Voynich Authorship

[Mark Knowles]

A while ago I compiled a list of structural obstacles and sources of frustration to be encountered in the study of the Voynich manuscript. Here are some:

*Compartmentalization

Occasionally you hear someone saying “Maybe we need an interdisciplinary approach to this?” Do you reckon?

I think one problem is that most Voynich researchers don't specialise in any given area of the manuscript. They tend to jump around from topic to topic. So at the moment we don't have many people with skills in different disciplines in order to have an interdisciplinary approach.

*Careerism

Academics are career driven. They are not the paragons of objectivity they pretend to be. There are no careers in Voynich Studies and academics stay right away from it because it is perceived as a bad career move.

(The Dead Sea Scrolls are the classic case of this. Scandalously, for years after they were discovered academics were not interested because there were no careers in it. For several decades the whole thing was left to the Dominicans because monks don’t have careers and are not puffed up egotists.)

I think that many academics are wary of getting involved in the Voynich just, because there are a lot of academics who have ended up with egg on their face after producing solutions that have subsequently been demonstrated as flawed. There is a lot to lose in terms of reputation from getting involved in Voynich research. If an academic has tenure then it makes it somewhat easier, but still there is scope for reputational damage. It is hard to have any academic posts in the Voynich manuscript as nobody really knows much about the Voynich for certain. Who would be appointed to the academic post? You can find one or two researchers who like to think of themselves as experts on the Voynich manuscript, but the truth is that if one compares what they know about the Voynich manuscript compared with what they don't know you will find out that they know almost nothing about the manuscript. I think someone who knows almost nothing about something cannot sensibly be considered to be an expert.

If I was a professional academic then I would be wary of researching the Voynich for career reasons; if one has a family to support etc. one has to be practical.

*Conceptual prisons

In general, the modern mind struggles to understand the medieval mind. This is endemic in Voynich Studies with many researchers entirely unaware of their own conceptual limitations, baggage and blindspots.

I am very wary of the concept of "the medieval mind", biological speaking medieval people have much the same brains as modern people. I am dubious that their motivations and goals are so different from ours. Of course they existed in a different intellectual environment, but I think it is easy to overestimate how different they really were from us.