[split] Relying on external imagery

[Mark Knowles]

How do you know the current document was not an exact copy of one made, say, in 1410?
Or copy of one made in 1350, updated to the style of the early 15th century?
How do you know it is not a unifying copy of several earlier sources?
How do you know there was just one author?

I'm not saying any of those statements must be right or wrong, but you seem to be convinced about these matters. Why?

(I'm going to split the last few posts after adding this one).

I wrote a response to this earlier, but it got lost as I had a problem with my phone.

I do not know the current document was not an exact copy of one made, say, in 1410 or 1350. However I think that very unlikely. If it was written in a natural language in an unknown script then that would be possible, but I think given the structure of the text and geographical origins of the Voynich it seems to me that the natural language hypothesis is highly questionable. Why would one make an exact copy of a meaningless text or an enciphered text? Those ideas and quite a jump and so without evidence to the contrary I think we should assume not. (The Voynich could be 1 of 10 identical copies produced by the author, but this is big leap and Occam's razor demands that without any evidence we really need to reject that idea.)

The nature and structure of the text points to me of an imaginative individual it therefore seems very likely that the drawings are correspondingly imaginative rather than duplicates. If it is a copy of an existing manuscript, but written with enciphered or meaningless text then why do that when the viewer could look at the original?

It seems that if choose to encipher something, if it is enciphered, then you do so to protect some original or unique content.

Similarly if you are trying to produce a mysterious object for sale then it makes sense to produce content that is more mysterious.

That fact that we have not found one source for specific page of the manuscript and therefore Nick Pelling's block-paradigm, suggests to me that the whole contents was not from different sources.

Of course, I think the manuscript is one of it's time and therefore influenced by other manuscripts from that time or before, such as alchemical herbals, but I do think there is an underemphasis on the author's inventiveness and far too much emphasis on illustrations from other manuscripts that if one squints loosely resemble what we see in the Voynich. Also I think there is an underemphasis on not manuscript sources and influences. Purely as an example, my theory or the 9 rosette page is based on relatively few manuscript illustrations and heavily on geographical or architectural sources as some other people have done. 

I do not know there was just one author I intend to refer to one author, where it is not important to the argument, for simplicity rather than writing "author(s)". Similarly I often find myself writing "he" instead of "he/she" for simplicity and brevity. Though it is true I think there was essentially one author, who may have had some assistance from those working for him, and that the author was Male, but that is a completely argument and subject.