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+--- Thread: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? (/thread-5083.html)
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - RenegadeHealer - 02-12-2025
(30-11-2025, 12:17 AM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It was commissioned as a prop for a shop. It wasn't made to sell, but to sell other things, a loss-leader of sorts. Spend money to make money.
I think this idea works best if it is something meant to be from "far away" with very valuable knowledge.
A question popped into my mind whilst reading this thread, that I’m hoping someone with a better knowledge of the history of writing and bookbindery can answer: In the general place and time most of us agree the VMs was composed, how common, or precedented, were scribes and scriptoria that copied or published handwritted documents written in a script not familiar, nor in common use, to people in that place and time? Note that includes not only foreign pieces of writing, but also ones written in an unrecognizably archaic script of the local written language, and enciphered documents to which the scribe had no access to the key. Was quickly learning and copying pages and pages of a wholly new and subjectively meaningless writing system something any master craftsman level scribe was expected to be able to do, or get much practice at, outside of a few major continental crossroads of travel and trade, like Venice, Constantinople, or Jerusalem? Was this a service more provincial scriptoria would have offered? I imagine the ones that took commissions like this in the first place would charge more for the job, the less in demand it was and the more provincial we’re talking. It would probably take longer to finish. And to a person who could read the finished product meaningfully, something about the writing would look off — just a dash of that weird and offputting unnaturalness that characterizes first generation AI’s attempts at written human language on signs, enough to cause an uncanny valley effect. There would doubtless be errors due to incorrect judgement of ambiguous glyphs, which would carry over and accumulate in subsequent generations of hand copying. Worst case scenario, I ween this error rate could be so lossy, even after a single iteration, as to make much of the information the document contains irretrievable to anyone without access to the master copy.
TL;DR: If money was no object to me, could I just rock up to a scriptorium in Nottingham in 1400, throw an Armenian codex and a bag of gold on the table, and said “Three copies of this by next month, please”? And would a native Armenian speaker and reader find the products of such a publishing venture much use?
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - Jorge_Stolfi - 02-12-2025
(28-11-2025, 04:05 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The sewing structure is fifteenth century - three sewing stations of double-cords with the extended end band structure that developed in the fifteenth century.
That is when the sewing structure was developed, But when was it abandoned, and why? Are those dates the same for all binders in all of Europe?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - oaken - 07-12-2025
(29-11-2025, 12:21 PM)Skoove Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(28-11-2025, 10:19 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You could easily get away with a fraction of the work.
I have sometimes thought of this as well. The major basis of someone trying to sell the VMS circa 1430 would have been the unusual script since (as VMS researchers have discovered over the years) many parts of the VMS weren't that strange for someone familiar with manuscripts in the 15th century. During that time (since they didn't have the internet), one wouldn't be able to tell that it was not a pre-existing script. They would just be able to tell that it was not a common European script that they had seen.
My point is that if they wanted to sell it, it would be much easier to make it crazier and make it largely readable for the potential buyer so that they could comprehend the uniqueness of it.
I am not convinced a hypothetical european VMS author would have the ability to create a version of the VMS even more out there than the existing one, let alone make it readable in addition. This was a period when a catholic european, even an educated one, would have had very little access to information about other cultures, philosophies or ideas. Trade with the Islamic world was only just beginning to flow again and Jewish communities, where present were insular, the reformation is still a hundred years away. With no other cultures to appropriate from, the author would have to create a manuscript with a legitimately interesting content, and the whole point of this theory is that writing a legitimately interesting and desirable manuscript is harder than making a superficially intriguing book of nonsense, interesting primarily in its illegibility.
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - LisaFaginDavis - 07-12-2025
By the late fifteenth century, when printing on paper was becoming more and more common throughout Europe, new binding structures appeared that were quicker and cheaper, like limp vellum. However, the style of the limp vellum bindings that developed in the late 15th century were quite different from what we see on the Voynich Manuscript today. In the 15th and 16th century, limp vellum bindings were attached by a complicated and decorative stitching on the outside of the spine and used a different sewing structure entirely than the way the quires are attached to each other in the VMS. The sewing structure of the manuscript is 15th century, but the covers and their attachment to the manuscript are 19th century.
(02-12-2025, 09:39 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(28-11-2025, 04:05 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The sewing structure is fifteenth century - three sewing stations of double-cords with the extended end band structure that developed in the fifteenth century.
That is when the sewing structure was developed, But when was it abandoned, and why? Are those dates the same for all binders in all of Europe?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - Jorge_Stolfi - 07-12-2025
(07-12-2025, 03:16 PM)oaken Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This was a period when a catholic european, even an educated one, would have had very little access to information about other cultures, philosophies or ideas.
That may have been true for the vast majority of the people. But surely, at any point in time since Antiquity, there have been thousands of Europeans who traveled much beyond the confines of "Europe", and thousands of non-"Europeans" living in Europe.
On a few of those long-range travelers would have bothered to write about their experiences. Christian missionaries felt compelled to write reports for the Church, that would help it spread the Word to the Heathens. Maybe some scholars did so. The others probably did not bother. (We only know that Marco Polo existed because, the story goes, he spent some time in prison, together with someone who happened to be a writer.)
And only a small fraction of whatever they wrote has survived.
All the best, --stolfi.
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - oaken - 08-12-2025
(07-12-2025, 06:16 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On a few of those long-range travelers would have bothered to write about their experiences.Yes, it certainly could be that one of those few travelers outside of europe was involved in the vms. Although that might be more motivated if there was a clearer link to somewhere like al-andalus, where cross cultural contact was/had been more common (e.g. christian nobility fighting as mercenaries in the Islamic world) , or if there was anything in the vms that is impossible to explain in a central european context, which I am not yet convinced of. There are surviving later documents from early contact between europeans and the peoples of the americas of course, and they don't look anything like vms, and no amount of redaction could render them to. But I don't discount the idea.