Expert opinions about the VMS

[ReneZ]

Picking up from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ...

Historical introduction

After the deaths of Ethel Voynich and of Anne Nill, H.P.Kraus came into the possession of several of their (and Voynich's) manuscripts, and a large collection of collateral material about their book business, including notes, letters, etc.
When he gave the Voynich MS to Yale, he split this collateral material into two parts. The material that apparently dealt with the Voynich MS was given to Yale, and all other material relating more generally with their book business was given to the Grolier club in New York, of which he was a member.

The material in Yale (Beinecke)  is summarised You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (scroll down, to boxes A to N).
The material in the Grolier club is summarised You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

Apart from these collections of correspondence, there are important other collections, the most notable probably the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , but there are many more. (Some have not been seen to my best knowledge, e.g. the Panofsky-Friedman correspondence in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, or correspondence between Heckscher and Panofsky about the Voynich MS).

Summaries of the historical work on the Voynich MS

The Grolier club material has been studied most intensively by Arnold Hunt, not a household name in the Voynich fora, but also by Colin McKinnon. Rich Santacoloma has also visited it several times, and posted a number of interesting anecdotes that emerge from this collection. I have not (yet) written about it, and it is not clear to what extent Mary D'Imperio used this material. In any case, it is more indirectly concerned with the Voynich MS.

The Beinecke material has been studied by many people, notoriously Mary D'Imperio, but we also have a short report from Jim Reeds in the mailing list archive. I have used parts the material for my web site. Rich Santacoloma has also written about it.

I believe that D'Imperio also consulted the Marshall foundation material of Friedman. Jim Reeds certainly has.

About D'Imperio's book

Large parts of D'Imperio's book are outdated, and likely to be superseded by the new Yale volume.
Her descriptions of what is in the material in the Beinecke are, however, as valid now as they were then. I don't know how many people in this forum have had a chance to see any of it, but it won't be many.

A number of statements in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  are contradicted by D'Imperio and other sources, e.g. that no specialist analyses of many aspects of the MS were ever done.
Others are not borne out by any sources that I am aware of, primarily statements that amateurs or 'Voynicheros' are suppressing or rejecting the work of professionals / experts.

New developments

Proper palaeographic analysis, i.e. more than the one brief statement that has been made (which, unfortunately I couldn't find back so quickly) is still lacking, but the materials of the MS have recently been studied again by experts. Not all of this is public yet, but some of it has been included at my web site. No suppression of specialist opinion here.

Proper, qualified opinions about the imagery are relatively rare still, but there are a few. Toressella, Stolot and more recently Touwaide, Blume. It should be clear that one should not simply reject these just because they don't fit with one's opinions.