Cost to produce the Voynich manuscript

[Sephardi_Genius]

Hi everyone, new user, got interested in the Voynich manuscript recently as a result of watching Koen's Youtube videos 

I was wondering if anyone could point me to a source on the price of vellum in late medieval Central Europe? I have oscillated my thoughts on whether the manuscript is an authentic piece of writing or a hoax designed to be sold as an esoteric/mysterious text, and one of the things that I have been thinking about is the cost to manufacture it. We have about 240 surviving pages, but it was probably closer to ~270, and it was written on vellum with colored inks and includes the hands of multiple people, with many sources I can find online saying five people. Needless to say, assuming it was designed to be sold as a bit of fakery, this seems like a lot of work even if you assume everybody that was working on it was doing it for free. 

Obviously we know that Rudolf II bought it for 600 ducats, which is an insane amount of money for a book, but that's at least 150 years after it was likely made, and I'm curious about what it likely would've cost the authors to make in the first place. My thinking is that if it had been made up by a group of broke university students or someone else looking to made a quick buck by copying a bunch of stuff that looks like a book (or a bunch of books) they'd seen earlier, they either wouldn't have had enough money to make it in the first place, or wouldn't have needed the money they could get by selling it, especially given how much you time and effort it must've cost to write all this stuff down in a way that it somewhat resembles a natural language or cipher. Anyways, thanks for the help, and I hope I haven't bothered your community with my silly question too much 

[pjburkshire]

Obviously we know that Rudolf II bought it for 600 ducats, 

That is a claim.  We do not know if that claim was true.  I suspect that the Voynich Manuscript was never owned by Emperor Rudolf II but that the claim was invented to make the manuscript seem more important/valuable.

[Bluetoes101]

Obviously we know that Rudolf II bought it for 600 ducats, 

That is a claim.  We do not know if that claim was true.  I suspect that the Voynich Manuscript was never owned by Emperor Rudolf II but that the claim was invented to make the manuscript seem more important/valuable.

By a guy giving it away for free.

[Bluetoes101]

In answer to your initial question, I trusts Marco P's opinion entirely and this was his opinion 2 years ago. It may have changed now, I don't know, but hopefully it is useful to answer your question -

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[Sephardi_Genius]

In answer to your initial question, I trusts Marco P's opinion entirely and this was his opinion 2 years ago. It may have changed now, I don't know, but hopefully it is useful to answer your question -

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Thanks for answer! I'm surprised by how cheap it is, I had always heard that calfskin vellum was expensive, but the modern equivalent of a single pay period doesn't seem like that much (especially if the payoff is even 1% of what Rudolf is alleged to have paid for it). I guess all the costs would've had to go to teaching all the scribes how to write in the glyphs.

[Sephardi_Genius]

Obviously we know that Rudolf II bought it for 600 ducats, 

That is a claim.  We do not know if that claim was true.  I suspect that the Voynich Manuscript was never owned by Emperor Rudolf II but that the claim was invented to make the manuscript seem more important/valuable.

Just out of curiosity, what are you basing your suspicions on? Obviously, hearsay can travel fast, but the fact that the Marci letter was written at least within living memory of the claimed events and there does some to be some indirect corroboration in Rudolf's records that he paid Widemann in the rough amount claimed does seem to indicate some authenticity to the claim. I can understand casting doubt on the idea that the 600 florins were the price paid just for the VMS, because Rudolf's records indicate books (plural), but I feel comfortable chalking up the discrepancy between the price paid for all the books vs. just the VMS and ducats vs. florins as attributable to the temporal distance between the events and the letters and playing telephone between speakers. The signature of Horcicky that appears under UV analysis makes it somewhat undeniable that it would've at least been around the court of Prague. It still seems reasonable to me to disbelieve the claim (its believable it could just be marketing) but I'm wondering if you have any specific material or analytic evidence you're relying on that I haven't touched on?

[pjburkshire]

Just out of curiosity, what are you basing your suspicions on?

It's not important.  Enjoy your Voynich Manuscript journey.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

the fact that the Marci letter was written at least within living memory of the claimed events and there does some to be some indirect corroboration in Rudolf's records that he paid Widemann in the rough amount claimed does seem to indicate some authenticity to the claim.

In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Marci wrote
   

• D. Dr Raphael, tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, the King of Bohemia, told me that said book had belonged to Emperor Rudolf, for which he presented the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats, the true author he believed was Roger Bacon, the Englishman. I suspend my judgment, ...
  

This passage is ambiguus.  First, it is not clear who was the "he" in the senrence "the true author he believed was Roger Bacon": was it Rudolf, or Raphael?  Second, it is not clear what Marci was "suspending his judgement about".  Was he saying "I don't trust Raphael's story" or "I wonder whether the book is indeed Bacon's".  

Wilfrid just ignored Marci's misgivings, trusted Raphael, and interpreted this letter as proof that the VMS had belonged to Rudolf and was a Bacon's original.

Since it has been established that Bacon was not the Author, the optimists still have assumed that Raphel had seen the VMS in Rudolf's possession, and that he knew for certain that it was the book Rudolf paid 600 ducats for, and that Rudolf at least, if not Raphael, believed it was Bacon's.  And then Marci's "suspend my judgement" meant that he was doubting only the Bacon authorship bit.

But if the book purchase for "600 ducats" (rather florins?) happened in 1599, as Rene's research indicates, then it happened when Raphael was still a young college student.  It s very unlikely that Raphael was at the Court at that time.  Therefore his statement to Marci must have been based on hearsay only.  Therefore there is no reason to assume that he had ever seen Rudolf's "Bacon's book" while it was in Rudolf's possession, and was only guessing that this mysterious "cipher" book now in Marci's hands may have been it.  Then Marci's "ego juditium meum suspendo" may have been a polite way to warn Kircher: "I myself think Raphael got his story from an LLM". 

The signature of Horcicky that appears under UV analysis makes it somewhat undeniable that it would've at least been around the court of Prague.

That "signature" is suspicious in many ways.  I myself think that it is more likely than not that it was forged bt Wilfrid, precisely to provide evidence that the book was once in the hands of someone who could have received the book form Rudolf.  Because, without that signature, there would be not a shred or lint of evidence that the VMS was ever anywhere near Rudolf.  Or that it is the same book mentioned in Marci's letter.  Or that it even was in Bohemia, at any time.

All the best, --stolfi

[LisaFaginDavis]

To respond to the OP, it's worth remembering that we do not know if the materials for the manuscript were homemade or purchased. The ink and pigments could all have been made quite inexpensively with easily-acquired ingredients. There's no gold, no minerals like malachite or lapis. The parchment is poor quality, made from around twelve or thirteen skins (that argument will be detailed in our forthcoming book). So it could have been produced relatively inexpensively. There is no way to estimate the actual cost.

[Rafal]

Thanks for answer! I'm surprised by how cheap it is, I had always heard that calfskin vellum was expensive...

In my opinion this issue is a bit messy and far from being solved.

Experts generally seem to insist that there is something as vellum and something as parchment and it's not the same thing. Yet 90% of people don't see the difference and use both terms like they were the same.

So precisely speaking vellum was made of skin of newborn calves and was a very fine and expensive material. Parchment is on the other hand made of any skin, is worse quality and much cheaper. Using this terminology Voynich is made of parchment, not vellum.

Manuscripts are of different quality. We have stuff like Book of Hours of Duc de Berry: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  It's on finest vellum, with gold illumination, expensive paints and great craftsmanship. And we have mass production manuscripts like Diebold Lauber, made on cheap paper with recycled graphics. AI told me once that Duc de Berry could cost 100 times as much as Lauber. It may be a wild guess but I think a value between 10 and 200 times as much is valid.

Voynich Manuscript seems to be rather low quality, closer to cheap manuscripts than expensive ones but how much exactly it could cost is unsure.