A random rant about the VMS

[Rafal]

Lack of references in other manuscripts can be in fact frustrating. Sometimes I browse online manuscripts too, hoping to hit the jackpot with some reference but no success so far 

Let me share a few observations.

- it is said that only about 10% of old manuscripts survived. If VM author was using some references (and he almost certainly did) they are probably lost. What we find from time to time is not his reference book but its cousins, sometimes far cousins

- most of manuscripts that survived are religious. People just cared for them more, treated with bigger respect are were more reluctant to throw them to a bin. Based on it, we could think that medieval people were extremely pious but it's not entirely true. It is rather a kind of survival bias: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

- things that aren't religious may have few "cousins". How many manuscripts about chess have you seen? I have seen recently my first one:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.


Is it rare? Yes, it is. But is it weird? Does it make it weird that you cannot find references in Psalters and Book of Hours?

- VM may be weird because it was probably never intended to be a single manuscript. It contains too much different stuff for a single work. If a medieval work was a herbal then it didn't have bathing ladies. If it was about bathing then it didn't have Zodiac signs and so on. Voynich manuscript has it all together.

But as Lisa Fagin Davies suggested recently it was probably orginally unbound. So it is possibly a compilation of several independent works. Therefore you shouldn't search for another manuscript with similar structure