14-09-2026, 11:58 AM
I don't think the smoking gun exists. You would have to be extremely lucky and it'll happen by accident most likely. I think the best we can do is try and nail down a source ecology and get everyone to agree it. I think given the number of different opinions out there, that itself is a challenge. For example, if I said the following, which GPT has summarised for me based on a year of work on this, I'd want everyone to agree with it. That would actually be progress. It doesn't solve it in an absolute sense, but it would be a framework at least:
"MS408 was probably produced c.1415–1445 as a deliberately planned, modular scholarly manuscript by a small coordinated group working within a shared textual/graphic convention. Its production was organised unusually strongly around the physical bifolium: scribal ownership repeatedly follows conjoint parchment sheets rather than normal sequential copying through a gathering, a pattern that now looks genuinely atypical against structured contemporary controls.
The surviving codex is therefore better understood as an assembly of separately executed physical task-packets than as an ordinary serially copied book.
Its parchment provides an independent material signal. The near-equalisation of hair and flesh sides is substantially closer to late-medieval German/HRE preparation practice than to ordinary Italian parchment, while the best historical mechanism evidence shows that such parchment could enter northern-Italian book production through transalpine suppliers, preparers, cartolai and migrant craftsmen. Thus the manuscript need not have been physically written north of the Alps: a northern-Italian production environment using transalpine-prepared or transalpine-style stock is a coherent and increasingly attractive model.
The intellectual content appears compiled rather than derived from one exemplar: medical, botanical, pharmaceutical, astronomical and cosmographical materials draw on both Italian and Germanic/transalpine traditions. Illustration and colouring were at least partly separate production operations from writing. The comparatively planned execution and sparse authorial revision argue against the surviving codex being a rough notebook; a prior accumulated scholarly corpus followed by organised reproduction is a better fit.
The strongest social model is therefore a small scholarly or academic circle—possibly student-associated, possibly a private practitioner/scholar network—working under an organiser or shared project convention. Padua/Pavia and the wider Veneto–Lombardy academic corridor currently provide the richest exact-period ecology for that combination of transalpine personnel/material movement and northern-Italian medical/astronomical culture, but neither the city nor the social identity of the group is identified.
Voynichese itself remains causally unidentified. It is clearly a highly constrained shared writing system with strong local production state, but current evidence cannot distinguish meaningful notation, cipher/realisation, exemplar-guided regularisation, or sufficiently sophisticated generated text. Provenance before the early seventeenth century likewise remains unproven"
Now if I provide a body evidence that objectively supports that, then that would be progress....
"MS408 was probably produced c.1415–1445 as a deliberately planned, modular scholarly manuscript by a small coordinated group working within a shared textual/graphic convention. Its production was organised unusually strongly around the physical bifolium: scribal ownership repeatedly follows conjoint parchment sheets rather than normal sequential copying through a gathering, a pattern that now looks genuinely atypical against structured contemporary controls.
The surviving codex is therefore better understood as an assembly of separately executed physical task-packets than as an ordinary serially copied book.
Its parchment provides an independent material signal. The near-equalisation of hair and flesh sides is substantially closer to late-medieval German/HRE preparation practice than to ordinary Italian parchment, while the best historical mechanism evidence shows that such parchment could enter northern-Italian book production through transalpine suppliers, preparers, cartolai and migrant craftsmen. Thus the manuscript need not have been physically written north of the Alps: a northern-Italian production environment using transalpine-prepared or transalpine-style stock is a coherent and increasingly attractive model.
The intellectual content appears compiled rather than derived from one exemplar: medical, botanical, pharmaceutical, astronomical and cosmographical materials draw on both Italian and Germanic/transalpine traditions. Illustration and colouring were at least partly separate production operations from writing. The comparatively planned execution and sparse authorial revision argue against the surviving codex being a rough notebook; a prior accumulated scholarly corpus followed by organised reproduction is a better fit.
The strongest social model is therefore a small scholarly or academic circle—possibly student-associated, possibly a private practitioner/scholar network—working under an organiser or shared project convention. Padua/Pavia and the wider Veneto–Lombardy academic corridor currently provide the richest exact-period ecology for that combination of transalpine personnel/material movement and northern-Italian medical/astronomical culture, but neither the city nor the social identity of the group is identified.
Voynichese itself remains causally unidentified. It is clearly a highly constrained shared writing system with strong local production state, but current evidence cannot distinguish meaningful notation, cipher/realisation, exemplar-guided regularisation, or sufficiently sophisticated generated text. Provenance before the early seventeenth century likewise remains unproven"
Now if I provide a body evidence that objectively supports that, then that would be progress....