Documents in Archives

[Mark Knowles]

I note that Koen has listed on his website some manuscripts that have not been digitised that he would like to see with reference to his research into Diebold Lauber etc.; I am not sure if I think they are worth pursuing or not as I haven't yet studied his writing on that. However it makes sense to try to track down certain documents.

One thing I can add here is that knowing which manuscript you would like to see requires digging deep into a particular subject.

There is a subjective passion required to drive one to find undigitized documents.

There needs to be a specific research question, a curiosity to have particular questions answered by these missing documents. This is why, when someone asks which documents I'd like to see digitized, I find this question hard to answer. This is often dependent on one's current research.

A few years ago, I enquired if there were any undigitised documents in the Bodleian Library in Oxford that people would like to see, as I live in Oxford it is relatively easy for me to go there and take photographs. There is an undigitised herbal manuscript that was suggested to me and which I duly photographed and that I shared with Nick Pelling and other Voynich researchers on Ninja. This herbal manuscript is the kind of document that I am referring to. In fact I expect there must be other undigitised herbal manuscripts from the 14th and 15th century that would be worth seeing, though I don't know of them specifically as it is not a topic I have focused on.

Deeper digging into a particular subject is certainly something I support. I only tend to explore a subject connected to the Voynich deeply or not at all. I tend to choose a subject to focus on if I believe there is the possibility that by exploring it will bring one closer to a decipherment of the Voynich. I fundamentally think Nick Pelling's project of locating what he likes to call a "block paradigm" is a sound approach, though not necessarily an easy one.

For example, one might choose to locate all surviving works of Diebold Lauber that one can find references to.(There may be works of his that one doesn't locate as they are not referred to online or in books or known to other researchers.)