[split] Diplomatic ciphers

[Mark Knowles]

Rene: I started to write a much longer reply which I will try to post when it is finished. However here is a quick answer, on the basis of my authorship hypothesis we are dealing with someone with a very strong background particular through his family, but also early training in diplomatic ciphers who later followed a different career path and interests of the kind we see in the Voynich. I think the Voynich is probably a text broadly akin to Giovanni Fontana's enciphered manuscript, which only has a simple substitution cipher, but which was produced instead with a much more complex cipher from someone with intimidate connections to the research and development of diplomatic ciphers in the Milan chancellery during a period which my research shows was a period of significant cipher advances.

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JKP & Rene: A sequence of a few "units" could map to a null or nothing.