Of course it is the simplest solution, and the MS has been sold for a considerable sum. The maddening thing about the VMS is that advanced technology does not, so far, rule out any underlying meaning; instead, it tells us things like “the text is definitely not completely random, but it matches no known language; maybe anagrammed misspelt Hebrew, a bit.” Under the circumstances, I would not hang your entire career on studying the Voynich Manuscript, but there is no reason yet not to spend a bit of free time on it if it catches your fancy, or to test out new machine-translation algorithms on it.
PS: my native language is the Inuit dialect of Old Hurrian. So, while you might expect me to be more fluent in Voynichese than most, with all the regionalisms and medical jargon it is almost like reading gibberish.
If the Voynich MS is a clever forgery, would we not expect to see more of its type? Assume it is a forgery created to make money; obviously it took time and talent to produce. You would guess it’s not a one-off and the forger would use her talent to make others. At some point the money diminishes as people realize there’s a lot of bullshit flooding the market. But what about a second or third MS of this type in the same gibberish script? Have the others been lost, or discarded long ago by nameless scholars as obvious fakes, or maybe as “the work of the devil”? Or is the VM the work of some kind of medieval Henry Darger, filled with meaning obvious only to himself?
The premise is that it’s trade secrets, and that the herbalist or wizard or whatever who made it didn’t want their rivals to be able to make their concoctions if the book fell into their hands. So the author made up a code that he himself could understand, but that others couldn’t.
I think that that’s a real possibility. It might have been created by some obsessive to illustrate their personal ideas, and not have been meant to be seen by anyone else.
It seems far too elaborate to be a simple mnemonic for someone’s personal use. Certainly it would have been unnecessary to include all those illustrations of women bathing.
That’s the part that particularly makes me think it might have been done by an obsessive. Inspired by this thread, I purchased a facsimile copy of the MS. If it were merely a treatise on women’s health, you would think you would be able to get your point across with many fewer pictures of nude women. There are hundreds of them. Even the astronomical section is filled with illustrations of naked women. (Very few women are depicted clothed anywhere in the MS.) They don’t seem to be obtaining any medical treatment aside from bathing.
I find this explanation most convincing. The pictures have a doodling feel to them.
Here’s a scenario. A family commits a somewhat autistic child to a monastery. The monk is bad at copying manuscripts, but is given some vellum to keep him out of trouble. (It’s here that we need a family patron, as vellum was expensive.)
Later to recoup losses, someone hawks the manuscript as containing secrets from far away.
Most forgers can apply their skills in a more efficient manner: they would typically try to make their work appear like something produced by someone famous. But if the work was drawn for personal or therapeutic purposes, this problem goes away. It would also explain the singularity of the manuscript: such behaviors would only be rarely indulged. And when they were, the output would typically not have market value.
The weird lettering reflects the author’s illiteracy. The patterns reflect his doodling and his modeling on possibly Hebrew manuscripts or even Latin ones. It’s not like the closest match would necessarily be the one that our obsessive was exposed to. As for Voynich A and Voynich B - I dunno. Maybe they were scribbled at different times.
Yes, that’s what made me think of Darger, whose work I greatly admire. There is obviously something obsessive yet curiously non-sexual about his depiction of the angel girls with penises, or hermaphrodites if you prefer. The women-in-baths pictures in the VM suddenly struck me in the same way.
The MS must have more illustrations of nude women than any other book of that time period, or almost any time. There are easily more than 400 of them. But as you say they are depicted in a non-sexual way.
I’ve already remarked on how terrible the illustrations of the plants are. Almost none of them can be reliably identified as actual species. It really looks like the artist was just making stuff up (sometimes including bits and pieces of real plants) rather than trying to depict actual plants.
Come to think of it, the botanical illustrations bear the same relationship to real plants as the lettering does to real alphabets - they look like they could be real, but don’t actually match anything in the real world.
Darger as we know used extensive “found imagery”–cutouts from magazines and newspapers, tracings of the same, freehand interpretations of commercial images. I saw an exhibit once which recreated his apartment–he displayed on his walls pictures from commercial publications, framed as if they were art. Anyway, Measure for Measure’s notion may make some sense–this was the product of a mentally challenged/uneducated but innately gifted person, most likely a man, who had access to both supplies and reference materials–that is, a monk. He amalgamated and interpreted in his own way all that he came across in the monastery’s libraries into the oddity we know today. Nude women, or illustrations of them, would not have been unknown to him, medieval copyists were well known for introducing naughty bits into their illustrations.
I don’t know how many times we’ve had someone point to a “science journalism” summary as proof of something, only to open the actual journal article to find out things are different. IME from dealing with them often the “quotes” are actually written by them and ostensibly checked by the scientist, but we’re busy so YMMV.
In addition, if the work was penned by a scammer, I would expect at least some references to transmuting lead to gold or creating an elixir of youth. Or at least drawings of unicorns or man-eating plants. Something that consistently separates marks from their mulla. It would take a brave hoaxster to stay on the pseudo-scholarly path for so many months or years.
On the other hand, with the book itself incomprehensible, that might have been the domain of the salesman, not of the author (granted that the two might have been the same person). The book contains a lot of what might be recipes; the salesman just has to say that there are rumors that some of those recipes might lead to wondrous things like the Philosopher’s Stone, if there were only someone with the cleverness and resources to decipher them. But while the book itself survives, the exact pitch used to sell it hasn’t.
And it’s better, for such purposes, if the recipe is incomprehensible: If a recipe makes sense, but doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, then the rich and presumably powerful buyer is going to want to take it out of the hide of the scammer who sold him the book. But if the recipe needs to be deciphered, then when it doesn’t work, the buyer is going to just conclude that they deciphered it incorrectly, and try again.
I am afraid I have to admit my initial excitement about Nicholas Gibbs’s alleged Voynich deciphering has waned. Yes, it sounded good, but so far he has failed to back it up and his deciphering now looks decidedly doubful.
Oh, well, he convinced many people, so at least I am not alone.
I still think the Manusript was a frund, however, too much work went into it, they could have done a lot less,and still sold it, if that was the original idea.
Just make it look like a work by John Dee, for example.
I would toss out a wild guess that the work is some sort of esoteric religious/mystical work, from a member of some small sect or cult. The illustrations are not intended to represent actual reality, but rather things which represent concepts under that mystical system. (That would be why the plants don’t conform to the appearance of genuine plants.)
The purpose of the code was to keep these secrets away from unbelievers or people who were otherwise uninitiated. The code would only be known to the select few who were deemed worthy of it. The sect was very small and short-lasting, so there’s no other record of them and the knowledge of the code died out without a trace.
That makes sense, but until we get some confirmation…
What would be interesting is that if the Mansucript was a copy, made by someone who didnt know the language or the plats. So the fact that we cant’ “decode” it is due to copyist errors, and the same with the plants. Someone took a herbalist simple, scrawled in code with scribble illustraions, and gave to a monk to redo and illumunate of sorts.