The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text

[dexdex]

I tend to think we spend too much time "psychologizing" the Voynich composer, but for once I would like to hear your thoughts on that. Do you have a sense of why someone would make a text this way? I get it is ultimately unfalsifiable and I don't think your paper---which I think is one of the better attempts I've seen to grapple with the word families---lives or dies on it, but I just cannot get my head around why someone would create this artifact with autocitation and drawings.

You're right that the question of motivation is ultimately speculative, and I appreciate that you recognize the paper doesn't depend on answering it. Still, I think the question "why would someone create this?" becomes less puzzling once we separate two things that often get conflated: the motivation for creating the manuscript as an object, and the method by which the text was generated.



On the method, there is no mystery at all. The Gaskell and Bowern (2022) experiment shows that self-citation is not a strategy someone consciously adopts — it is what inevitably happens when a person produces extended pseudo-text. Participants asked to generate just 100 words of meaningless text spontaneously began copying and modifying their own output, simply because inventing genuinely new forms is cognitively exhausting (Bowern & Lindemann, 2021). The Voynich Manuscript contains roughly 38,000 tokens. At that scale, self-citation isn't a choice — it's a cognitive default. Whatever the scribe's original intention, the text generation process would have converged on copying and modifying previously written words simply because of the volume required. D'Imperio (1978) already observed that someone with the intention of producing dummy text "would naturally tend to repeat parts of neighboring strings with various small changes." The scribe need not have known they were doing it.



On the motivation for the object itself, that question will most likely remain unanswerable unless additional historical documents surface. As Timm and Schinner (2020) note, "probably, the author was undergoing the substantial effort of creating the VMS in order to gain something. Not necessarily money for selling the book, although (because the algorithm can be executed by an experienced scribe almost as fast as writing down the text) the effort even for a 'classical fraud' now appears more reasonable. Perhaps it was about gaining reputation by possessing a mysterious book that no one would ever be able to decipher (simply because there really is nothing to decipher in it)" (p. 16).



Personally, I find the idea of a forgery intended for sale less convincing than the alternative: that the manuscript served to impress. Consider a physician who could claim that his superior knowledge derived from a mysterious book — one filled with illustrations of plants, astronomical diagrams, and human bodies, written in a learned-looking script that no one could read. In a fifteenth-century context, the possession of such a book would have conveyed authority and esoteric expertise. No one could verify what it "said," and that was precisely the point. The sheer craftsmanship — the vellum, the illustrations, the consistent calligraphic hand — would have reinforced the impression of a genuine scholarly work, while the impenetrable script would have discouraged anyone from questioning its content.



The illustrations, on this reading, don't require a separate explanation. They are part of making the object convincing as a medical or philosophical reference work. And the text doesn't need to encode information — it needs only to look as though it does.

I wrote on this hypothesis here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I think it also neatly explains why someone would make a tome of such magnitude filled with gibberish: they started with just a few folios that were herbal in nature, as the quack herbals of the day tended to appear. then it grew, as the scam became more and more successful. At some point, other sections were added to make it more mystical, but no real content was added.

The order you suggest certainly squares away with this hypothesis: start like a dime-a-dozen herbal with herbal and pharma stuff. Then someone mentions the Zodiac and astronomy. But whoops! now your herbal has too little herbalism, so you add more herbal stuff. And maybe someone suggests reproductive health and baths so you draw a bunch of nymphs.

Whatever the exact motivations, I think you're bang on with how it was created and why. I do wonder about scribal hand differences, though...