[Movie] New video about the Swallowtail Merlons map

[Mark Knowles]

I just noticed this video has a harder time attracting an audience than my previous ones.

Let me share some thoughts.

"Is Voynich fake" seems to be a big, important question to most people even slightly interested in it.
"Swallowtail merlons" on the other hand may at first seem to be some tiny, unimportant detail.

For some people the swallow-tail merlons detail is very important. And the reason it is important has to do with geography. For some people the rosettes folio is important as they believe it to be a map and knowing where it is a map of can tell one a lot about the area of origin of the Voynich manuscript. For me it is even more important as I interpret it as providing a very precise geographical location of origin of the manuscript and so much so that in my opinion it points to authorship. And knowing who the author(s) of the manuscript were should be a useful stepping stone towards decipherment. Certainly my Ideas of authorship point clearly towards it being a cipher related to early 15th century Milanese diplomatic ciphers. And whilst, due to the 1447 fire in the chancellery in Milan, almost no evidence of Milanese ciphers survive in Milan, a little evidence survives in other archives from intercepted Milanese ciphers with some historical gaps which I would like to fill if there is surviving material(such as known Milanese intercepted enciphered letters from 1431 which may survive in the Vatican archives). In addition, knowing authorship may help in locating sources on which the author relied in producing the manuscript which could help in finding an elusive block-paradigm, as Nick Pelling calls it. I think it extremely difficult for statistical analysis of the text, without a crib and a clear knowledge of the structure of the cipher, to decipher the Voynich manuscript. This is why I have concentrated my efforts on tracking down related ciphers and trying to trace the sources that the author(s) used in producing the manuscript. My forthcoming trip to Milan is particularly related to looking for such sources and trying to locating what evidence that survives which could support or go against my authorship hypothesis.