[Article] [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis

[VoyBear]

Sorry if this was asked before, but did someone ever ask the jesuits what they did to the manuscript, before Voynich acquired it ?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Sorry if this was asked before, but did someone ever ask the jesuits what they did to the manuscript, before Voynich acquired it ?

Wilfrid lied about the provenance of the manuscript for many years, supposedly because public knowledge of the sale would mean trouble for the Jesuits.  So I suppose that asking that question to them would have been rather difficult.  Anyway, by the time people got interested enough in the details like binding, all the Jesuits involved in the sale would probably be gone.  

And AFAIK there is no mention of the book anywhere between Marci's letter and Wilfrid's announcements.  Rene may correct me, but AFAIK there is no stamp on the VMS or an entry in any catalog that confirms that the VMS was in their possession.  It is not even identified in the list of books sold to Wilfrid: there is an entry that could be it, but that identification is only by exclusion, if one assumes that it must be on that list.  

So I bet that the Jesuits have no records now of whatever they did to it.

All the best. --stolfi

[JustAnotherTheory]

Congratulations @Dr. C Layfield and @LisaFaginDavis for the article that appeared in the Guardian today. Great stuff!

[cencei]

Thanks to both of you for the fantastic research! I really hope this will bring us closer to a solution.

Just two questions from a (relative) newbie:

- Are there any published studies that rely heavily on the quire-wise ordering being correct, and thus probably would need to be re-done with the new proposal?

- Is it pure chance that Ol and Shedy have the exact same word frequency in the text? See Fig. 3A:
   

If this was a substitution cipher, this would be explained by both words being synonyms for one even more common word, and just used interchangeably.
But my probability calculus is a bit rusty, so I can't really tell how much of a coincidence this is.