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Was the VM a failure?
- Was the VM a failure?
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RE: Was the VM a failure?
bi3mw > 26-06-2025, 05:09 PM
(26-06-2025, 04:55 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What is the use of a plant illustration if it won't let the reader identify the plant?
Well, the insiders will have known which plants, derived from the text, are (abstractly) depicted. Everyone else is out of luck
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RE: Was the VM a failure?
oshfdk > 26-06-2025, 05:22 PM
(26-06-2025, 05:09 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, the insiders will know which plants, derived from the text, are pictured. Everyone else is out of luck
I'm not sure I understand the use case. They will have a picture of something that is definitely not a dandelion, but the text will say that you have to assume it was a dandelion. Why have the picture at all? -
RE: Was the VM a failure?
bi3mw > 26-06-2025, 05:59 PM
(26-06-2025, 05:22 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not sure I understand the use case. They will have a picture of something that is definitely not a dandelion, but the text will say that you have to assume it was a dandelion. Why have the picture at all?
Because pictures of plants, if you know what they are supposed to represent, can contain a certain amount of information about their structure (roots, stems, leaves, flowers). Even in "regular" herbal manuscripts, the illustrations are often very difficult to recognize, even without intentional abstraction. For example, I wouldn't trust myself to recognize most of the plants in the Circa Instans tradition in nature. But the medieval reader had nothing better, he often had to orientate himself by a single characteristic feature of a plant (e.g. roots or flowers). The rest was then more or less irrelevant. So there can be no question of a realistic depiction anyway. -
RE: Was the VM a failure?
R. Sale > 26-06-2025, 09:24 PM
A couple of botanical details might tickle the gray cells of those who have taken note. The number of VMs plants that have leaf margins based on variations of a nebuly line pattern and the number of VMs flowers that have blue and white alternation are examples of context that was carried over to later parts of the VMs. This requires a bit of heraldic "insider" knowledge to define the word 'nebuly', both its denotation and connotation.
Consider that a novice investigator may not be familiar with the term 'nebuly", while the VMs artist clearly was, and has demonstrated such with the example in the VMs cosmos. This is something that the VMs artist does, s/he makes use of detailed information that has since been obscured by the dust of history.
That use of historical info, however, is not straight forward. The VMs cosmos has no planetary spheres. The VMs cosmos is disguised and composed of a pairing of two disparate parts. It's an intentional oxymoron.
Intentional duality and the alternation of blue and white lead on to VMs White Aries and the Genoese gambit. -
RE: Was the VM a failure?
magnesium > 26-06-2025, 10:54 PM
(26-06-2025, 03:32 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I wouldn't say that the VMS was a failure. The crucial question seems to be whether or not it was ever intended for distribution. Encryption without any reference to the method in the manuscript itself (as in other encrypted manuscripts) suggests that it was not intended for distribution in the first place. There is still the possibility that there were clues on the missing pages of the manuscript, but I think this is rather unlikely. In my opinion, it can therefore be assumed that the encryption was generally intended to make it impossible for others to read the manuscript. The use of the VMS was therefore reserved for a few insiders. The question arises as to what was so explosive in terms of content that it was thought necessary to conceal it. In any case, the illustrations do not suggest such an explosive nature. On the contrary, if the content is related to the illustrations, which is to be assumed, then we are dealing with rather trivial topics. One could assume that the encryption was more of an end in itself, a kind of intellectual “finger exercise”. So it does not seem surprising that the (experimental) method did not spread further, as it would have had to be disclosed.
I'm inclined to agree. If the VMS is a ciphertext—which is not confirmed, but is historically well-grounded—there is no reason to expect that it was meant to be a cipher meant for wider uptake à la Alberti or Trithemius. Depending on the creators' assessment of how dangerous or explosive the contents were, making a cumbersome one-off cipher for themselves to ensure the impossibility of other people reading it could have been worth it.
On the note of a "finger exercise," I have sometimes entertained what I call the "Skunk Works hypothesis": that the VMS represents a deliberate, high-investment exercise to create a state-of-the-art cipher relative to its peers, but the resulting cipher proved clunky enough to use that it was not adopted by the cipher's benefactor. On the balance, this hypothesis is almost certainly wrong; you don't need to make an entire encrypted manuscript to prove your point when only a few encrypted letters would suffice. But it is fun, for much the same reason as the "Ocean's 11 hypothesis" (aka the collaborative-hoax-as-elaborate-scam hypothesis)—it invites compelling narrative. -
RE: Was the VM a failure?
Torsten > 26-06-2025, 11:14 PM
(26-06-2025, 02:31 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regardless of the intention behind the VM, what we can say for sure is that it's creation process wasn't a success story that was frequently repeated.
In some cipher systems, especially those based on substitution or transposition, "filler" sequences are deliberately inserted to obscure patterns or irregularities in the plaintext. These fillers make the message harder to decipher without the correct key.
A historical example comes from World War II:
"These practice messages contained a short text at the beginning and were filled out to average length with dummy text."
(You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
Generating such dummy text by reusing fragments with small alterations was a practical, low-effort way to produce large amounts of plausible-looking content, without the mental strain of inventing every sequence from scratch.
D'Imperio (1978, p. 31) describes this as a natural approach for generating pseudo-text:
"The scribe, faced with the task of thinking up a large number of such dummy sequences, would naturally tend to repeat parts of neighboring strings with various small changes and additions to fill out the line until the next message-bearing word or phrase."
Note, also designers sometimes modify Lorem Ipsum text by copying nearby words and changing a few letters to create longer filler text that looks structured but is ultimately meaningless.
Today, of course, we have automated Lorem Ipsum-style text generators that serve the same purpose — producing structured, filler text that looks convincing but carries no real meaning:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -
RE: Was the VM a failure?
ReneZ > 27-06-2025, 02:27 AM
(26-06-2025, 04:55 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(26-06-2025, 04:30 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would assume abstraction rather than deception here. It was probably intended that the plants in the plant section, for example, cannot be assigned to real plants with certainty. Nevertheless, the first section is a plant section as can be seen in many other manuscripts. This is true even if the plants in the VMS cannot be clearly assigned to any known tradition. It seems as if the author wanted to prevent plant names from being deduced from the coded text ( usually first "word" ? ) at any point.
What is the use of a plant illustration if it won't let the reader identify the plant?
It is a very common modern misconception that illustrations are used to clarify things.
Certainly, that is the case nowadays.
Especially in early herbals this was NOT the case. Minta Collins is very clear about this. Highly recommended reading.
Initially, this was done to beautify the book, or make it more interesting. The people making the drawings were not the physicians who actually knew what the plant looked like. They did not even realise what are the plant properties that help to identify them.
This last point was included in one classical work, by Theophrastus. This was only intruduced in Europe in Padua around the time of the Voynich MS creation, but few people could read the Greek. Translations appeared later, and plant drawings that were good enough to recognise the plant started to appear in the 16th century in the times of Brunfels, Bock and Fuchs. -
RE: Was the VM a failure?
ReneZ > 27-06-2025, 02:40 AM
Indeed, we do not know what was the purpose of the MS.
If its main purpose was to draw attention, appear interesting and mysterious, then it should be considered successful, even as we do not know how many people will have seen it in its early days.
If it was to convey knowledge, it could not have been a greater failure. -
RE: Was the VM a failure?
Koen G > 27-06-2025, 06:48 AM
(27-06-2025, 02:40 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If it was to convey knowledge, it could not have been a greater failure.
I guess that depends on the envisioned timeframe. Maybe people were merrily reading it for over a century, when it was still in its original environment. -
RE: Was the VM a failure?
oshfdk > 27-06-2025, 09:05 AM
(27-06-2025, 02:27 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is a very common modern misconception that illustrations are used to clarify things.
Certainly, that is the case nowadays.
Especially in early herbals this was NOT the case. Minta Collins is very clear about this. Highly recommended reading.
Initially, this was done to beautify the book, or make it more interesting. The people making the drawings were not the physicians who actually knew what the plant looked like. They did not even realise what are the plant properties that help to identify them.
This last point was included in one classical work, by Theophrastus. This was only intruduced in Europe in Padua around the time of the Voynich MS creation, but few people could read the Greek. Translations appeared later, and plant drawings that were good enough to recognise the plant started to appear in the 16th century in the times of Brunfels, Bock and Fuchs.
This is interesting. So, it shouldn't be a big surprise then that the plants in the Voynich MS are hard to identify? I'm not really into image analysis, in popular accounts about the Voynich MS "mysterious unknown plants" seem to be one of the first talking points. But in reality, this is not something out of the ordinary for a XV century MS?