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Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
- Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
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RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
LisaFaginDavis > 29-09-2025, 05:05 PM
It actually matters quite a lot if the manuscript was created by one person vs. a community. If multiple scribes wrote the text (which doesn't mean each scribe is also an AUTHOR...that remains to be seen), underlying meaning becomes much more likely and the function of the manuscript can be interpreted differently as well. Again, I addressed this at length in my Toronto lecture. -
RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
Jorge_Stolfi > 29-09-2025, 10:49 PM
(29-09-2025, 01:39 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For me it's very obvious there there are at least 2 persons involved. Compare for example You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f31r.
You mean these parags?
Frankly the handwritings don't look different to me. There are differences in glyphs like r, n between the two pages, but there are the same differences within each page. What detail specifically do you think stands out?
The lines on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are more straight and parallel, but that could be the result of something as trivial as the Scribe working on his scribal desk versus he working on the counter at Starbucks, rushing to meet the day's quota...
On the other hand, I cannot avoid noticing the water stain along the top edge of f31r, and how it partly washed out the text there. Iron-gall ink? Ha!...
Quote:On the other hand I wonder is this question about the number of scribes really helpful in solving the manuscript. What would it give us if we know for sure that it was made by 1,2 or 5 people?
The number of scribes makes no difference if one's "origin theory" assumes that the author and Scribe(s) were different persons, and that the Author alone understood the language/code.
However, that issue is very important if, for instance, one assumes that the VMS was meant to be an "information transmission tool" between two or more people who knew the language/code and wrote it themselves.
By the way, I find it disconcerting that people dismiss the Chinese Theory or the Retracing Hypothesis as "hallucinations", but accept pacifically the idea that there was some Medieval society or cult that devised the Voynichese "code", created a totally original cosmology and medicine, and set out to write down that esoteric knowledge in an encrypted encyclopedia...
All the best, --jorge -
RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
oshfdk > 29-09-2025, 11:06 PM
(29-09-2025, 10:49 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way, I find it disconcerting that people dismiss the Chinese Theory or the Retracing Hypothesis as "hallucinations", but accept pacifically the idea that there was some Medieval society or cult that devised the Voynichese "code", created a totally original cosmology and medicine, and set out to write down that esoteric knowledge in an encrypted encyclopedia...
Assuming this is a cipher and there is a meaningful plaintext, I won't be surprised if the topic of the manuscript has nothing to do with cosmology, medicine or plants. If the text for some reason demanded complete enciphering not leaving a single word in plain view, I think it's likely that the images should have the same level of obfuscation one way or the other. So, maybe we can't really use the images to identify the topics.
Then this could be a society or a cult, yes, but the document they chose to encipher would more likely be of political, iconoclastic or otherwise taboo nature, I think.
On the other hand, there has been a recent discussion here about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. So, who knows, I guess it's fairly hard to estimate what was possible and what wasn't. -
RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
Torsten > 30-09-2025, 06:45 PM
(29-09-2025, 02:01 AM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Torsten, as I have told you on many occasions, Archetype is only a tool. It was just a way for me to organize my thoughts. I can't share it, because it was a bespoke databank that lived on an old computer whose operating system is now out of date and unbootable. But that doesn't matter. Ultimately, my work depends on my own experience and expertise. Archetype didn't do the work for me. It's not a neural network. It's just a tool. You are welcome to disagree with my conclusions, as is anyone, as paleography is a subjective methodology. After thirty years of studying hundreds, if not thousands, of medieval manuscripts, cataloguing and describing them, publishing five books and dozens of articles, elected by my peers to the International Committee on Latin Paleography, my expertise speaks for itself.
Dear Lisa,
I am fully aware of what Archetype is—I maintain my own instance on my computer. See the following screenshot:
One of its advantages, in fact, is that it can be deployed as a Docker container, which makes it relatively straightforward to preserve and share between systems. As long as the underlying files are available to you, the entire environment can be copied and restored on a new computer. If helpful, I would be glad to provide you with a copy of my own instance.
That said, my first point concerns the lack of documentation. In your publications you present results, but the underlying evidence remains inaccessible to other researchers. Without access to the working materials, it is impossible to verify or reproduce the analysis. Independent scrutiny requires more than an appeal to authority; it requires access to data.
My second point concerns the scale of the material used. The screenshots of your Archetype project indicate that only 44 of 225 pages—roughly 20% of the manuscript—were uploaded for analysis. This limitation is never clearly stated in your 2020 paper, nor is it specified which pages were included. The omission is significant, since paleographical comparisons may be sensitive to manuscript section. For instance, when I compare instances of iin between the Herbal A (e.g., f2r) and the Pharma section (e.g., f99r), I find consistent differences in the length of the final stroke for iin.
See the screenshots for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f99r:
Since you attribute both the Herbal A and Pharma sections to the same scribe, it would be important to clarify which specific folios from the Pharma section you examined in your analysis.
In short, without open access to the underlying documentation, your conclusions cannot be independently verified. With so few research details available, it is impossible to validate or even to assess your results.
My third point concerns your assertion that Scribes 1, 3, and 5 render the k-glyph with a single stroke. However, there is clear evidence that these scribes executed the k-glyph using two distinct strokes. Your failure to address this evidence is, in itself, highly significant.
BTW: Scribe 1 also renders the t-glyph using two distinct strokes (see for instance oltchey on f1v):
Best regards,
Torsten -
RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
LisaFaginDavis > 30-09-2025, 07:55 PM
I examined every glyph on every leaf. I'm afraid you're just going to have to believe me even if you don't accept my findings. -
RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
Torsten > 30-09-2025, 09:31 PM
(30-09-2025, 07:55 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I examined every glyph on every leaf. I'm afraid you're just going to have to believe me even if you don't accept my findings.
So, if I understand you correctly: after examining every glyph on every leaf, the only significant distinction you identify is the variation in the length of the final flourish of the iin-glyph group?
To me, this seems less like evidence for multiple scribes and more like an argument against such a hypothesis.
Anyway, didn't you wrote in your paper from 2020: "I initially annotated several different characters, but, after spending some time looking closely at different glyphs, I decided to focus initially on the single-loop gallows glyph that, in v101, is arbitrarily called “h” (the substitutions rarely have a semantic correspondence to the relevant glyph but are for convenience only). Once the annotations were complete, I used the faceted search to study the annotated [h] characters by comparing unknown hands with known samples such as Scribe 1 and Scribe ⒉" and later "My preliminary results identify five hands ..." (Lisa Fagin Davis 2020, p. 2)?
If you truly examined every glyph on every leaf, why does your paper refer to preliminary results and why did you wrote only about the k-glyph as well as the iin-glyph group only? This seems inconsistent with the claim of having conducted an exhaustive analysis. -
RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
Rafal > 30-09-2025, 10:21 PM
Quote:For me it's very obvious there there are at least 2 persons involved. Compare for example You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f31r.
You mean these parags?
No, I mean no paragraphs but two different pages:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In my opinion the handwriting never changes on a single page. -
RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
LisaFaginDavis > 30-09-2025, 10:28 PM
No, that is definitely not what I am arguing. It's just that [n] turns out to be a useful diagnostic for quickly determining which scribe one is looking at. This is true for just about any kind of script...there are always one or two graphemes that are particularly useful for distinguishing between scribes. It just so happens that, for Voynichese, [n] and [k] (and [f] to a lesser extent) are useful diagnostic glyphs, along with the general aspect of Scribes 1 and 2 in particular. Many of the glyphs are paleographically useless, such as [a], [i], and [o], so it is not worth the time to describe them.
In 12th-century Germany, for example, you want to look at [&], [g], and the question mark. In 14th-century England, [a] is particularly useful. In 15th-c. Italy, the Tironian [et] abbreviation is a good diagnostic, among other letters. But of course you want to consider more graphemes in your research. It just isn't worth the ink, paper, and time to describe them if they do not move the argument forward. They only add static and noise. A concise and effective academic argument focuses on salient details, which is what I have done.
Rafal - in my view, there is only one page with more than one hand: f. 115r, where the top five paragraphs are by Scribe 2. -
RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
Jorge_Stolfi > 30-09-2025, 10:31 PM
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RE: Why do we think the Voynich manuscript has multiple scribes?
Jorge_Stolfi > 30-09-2025, 10:58 PM
(30-09-2025, 10:21 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.No, I mean no paragraphs but two different pages:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
OOPS, sorry sorry, I clipped one of the parags from the wrong page. Here they are again:
f30r:
f31r:
They do look very different, but looking closely you should see that the main difference is that many glyphs on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. have been retraced using a wider pen, and the others are fainter. If you ignore those thicker glyphs and the difference in stroke weight of the others, the difference between the two pages is much smaller. I, for one, cannot describe it...
All the best, --jorge