicted. The reason is the same as for fantastic and widely inaccurate plants in herbals. Vegetius himself was, as far as we know, nether a historian, soldier nor an engineer - but an aristocrat. Modern scholars are critical of his descriptions of the Roman army and note that he carelessly compiled material from different sources and time periods and is full of inconsistencies and obvious mistakes. Vegetius lived at a time of decline of the Roman Empire and reminisced a better (and obviously fictious) 'Golden Age', much like Plato's description of Sparta as an ideal state. In other words, even the original work was - basically a fake.
Quote:Although the text was historically taken at face value during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as an accurate contemporary work on the Roman army and as a valuable military manual, modern historians have questioned the accuracy of the claims that Vegetius made about the state of the Roman army in his time. According to Michael B. Charles "many details that he provides about the [Roman] military are simply wrong", and said that it was "doubtful" that he had any military experience, arguing that the work was "not meant to be an accurate exposition of Roman military history, or indeed [then] present-day military activities", and that only "small but nonetheless valuable nuggets" of information in the text are actually valuable for understanding the Late Roman Army. The work has also been criticised on stylistic grounds. Sydney Anglo stated that the work was "mediocre" and that "its coverage of Roman military institutions is derivative, patchy, inconsistent and repetitious", and that Vegetius blended information from vastly different time periods in an unclear and confused way, with Anglo stating that "Vegetius's account of Roman military usage was not so much anachronistic as extra-chronistic. It was outside any specific time."
Now why would such a faux military guide be popular for 1500 years? First, it did contain some valid organizational and strategical advice, second, it was not intended to be used by military officers. Vegetius was an aristocrat, and his audience was nobility. We must see such works in a more abstract way. The historian Werner Leng wrote about the reception of Vegetius works from the middle ages to modernity that Vegetius was rarely seen as a military field guide for officers, but more of a cultural and aesthetic guide for nobility who sought to present themselves as the successors of the Roman Empire. Also as a political and moralistic guide on leadership and organization in line with the teachings of Aristoteles or Plato.
This is something we often tend to forget when we look at medieval manuscripts from a modern perspective. A herbal like Dioscorides was not created to be used by a physician to treat patients. A manuscript on warfare and engineering like Kyeser was not created to be used by a military officer or engineer. They were conversation pieces and collectibles for nobility that were meant to show the owner was familiar with the teachings of the re-discovered authorities of antiquity. Even the obviously practical notebooks of engineers like Taccola and Ghiberti were also representational. The machines are mostly useless. They are fantastic ideas, like one would draw a martian colony nowadays. Inspirational, aesthetic, fashionable. This is why we have all those copies of impossible machines. They were fancy. The question is who came up with the illustrations first? Like Dioscorides, the oldest copies of Vegetius appear to have been un-illustrated. At some point, an artist tried to create more-or less accurate illustrations of war and siege machines from the text, which were then copied further. But these were never technical drawings in a modern sense. Ideas at best, like Taccola's sketches. I'd say the Ghiberti cipher falls in the same category. It was a hot topic at the time. Something you'd incorporate into your works because it was the thing to do. Protecting ideas from casual readers surely also played a role, but not the main one.
In a harsh way you could say all those high-end manuscripts were fakes, pretending to be something they were not. Which was fine since the buyer did not use them for their alleged purpose anyway.
I'd still like to find early illustrated copies of Vegetius work and compare them to Kyeser's war machines. Early Kyeser illustrations are mostly flat and straight full medieval, while Taccola's drawings are much more organic and humanistic, more in line with VM drawings. Yet some elements like the wavy shore line are already present in Kyeser. So the question is - were Vegetius copies illustrated before Kyeser's 'Bellifortis' or did Kyeser invent those illustration and they found their way itto later Vegetius copies - and Taccola? The origin of the illustrations appears to be complex and cross-linked but paradoxically it appears all the war machine illustrations originate from Kyeser (who copied Vegetius' text), not from an illustrated Vegetius copy. Later ones like those of Valturius from 1470s (Rosenwald 5+6), likely copied from Taccola. And Ghiberti from either of those. But I'm not sure yet.
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| Paracelsian spagyric medicine |
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Posted by: pmw57 - 16-05-2026, 11:30 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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I'm working on a theory that the book was a workshop manual, where each letter represents a certain part of the process.
For example, t for toglie (take), o for olio (oil), r for riposo (rest).
From my exploration of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the four sections match up really well with four main aspects of spagyric medicine, those being separation, purification, recombination, and fixation into a final substance.
I am getting really promising results, and I'm now working on grounding them in historical accuracy.
Has anyone delved much into that area before?
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