I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500

[99b86aeea]

Thank you all. I already knew Taccola's work, but Martini's is the only one where I saw the columns (as shown in my first post above), that look like the multi-level containers in the Voynich manuscript. Of course he might have copied them from another manuscript, too. I cannot prove that he didn't.

I will quickly try to respond to RobGea's question concerning an example encryption/decryption method, assuming that we are indeed looking at an Alberti-type disk.

I propose a disk like this (sorry for the bad quality):

   

Of course, I placed the Voynich characters in the inner disk in a completely arbitrary manner, just for illustration purposes. 

In this system, we could encode "LOREM IPSUM" in such a manner:

   

Recall that in my first post, I introduced the gallows characters as a manner to rotate the disk, by as many positions as there are crossings in the calligraphy. In this case, there are 3, so we rotate the inner disk 3 positions clockwise.

I have a few remarks about this system, which I invite you to consider not as a "solution" or even a "suggestion", but merely a bad example, which, nevertheless produces Voynichy looking text.

• Every phrase, and in fact every letter, can be encoded in more than one way by using a different gallows character to indicate a different spin of the disk.
  
• In the middle of a word, one can decide to spin the disk again, in order to further confuse the decrypter. In such a case, the disk would be rotated relative to the current position, by the number that is represented by the gallow. We see this occurence many times in the Voynich manuscript, where a gallow character is sitting inside a word.
  
• There could be some "internal convention" that all the scribes had to follow, such as, after "aiin", you must start a new word, i.e., insert a space. This can also be the case before every "qo" character.
  
• The disk would contain groupings of letters, as in my example above, instead of individual letters. This would account for multiple "word repetitions", as it were, in the text. For instance, "daiin daiin" could simply be "CC", if the disk is appropriately rotated beforehand.
  
• For encoding numbers, perhaps a secondary disk would be used, which would be indicated by a special charater before a gallow. An example, in the "labellese" section would be the "o" letter.
  
• Finding a correct combination of tokens for the inner disk, i.e., one that produces actual Voynich text, seems to be a hard problem. Perhaps there is a computationally efficient manner to brute force such a combination, or some linguistic clues that call fill in some of the positions intelligently. Either way, this appears to be at this time unfeasible.
  

I hope this makes sense. Of course, I could be terribly wrong about all this. Furthermore, if the manuscript predates Alberti, then this hypothesis could quickly be thrown out. I am assuming af course, that it is either contemporaneous with, or post Alberti.

Thank you very much for your attention.