Writing papers about the Voynich MS

[ReneZ]

I naively believed that an author putting a reference in a bibliography means that the author has read it and understands it, because that's the way I always did it when I was a student. I would feel ashamed citing a primary source I never (or barely) even read.

I don't think that there are any hard rules. For young academics it may seem interesting to have a long bibliography, to show that they are familiar with all relevant sources. For specific types of publications, a long bibliography may also be extremely useful. 

I don't think that there is anything wrong with just citing a publication in order to provide the original source for some information, regardless whether the author has read the paper or not. Usually, he would have.

The idea behind cited publications is always to help the reader, or provide some traceability.