(25-12-2025, 12:26 AM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It has so many coincidental similarities with the Voynich MS that it is easy to imagine (hypothesis alert) that both manuscripts would have been in the interest of similar groups of people, and may have travelled similar paths:
They have the same size.
They were created around the same time.
A later owner wrote a cipher alphabet on the first page (ciphers don't usually go with herbals).
Florence 106 was created in N. Italy but spent some time in N. France before coming back. (This is entirely possible, but not known with any certainty for the Voynich MS).
I can almost imagine someone having seen it or heard about it requesting a version for themselves, and the scribes having to memorise it quickly before giving it back, and that's why it looks so familiar and yet the VMS seems a slightly off facsimile... The rest of the Voynich manuscript in my view is nothing more than a commonplace book, with some De Balneis, some Sacrobosco, some Antidatorium, and some standard recipes like the ones towards the middle/back of this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. ...
If it weren't for the text encoding (which given Fontana's influence in northern Italy at the time is also perhaps not so strange) , I'm not convinced it would be that special at all... And the fact that it's a unicom is simply an accident of fate... Saying that, there are also other surviving compendia like Cambridge University Library MS Dd.10.68 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which to me at least proves that in the intellectual millieu of northern Italy, plenty of people had time and resources to build these things, and experiment.