No text, but a visual code

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I didn't say read the text, but rather interpret the images in the Voynich manuscript.

That is what I meant. (Sorry, there was a "not" missing in my post. Baresch was not able to read the images beyond "looks like medical stuff".)

In the early 15th century, educated people would have known how to do so. Two hundred years later, when Baresch lived, it might have been a bit more difficult for them.

 

Was it so?  By the early 1600s the "scientific" thought was still mostly that of the Middle Age -- alchemy, Aristotle, Paracelsus, Ptolemy, ... Scholars would still read books written in the 1400s or earlier.   Those "classics" would lose their relevance only in the 1800s or so.

All the best, --stolfi