Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels

[Mark Knowles]

To sum up my own personal thoughts on Fontana: I think he was one of those people who took a quantitative leap with common knowledge. He was familiar with basic ciphers; he took the idea of a cipher and turned it into a code for personal reasons. Most probably for the first time in history. His idea was an antecedent of the same one that caused educated 18th/19th century Western gentleman to write in Greek or Latin - to hide ideas from the common person, to ensure that only the educated could read his work.
He wasn't trying to hide his work from the world, he was trying to ensure that only those worthy of access could read it.

Yeah, it's hard to know how close a parallel to the Voynich it is. His work was a scientific treatise, to the best of my knowledge. I think the Voynich can be considered in a similar vein as a scientific treatise of sorts. They both have a different scientific focus from one another I think. And they are both written in an unknown script; however one we find easy to read and the other very hard. As I believe the Voynich is written in cipher, so for me there is a greater parallel.

Assuming the author of the Voynich was not Fontana what could these parallels tell us about him/her/them. For me of course the fact that Fontana was Northern Italian is significant given that is in my opinion where the author of the Voynich originates. He was highly educated as one might expect. He was born in the 1390s. He had close ties to Venice.

If the Voynich is to some extent a product of the culture of the beginning of the Italian renaissance then that could be seen as another parallel with Fontana's work.

However why were there not other people at the time or over the following century producing similar works? Why did this urge to produce scientific texts in cipher stop?

Fontana's work is dated to the same period that the Voynich is carbon dated to, yet I don't think Fontana was the author though that might seem a logical explanation.