[Blog Post] An Allegory of Salvation (Koen Gheuens & Cary Rapaport)

[Mark Knowles]

There are many medieval images where the buildings are part of the backdrop without referring to any specific place.

Could you let me know any examples of such?

If something like that is the case for these tiny details, then trying to identify them is useless. Similarly, the castle may be a generic castle, not a specific one.

If one looks closely and carefully at the drawings of the buildings what one notices is that very many of them are drawn in a way which makes them distinct and different from one another. Many are not drawn as generic buildings, but rather as specific buildings with their own features. It is true that some of the very smallest buildings are drawn in a way which is quite generic.

Likewise if one compares closely the drawings of each causeway their general shape and features are quite distinct from each other in very significant ways some of which the viewer may not have noticed.

In fact the page is full of specific details.

So, I think, one has to ask what all of these specific details mean.

If all of these specific details are as you suggest, just part of the backdrop without any real meaning, then that means to me that the author put in a lot of effort illustrating those details for them to be absolutely meaningless. And even if they were plucked purely out of the author's imagination then he/she must have had at least some real world reference point.

And if all the details are meaningless why use such a large sheet of vellum to illustrate them when a smaller sheet of vellum would be quite sufficient?

As an extreme example one could operate under the hypothesis that the whole page is meaningless, just the author doodling from his/her imagination. If this is the case then trying to find a meaning from the page is pointless. However I am of the opinion that the page is full of meaning down to some of the very small details.

 What interests me first is the overall structure of the page.

Many of theories of this page focus on the overall structure of the page and one gets the impression that the theorist has probably not even noticed the specific details. I think the ability to explain the details is what really tests a theory of this page. It is easy to come up with a theory which explains the overall structure, it is hard to come up with a theory which explains the very many specifics details. As I say, my biggest concern is that so many people forming theories of the page are not even aware of so many of the specific details of the page. A theory which acknowledges each specific detail even if it does not explain them is progress when compared to so many of the existing theories of the page.

Obviously I have my own very specific ideas about the page, but they don't matter in the context of this general discussion of the page. I, myself, could reproduce so much of the page from memory down to very specific details, excluding the text, I don't think any other Voynich researcher alive or dead could do the same, as I have put a lot of time into studying the page. Because of the time I have spent studying this page I am very conscious of all of the specific details and how many there are.

Also, I don't think anyone's views should be static.

I completely agree with this statement.