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A random rant about the VMS - Printable Version

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A random rant about the VMS - JustAnotherTheory - 16-01-2026

Can I just say, what an incredible manuscript the VMS is. I am in awe of its mere existence. 

After looking at (at least) a few hundred different manuscripts from Switzerland, Tirol, South Germany, Italy and even the Netherlands, from the period 1350-1470, I am:
  • Unable to find a single illustration/illumination style that matches that of the VMS illuminator,
  • Unable to find a single handwriting style that matches the calligraphy of the VMS scribe,
  • Unable to find a single drawing that is reminiscent of the VMS,
  • Unable to find a single compelling match for any of the glyphs in the VMS,
  • Unable to find a single compelling explanation for the non-existent plants, vessels and charts in the VMS.

However, the scribe(s) and illuminator(s) of the VMS must have practiced their art or at least had many years of experience is writing and drawing. So where is the mark of their art throughout an entire century? There seems to be none. Literally none of the contemporary material matches anything that is on the VMS. In short, this manuscript should not exist.

Just ranting/awing at this masterpiece, that's all.

RE: A random rant about the VMS - Jorge_Stolfi - 17-01-2026

(16-01-2026, 06:31 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.After looking at (at least) a few hundred different manuscripts from Switzerland, Tirol, South Germany, Italy and even the Netherlands, from the period 1350-1470, I am: Unable to find a single illustration/illumination style that matches that of the VMS illuminator ... the scribe(s) and illuminator(s) of the VMS must have practiced their art or at least had many years of experience is writing and drawing.,
It seems to be a general consensus that the text and drawings on each page were produced by the same person.  Usually the drawing was done first and then the text was written around or inside it.

It seems that the VMS scribe had some experience writing, since he produced  reasonably regular letters only ~1.5 mm tall. 

However, he was not a professional scribe, as one would find in the scriptorium of a monastery. He did not draw guide lines for the margins, and the baselines of his text are all bent and tilted.

And he had no experience as illustrator. One can follow the evolution of his artistic, erm, skills on the Zodiac pages, from Aries onwards.  He learned to draw a minimally acceptable "nymph" only after 3-4 pages, and hardly improved on it thereafter.

So that may be why his style is so unusual.  Books like the VMS usually were illustrated by professional illustrators...

Quote:Unable to find a single handwriting style that matches the calligraphy of the VMS scribe[...]Unable to find a single compelling match for any of the glyphs in the VMS
The script apparently was invented by the Author of the book from scratch, without trying to imitate any existing script of trying to preserve some calligraphic tradition. Like hangul, or the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., or the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

The originality of the handwriting may be simply the originality of the alphabet.

Quote:Unable to find a single drawing that is reminiscent of the VMS,
Well, people have found many bits and pieces that apparently were copied (with variable degree of fidelity) from other manuscripts of the time. Like the icons of the Zodiac signs, the dresses and hairdos, use of a wolkenband to separate Earthy from Heavenly domains, and the Four Sages of Life on f85r2.

Quote:Unable to find a single compelling explanation for the non-existent plants, vessels and charts in the VMS.
For the plants, one possible explanation is that the VMS is a variant of the so-called "herbals of the alchemists", a genre of bogus herbals with fantastic plants that had some popularity at the time.  In fact there are claims that some details of the VMS plants were copied from those herbals. 

Another possible explanation is that the plants were real but the Author did not know what they looked like.  So he had to create the drawings in order meet the expectations of European doctors and herbalists as to how a herbal should look like.

For the vessels in the Pharma section, I would guess that the Scribe started drawing them from memory, as simple cylindrical jars; but then looked at books or visited an apothecary shop, and learned to draw more complicated shapes.

For the charts, those must have been due to the Author, not the Scribe, and must have come either from his fantasy or imagination, or from some exotic source in "Egypt or other oriental parts".

Quote:Just ranting/awing at this masterpiece, that's all.
I would not call it a "masterpiece". It is a remarkable object, that took a lot of work to produce, and the contents may even be valuable to historians and linguists.  But its execution is rough and uneven, probably riddled with mistakes and silly elucubrations...

All the best, --stolfi

RE: A random rant about the VMS - MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) - 17-01-2026

@JustAnotherTheory, I agree with you. There is something very special about the Voynich manuscript. Hopefully we will learn what it is one day.

RE: A random rant about the VMS - JustAnotherTheory - 17-01-2026

Thanks a lot for that Stolfi. Those are great points. 

Nonetheless, I have to note that a n00b scribe with n00b illustration skills could not, in my opinion, have written so incredibly consistently, i.e., without a single mistake on any pages. There are no strikethroughs, no erasures whatsoever.

Furthermore, following Lisa Fagin Davis' study, it appears that there were many scribes involved in the process. So what you're saying, is that we have a bunch of n00bs writing a highly complex manuscript without any mistakes, errors or strikethroughs, yet they achieve a level of consistency and mastery that one would expect from scribes wiith years of calligraphic experience (even though, like you say, they're not fully on par with professional scribes).

Also, what's up with the lack of training material? If a scribe (or scribes) is to write 200 pages of unknown script, there must be a trace of their practice. There must have been many vellums or trial-and-error, pen-testing, etc... Where is all that material? Did they burn all of it? Chuck them in the Rhine?

RE: A random rant about the VMS - Rafal - 17-01-2026

Lack of references in other manuscripts can be in fact frustrating. Sometimes I browse online manuscripts too, hoping to hit the jackpot with some reference but no success so far Smile

Let me share a few observations.

- it is said that only about 10% of old manuscripts survived. If VM author was using some references (and he almost certainly did) they are probably lost. What we find from time to time is not his reference book but its cousins, sometimes far cousins

- most of manuscripts that survived are religious. People just cared for them more, treated with bigger respect are were more reluctant to throw them to a bin. Based on it, we could think that medieval people were extremely pious but it's not entirely true. It is rather a kind of survival bias: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

- things that aren't religious may have few "cousins". How many manuscripts about chess have you seen? I have seen recently my first one:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[Image: m108.001r.jpg]

Is it rare? Yes, it is. But is it weird? Does it make it weird that you cannot find references in Psalters and Book of Hours?

- VM may be weird because it was probably never intended to be a single manuscript. It contains too much different stuff for a single work. If a medieval work was a herbal then it didn't have bathing ladies. If it was about bathing then it didn't have Zodiac signs and so on. Voynich manuscript has it all together.

But as Lisa Fagin Davies suggested recently it was probably orginally unbound. So it is possibly a compilation of several independent works. Therefore you shouldn't search for another manuscript with similar structure

RE: A random rant about the VMS - Rafal - 17-01-2026

And I will add that there are quite strong references in other manuscripts. Apart from what Jorge said we have:

- Nicole Oresme manuscript

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[Image: ellie-velinska-geocentric-voynich-768x392.png]

- De balneis Puteolanis in different versions for Quire 13
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[Image: 250px-De_Balneis_Puteolanis_MS_1474_Bibl...Rome_3.jpg]

[Image: BalneisParallels.png]

and probably more.

But yes, to find an unknown reference you probably need to browse not 100 manuscripts but something around 5000 or so Confused

RE: A random rant about the VMS - Jorge_Stolfi - 17-01-2026

(17-01-2026, 09:25 AM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[...] a n00b scribe with n00b illustration skills could not, in my opinion, have written so incredibly consistently, i.e., without a single mistake on any pages. There are no strikethroughs, no erasures whatsoever.

Who said that there are no mistakes?  There are tons of odd details that can be the result of mistakes: many malformed and bizarre glyphs that occur only once in the whole book, words that have uncommon combinations of glyphs, lines that are mis-aligned across plants, and more...

On page f105r, line 10 is only half-line long but right-justified.  It has often been interpreted as one of the "titles".  However, it was definitely written after line 11 was complete.  A more likely explanation is that those words belonged to line 11 or latter, but the scribe skipped those words at first and noticed the mistake only after line 11 was complete; and he tried to fix the mistake by inserting those words in the space between lines 9 (the end of a parag) and line 11. 

By coincidence, line 13 ends with what looks like an incomplete word (ot), and starting at line 14 the handwriting is quite different.   I wonder...

As for the lack of erasures and insertions: the Scribe himself is unlikely to make either, since he will not notice his own mistakes.   The examples I have seen, on the few manuscripts I have looked at, were apparently done by a separate Proofreader who went through the work of the Scribe.  In the example below, it seems that the Red Scribe who wrote the explicit did not know Latin, and thus made many mistakes, including a bizarre word "raaonem"; and those were corrected by the Proofreader in brown ink.
   

Quote:Furthermore, following Lisa Fagin Davis' study, it appears that there were many scribes involved in the process.

I can believe that there were several Scribes.  However, another handwriting expert once stated that there was only one...

Quote: So what you're saying, is that we have a bunch of n00bs writing a highly complex manuscript without any mistakes, errors or strikethroughs, yet they achieve a level of consistency and mastery that one would expect from scribes wiith years of calligraphic experience (even though, like you say, they're not fully on par with professional scribes).

For the "no errors", see above.  For the "mastery", the only thing that not everyone could have done is writing minimally consistent letters of that size.  But the shapes of the letters are all over the place, even on the same line or same word; and many are so badly written that we can only guess at which letter the Author meant -- a or o, r or s, e or i, m or g,  Ch or Ih or ee...

Quote:Also, what's up with the lack of training material? If a scribe (or scribes) is to write 200 pages of unknown script, there must be a trace of their practice.

Yes, if the Scribe was not the Author (as I believe), he had to be taught the alphabet by the Author, and train writing it until the Author was satisfied with the results. 

But, obviously, those exercises would have been mostly on paper. Even if the final tests were on vellum, they would be on separate scraps.  They all would be discarded soon after completed.

RE: A random rant about the VMS - Rafal - 17-01-2026

Quote:a n00b scribe with n00b illustration skills could not, in my opinion, have written so incredibly consistently, i.e., without a single mistake on any pages.

It is quite possible that the scribe wasn't understanding what he was writing.
Or he was writing gibberish and knew it or not

In such case he wasn't correcting any errors because he was unable to see any errors.

RE: A random rant about the VMS - JustAnotherTheory - 17-01-2026

Thank you all for your input. This is all highly interesting.

Especially that resemblence to the Nicole Oresme manuscript! That is indeed quite striking. Do we know of other copies of that manuscript? There must be many.

RE: A random rant about the VMS - Stefan Wirtz_2 - 17-01-2026

(17-01-2026, 12:42 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
Especially that resemblence to the Nicole Oresme manuscript! That is indeed quite striking. Do we know of other copies of that manuscript? There must be many.

This similarity of VMS „world“ to the drawing in N. Oresmes manuscript proofs a common understanding of the world during that time, not more.
Any „copy“ of the N-O painting would have been quite better than the result in VMS.

Above the medieval world consisting of earth, air and water (or Africa, Asia and Europe Wink) were the stars and, separated by a etherical seam or „cloud band“, the heavenly spheres with God and the Angels.
This kind of viewing appears quite often in medieval drawings troughout whole Europe; 
there is not really a clue if VMS draftman did copy or even know the Oresme Ms.