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+--- Thread: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material (/thread-4853.html)
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Jorge_Stolfi - 06-08-2025
(06-08-2025, 04:52 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm intrigued by the notion that the scribe working on the Voynich Manuscript might have been unsupervised.
I hope we can agree that the Author did not compose the VMS directly on vellum. It would make no sense, for several reasons. He must have written a draft on paper first, which then was clean-copied to vellum by a Scribe.
Would the Scribe be the Author himself? If you believe that there were multiple scribes, obviously all but one of them were not the Author. But even if there was a single Scribe, I think that there is enough evidence that he was not the Author.
Besides, the Scribe was someone who was skilled with driving a pen, able to write small characters (only 1.5 mm tall) on the rough vellum surface. Not all people who could write would have such a skill. Moreover, once the draft was complete, copying it to vellum was a boring, laborious, and mechanical task. It would make perfect sense for the Author to just hire some Scribe for that task. And, for the same reason, the Scribe must have worked most of the time unsupervised, apart from a bit of training and instructions at the beginning and a cursory check at the end. Like most scribes and secretaries have been doing up to this day. At most, the Scribe may have called on the Author a few times to resolve some hard-to-read glyphs in the draft, or for further instructions about the figures.
But then surely the Scribe did not understand at all what he was copying. Especially if one assumes that the text is encrypted, or mechanically generated gibberish.
Quote:you’d expect any errors introduced would be caught and corrected, perhaps by a supervisor or reviser. Yet, as some of you suggest, a few copying errors appear to have survived in the final version, which seems inconsistent with an oversight process.
Indeed those copying errors and other features argue against the copying being closely supervised by someone who could read it.
Note that the more people we bring into the Author club, the less likely the scenario becomes.
Quote:Given the manuscript’s importance
I suspect that the manuscript is vastly more important to us than it was to the Author.
All the best, --jorge
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - RobGea - 06-08-2025
Re scribes and supervisors, there is this unreferenced paraphrase from Charlotte Brewer on wikipedia: Piers Plowman. c.1377
Quote: scholars like Charlotte Brewer suggest that scribes and their supervisors be regarded as editors with semi-authorial roles in the production of early modern texts like Piers Ploughman.
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - RobGea - 06-08-2025
Hopefully more evidence of 'Scribes not understanding what they were doing' will come to light, as it is the evidence is scant.
Because the idea would go far to explain a lot of the not-quite-patterns in the vms.
e.g the single instance of a doubled gallows or the 2 instances of a doubled eva-d (iirc).
Then rather than the vms having no mistakes, it could be rife with errors, thus explaining why it is so hard to unravel.
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - quimqu - 06-08-2025
[quote="Jorge_Stolfi" pid='69381' :-/
I suspect that the manuscript is vastly more important to us than it was to the Author. :D
[/quote]
I totally agree with this point
But anyway, if it really is ciphered (which is also unclear), then there must have been something to hide — so at least some interest in making the cipher correct can be expected from the author.
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - N._N. - 06-08-2025
(06-08-2025, 06:39 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would the Scribe be the Author himself? If you believe that there were multiple scribes, obviously all but one of them were not the Author. But even if there was a single Scribe, I think that there is enough evidence that he was not the Author.
I would not consider the first point to be obvious. It is possible that each scribe authored their own section. While unlikely in my opinion, it would make sense that the text for each thematic section was the work of one expert from start to finish. The original post of this thread is an argument against this idea, but there are also scenarios in which an author-scribe does not fully understand what they are doing due to a lack of fluency in the cipher/language/whatever it is.
Additionally, to expand a bit on the C. Brewer quote mentioned by RobGea with what is my understanding on what is an author in this context: It is difficult, if not impossible, to cleanly separate the concepts of 'author', 'scribe', 'copyist' etc. in the context of medieval text production. Compilation, adaptation, re-arranging etc. were such key elements of the whole process that for a significant percentage of existing manuscripts we could not assign these roles even if we knew every detail about their creation. With more than one person involved in the process, it obviously just gets more complicated.
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Jorge_Stolfi - 07-08-2025
(06-08-2025, 08:25 PM)N._N. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would not consider the first point to be obvious. It is possible that each scribe authored their own section. While unlikely in my opinion, it would make sense that the text for each thematic section was the work of one expert from start to finish.
Unlikely indeed.
I wonder how many here have read Stanislaw Lem's tale of the guy who set out to find a Genius Of The First Kind? (That tale and his novel His Master's Voice should be mandatory reading for admission to this forum.)
In the relevant time frame there must have been thousands of Geniuses Of The First Kind who invented a new script for some reason and used it to write a VMS-length book. Societies with half a dozen members who did the same must have been much fewer, in the dozens or so at best. So multiple Authors is a priori far less likely than single Author. Until we have evidence of the former (such as another document in the same script that is clearly by a different author), it is safer to bet on the latter.s
Quote:It is difficult, if not impossible, to cleanly separate the concepts of 'author', 'scribe', 'copyist' etc. in the context of medieval text production. Compilation, adaptation, re-arranging etc. were such key elements of the whole process that for a significant percentage of existing manuscripts we could not assign these roles even if we knew every detail about their creation.
Indeed, before copyright and photography, every copyist was an author, and every copy was a new book, to a smaller or greater extent...
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - ReneZ - 07-08-2025
There is nothing unusual about the MS having mistakes. It was made by humans.
There are still very many unknowns (variables if you will) in how the MS was created. It's not just a choice between two options. When judging certain aspects, it is quite natural to be guided by one's own expectations about some of these variables, and I would not blame anyone for doing that.
Meaningful or not?
Scribe different from author?
Scribe understanding the source or not?
Was the 'translation' (if there was one) already done by the author, or did he just provide the rules?
This is far from being all, and some options are already conditional on other options.
What's more, some other aspects may not have been constant for the entire MS. In particular this applies to the quality of the draft (if there was one). Even more in particular, in the zodiac one may wonder how much of the drawings were improvisation by a scribe. In the beginning, the figures are reasonably well spaced but this deteriorates as it goes on.
I saw a suggestion that labels were all added at the end. I don't know how we could conclude this, and I also don't see how this affects the point I brought up in the opening post.
So to come back to that. I specifically selected that case (the only one I find sufficiently telling), because it holds, regardless whether the text is meaningful or not.
The label is written in the wrong place (probably!), even while it could have easily been written in the correct place. Also when the MS is a hoax.
In my opinion, the original author would not have made this mistake.
Yes, this is subjective.
The only reason why I want to point this out is, because it can have major consequences on the accuracy of the text. We may be looking at something that has been distorted very significantly due to ignorance (with apologies to Ulrich et al).
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - BessAgritianin - 07-08-2025
It is plausible, that the Voynich Manuscript in its present form is a copy, or composite compilation of different scribers.
In middle ages a system of fast copying known as "pecia" was very popular (citation):
"The Pecia system was a revolutionary manuscript production method developed in medieval universities (13th-15th centuries) where authorized texts were broken into smaller, numbered sections (called peciae, or pieces) and rented out by stationers to scribes for copying."
Evidences for Voynich of being a product of this system are:
- Different handwritings
- Mixed foil numbers
- Different stain patches which do not sit with one another if the foils were together
Giving these observations- where might be the original?
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - N._N. - 07-08-2025
(07-08-2025, 12:26 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Unlikely indeed.
I wonder how many here have read Stanislaw Lem's tale of the guy who set out to find a Genius Of The First Kind? (That tale and his novel His Master's Voice should be mandatory reading for admission to this forum.)
In the relevant time frame there must have been thousands of Geniuses Of The First Kind who invented a new script for some reason and used it to write a VMS-length book. Societies with half a dozen members who did the same must have been much fewer, in the dozens or so at best. So multiple Authors is a priori far less likely than single Author. Until we have evidence of the former (such as another document in the same script that is clearly by a different author), it is safer to bet on the latter.s
Since we pretty much know that there were multiple scribes, there must be more to it than just a single 'genius', even if we cannot really know what the role of the others were (just scribe without knowledge of the manuscript's meaning/scribe with a basic understanding/scribe and author). Additionally, the purpose of a cipher/language is usually communication, which requires multiple people. With these points in mind, the general theory about the circumstances of the creation of the cipher manuscript must be weighted against the factual evidence about the number of scribes etc. In my opinion, it is impossible to reach a final conclusion about the number of authors.
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Jorge_Stolfi - 07-08-2025
It is quite possible that there were multiple scribes. If the VMS was composed in parts separated by several years, the Author could have recruited different Scribes for different parts.
On the other hand, it seems unlikely that he used the services of some "industrial" outfit, like a monastery or a "fast copying" enterprise like that which you describe. The physical nature and layout of the VMS is distinctively "artisanal", if not "looney crackpot" level. A professional service presumably would have care more about the visual quality, e.g. requiring their scribes to use straight guiding lines for margins and baselines.
Moreover, every scribe would have to be trained in the alphabet. It is easier to see such training taking place with a privately hired scribe (or perhaps a secretary or even a relative) than with half a dozen staff or subcontracted scribes of an "industrial" outfit.
As for the scrambled folios and stains, those accidents almost certainly happened a long time after the manuscript was finished. It has been established that the book was bound and then re-bound centuries after that, and some stains clearly happened after the last re-binding. Some parts may originally have existed for a while as separate bifolios or unbound quires, but that does not imply that it was produced by multiple scribes working concurrently.