08-09-2025, 11:41 AM
It is definitely true that we have "survivality bias" - manuscripts that survived were mostly the prettiest ones. Nobody cared with ugly ones.
By the way, I have recently learnt that we have similar bias with open-air folk museums that exibit different kind of peasant houses. When you watch these houses you may get false impression that they are quite pretty and spacious and that peasant's life wasn't that bad. The problem is that houses which survived generally belonged to rich peasants. They were prettiest, biggest, most sturdy and best kept of. And all these dirty, collapsing, rat-infested shacks where most people live simply didn't survive.
My feeling is that Voynich Manuscript immediately after creation was something very private and homemade so it didn't have standards of prefessional manuscript.. And in the early days it wasn't famous and known, if it belonged to some king or some abbey then it would probably draw interest and we would have some early mentions of it. But it appears in public only at rhe court of emperor Rudolf, over 150 years after its creation.
Another possibility is that it was a fake made for Rudolf, but it's another story.
By the way, I have recently learnt that we have similar bias with open-air folk museums that exibit different kind of peasant houses. When you watch these houses you may get false impression that they are quite pretty and spacious and that peasant's life wasn't that bad. The problem is that houses which survived generally belonged to rich peasants. They were prettiest, biggest, most sturdy and best kept of. And all these dirty, collapsing, rat-infested shacks where most people live simply didn't survive.
My feeling is that Voynich Manuscript immediately after creation was something very private and homemade so it didn't have standards of prefessional manuscript.. And in the early days it wasn't famous and known, if it belonged to some king or some abbey then it would probably draw interest and we would have some early mentions of it. But it appears in public only at rhe court of emperor Rudolf, over 150 years after its creation.
Another possibility is that it was a fake made for Rudolf, but it's another story.