Useful Exercise?

[Koen G]

According to one of Koen's surveys, if I remember correctly, most Voynich researchers or certainly a large percentage of them have said that they think the manuscript is most likely written in a cipher which is not a simple substitution. Despite this it appears that very few Voynich researchers are interested in ciphers from the time of the Voynich manuscript. In fact, the latest Voynich decipherment theory seems to attract much more interest.

I think this is a correct observation. An explanation might be that pointing out what's wrong with a theory can be done by just focusing on what is presented, using one's accumulated knowledge of the MS. To learn about ciphers though, is something that takes years of dedicated effort, involving archives that aren't always easily accessible. Since we are all doing this as a hobby, it is up to individuals to choose how they spend their time on this. I would definitely welcome more people studying potentially relevant ciphers and telling us about them, but of course this is best done by people who are intrinsically motivated to study these ciphers.

Motivation alone only explains part of the issue though. If there were a particularly promising cipher, you would see this forum rally and hammer away at it until it's cracked. But all medieval ciphers unearthed thus far have been vastly different from Voynichese, both in their glyph set as in their apparent method. When people say it must be some non-simple-substitution cipher, they don't mean a polyalphabetic cipher or another of the usual suspects. They rather mean "something" we haven't quite figured out yet. The sentiment might then be (correctly so or not) that studying "the usual" medieval ciphers won't get us any closer to a solution.