Masterpiece?

[ReneZ]

and had your  B.A.  at 18 and your M.A. at 20  (these are averages of course). Then you went into a job  or started wiith something like medicine and took your doctorate. Accessability of books:  You either bought them ,  if you were rich or copied them or used one of the existing libraries as I said above.

No problem here, I would consider that adult.
However, you would have to be quite rich to own books.

The main problem I have with 'college notes' are the questions: "where was this material tought?" and "why do we not have similar examples".

Known manuscripts with college notes have recognisable material.

[-JKP-]

Deception in the Middle Ages...

This is a side-note (and the article is behind a login wall) but this is an article about how references were "coded" with careful hints so that the recipient might get a different impression about the person carrying the recommendation than might be apparent from the words on the surface:

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Edit, addition: I just found another copy on JSTOR:

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I don't know if this gives any insight on why things might be encoded in the Middle Ages but at least it provides some insight into how they thought and how they dealt with uncomfortable social interactions.

[Helmut Winkler]

[quote='Helmut Winkler' pid='39119' dateline='1595957031']

and had your  B.A.  at 18 and your M.A. at 20  (these are averages of course). Then you went into a job  or started wiith something like medicine and took your doctorate. Accessability of books:  You either bought them ,  if you were rich or copied them or used one of the existing libraries as I said above.

No problem here, I would consider that adult.

However, you would have to be quite rich to own books.

Most of the students were quite well off, they came from  rich families or had income from ecclestial offices or were members of Orders. And you could copy books yourself. Thea story of the poor medieval student is  more of lese a myth



The main problem I have with 'college notes' are the questions: "where was this material tought?" and "why do we not have similar examples".


I never talked about  college notes, what  I meant was Laborbücher/lab  books, the notes you  take along your work. This means the content can be original, but I think in the case of the Herbal it is quite obvious

[Scarecrow]

Masterpiece in what way? No from artistic point of view, not really a scribal masterpiece either..

"Whoever created the Voynich MS had significant skills and clear knowledge of medical / philosophical documents."
They must have had skills, but it is also possible that their skills were unrelated to what they were documenting.
What VMS demonstrates is writer(s) had access to medical/cosmological/philosophical artifacts, not that they had skills in those subjects.

As in this thread there are many open opnions, here's one more how I'd consider VMS a masterpiece.

Take the group of persons - a guid, family, congregation, secret society, whatever, who had access to manuscripts and artifacts in different languages and wanted to collect the most interesting (for them) in a single book, not written with many languages but just one. So they went to create an "esperanto of the 15th Century" that unifies those languages and scripts, and to be complete and easier to write, they created also a new set of glyphs and structure to support it.

In this case it would be a Masterpiece indeed.

[Ruby Novacna]

The manuscript may be an attempt to create a universal alphabet to transcribe the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Old Slavic and, perhaps, other languages.  The peculiarities of the different basic alphabets would be expressed by variants of the potency letters and composite letters such as "sh".

If this idea is correct, it would be normal to find (and search) words from different languages in the text.