RE: History of the study
Diane > 13-11-2018, 04:18 PM
-JKP -
I absolutely agree with you that most Voynich theories - purporting to be 'history'-narratives - would never pass peer review. (i.e. by historians specialising in the period's political, economic and social history).
So I gather you agree with my proposal? The forum should have a separate heading for those sort of discussions?
I know, of course, that Rene has a very big website but forums are more neutral spaces and here we can pose research questions and debate older ideas - not possible on a website, and a bit awkward on a blog.
Here are a couple of recent questions I would have put on a thread of that sort today, if it were there to post to:
Q: After 1912 who was the first person NOT to automatically repeat Wilfrid's assertion about a 'cipher-text'?
Also - if that was Currier, do other members think he was breaking away from the old 'cipher-text' idea, or that he was contributing to 'cracking the code'? [Note - an old idea isn't necessarily a wrong idea].
Q: Was Jorge Stolfi the first person to have asked and formally investigated the obvious question for an unknown script and language (viz "is it a foreign language?").
Q: Does there still exist any formal research, or written opinion, which would explain the long-held 'English' provenance? Has anyone considered the reasons for which that provenance was first abandoned? Was it just a case of shoving other opinions aside the better to push an agenda or theory?
Q: Given that Jacques Guy publicly admitted his hoax, and in the same article to the Times Educational Supplement that he could find no flaw in Stolfi's statistics and conclusions, why was Stolfi driven from the study ad.hominem?
Anyway, questions of such sort are avenues to enquiry, and can't be fixed with one authoritative assertion, so blog-comments wouldn't be the right place for them either.