Voynich Authorship

[Mark Knowles]

Clearly there are well known examples such as the works of Giovanni Fontana.

Giovanni Fontana was also the first one that came to my mind. I suppose his cipher was more of a "finger exercise" than an attempt to seriously hide anything. This is exactly the difference with diplomatic ciphers. Here, the information should be hidden as well as possible. What is striking about the VMS is the fact that there is not a single reference to a key in plain text ( like Fontana in Cod.icon. 242 ). This would indicate, if it really is a cipher, that the entire document should be seriously protected from access by others (non-initiates?). I know of no other manuscript from this period that would be comparable in this respect.

The thing is that the Voynich manuscript always suffers from what I call "The Problem of One". There is no parallel document, it is an isolated island, so comparison is difficult. Really the Voynich manuscript shouldn't exist as it doesn't fit in easily in known history. But the Voynich does exist, I believe, though I have never seen it, as I haven't visited Yale. So when you say "I know of no other manuscript from this period that would be comparable in this respect." that is an illustration of one kind of uniqueness we find with the Voynich.

What I have to say as follows is very much speculation->

Personally, I am inclined to think that the biggest reason it was written in cipher was, because he/they could. If you have just bought a fancy new carpentry tool and someone suggests you make a table then you would be very tempted to use your new tool even if it was not actually necessary. I think there was a temptation to use the latest cryptographic techniques they had developed in the project of writing a scientific/medical manuscript. I can imagine a cipher expert suggesting that one really ought to write the manuscript in cipher. Do I think for practical purposes it was necessary to write it in cipher? Absolutely not. I think given there was a plan to write a scientific manuscript then that was an excuse to write it in the most advanced cipher they could based on his/their professional expertise. In a sense by being written in cipher cryptography is just another topic covered in the manuscript alongside plants, astrology, astronomy etc.

Ultimately this is a problem of understanding human psychology. Humans sometimes do things that are not absolutely functionally necessary, but have other motives. Some people are quite secretive about what they do, take Henry Darger who wrote long novels that were only discovered on his death.

I think the work of Giovanni Fontana is the closest parallel to the Voynich manuscript in the sense of the type of document it is. However it appears one difference is that the authors of the Voynich were much less interested in making their manuscript public.