The VM as Outsider Art

[oshfdk]

I had a professor at university who insisted that we are all people of the renaissance. So much of how we see the world, art, science, ourselves... was shaped in that critical timeframe. Obviously this cannot be seen as a single moment when everything changed all of a sudden, but things were shifting quicker than before for a number of reasons.

Now the whole concept of the renaissance, when it started, what it entailed and so on is being revised by historians, and a subject of debate. But nobody, not even proponents of a very long Middle Ages, would use a 16th century work like Orlando Furioso to say anything about medieval literature. It's just a product of a different age and would not have been made in the early 15th century, just like Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) could not have been made in the 1600's. Works of fiction are products of their time. That fact that Orlando Furioso was written in the 16th century is extremely relevant, since it was clearly a new kind of work that had success and great influence on later authors.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the context of the early 15th century.

I think I understand what you are saying, but it's still puzzling why Orlando Furioso published in Italy no later than 1532 (I'm not sure if the 1516 version included the Moon trip) should be paradigmatically different from the Voynich manuscript created somewhere some 100 years earlier. I mean, there was no internet in Europe in the XV-XVI centuries, ideas took a while to spread and only some of them took off and became part of the known history, while a lot was just lost, I assume. According to Wikipedia, the ideas of Renaissance originated in Florence in the XIII-XIV centuries, spreading to the rest of Europe over the course of 200 years. 

Dante Alighieri was creating his version of Inferno 100 years before the Voynich manuscript, and, as far as I understand, it was very loosely based on the Biblical traditions and mostly an original world-building creation. And quite an elaborate one.

Maybe it is a stretch, I'm not a historian.