Useful Exercise?

[Mark Knowles]

Anybody fancy trying to decipher the following letter. It is dated to 1440 and from Milan.

It looks like it's already been deciphered: nihilominus arca hec et alia quedam nonnulla latius intimabo... ("nevertheless, I will describe this box and some others in more detail..."), etc., etc.

But is the challenge for us to work out a key to the cipher based on the decipherment?  That could be interesting.

To kick things off: that first word nihilominus occurs again later in the message, and there's a matching sequence of cipher characters both times, but the repeated part starts a few characters into the ciphertext.

Thanks for replying. You are right it does look as if some of the decipherment has been written.

Yes, the challenge is to work out the cipher key.

I thought I should work out the cipher key, but then I thought it would save me the effort and might be a useful exercise for a Voynich researcher.