Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

LSDkiller t1_j4dga2n wrote

Reply to comment by stegu2 in New archival findings on the earliest ownership of the Voynich Manuscript by stegu2

Really though? That seems so unlikely just based on simple human nature. Why go to such a great length to encrypt it in a way that no one can understand, if you actually want it to be understood? Are any of the other examples encrypted with nearly the same amount of care? What do we know of people who would have used manuscripts like this?

Is that really what you think after working in the field so long? It seems to me that it's such a long book with such elaborate and strange drawings, how could the answer be that "simple"? The drawings especially and how no one seems to be able to decode it with their help just immediately scream "whoever made this wanted people to have a hard time reading it".

What about all the plants? Aren't many of them nonexistent? Shouldn't those that exist have some known use in women's medicine if this theory holds true?

Thanks for the study though, fascinating read.

5

stegu2 OP t1_j4hriea wrote

In medieval Europe some topics where just too risky for a person to write about (see Keagan Brewer's excellent overview on encrypted gynaecological or sexological texts in the time period the Voynich manuscript was written).

Yes, a lot of plants seem hard to identify, but so are other illustrations in other medieval manuscripts as well. And just think of a person copying an illustration from another source without any botanical background. Usually manuscripts were illuminated by specialists, but obviously including a third-party professional wouldn't have worked out if the author/copyist wanted to have it secret. So he or she went for the (less skilled) in-house option. The quality of the illustration is clearly way below the usual quality in herbaria of the time.

What also is often forgotten: Things vanish in hundreds of years. We just see a single manuscript here. No one knows if there used to be a couple of codices in this writing system and a small group of person was used to work with it.

3

LSDkiller t1_j4hxtuw wrote

I ended up looking through the entire voynich manuscript and reading the whole study. I'm sorry but there's no way to me that this is the answer..in the study the longest comparable encryption was like a page, and there was a suggestion that another work may have also been encrypted with no proof. Every other comparable manuscript only had small parts erased. None of them carried even nearly as much info. I could see some of the text being about the topic but the whole thing?

The work is way too long. There are no comparable works from the time that deal only with female anatomy or women's secrets. The illustrations of the women seem symbolic rather than too encode any information. If it's supposed to be hidden anatomical knowledge there's no need to include naked ladies in the first place. Also, i feel like there's an undeniable "spiritual" or "religious/esoteric" quality to the illustrations.

The plants are undoubtedly not real for the most part, syntheses of different plants. When reading the manuscript it does feel like the illustrator is using their fantasy a lot to construct the illustrations, if these were medicinal plants, there would not be so many of them and such long texts accompanying. It's nothing like similar medical or pharmaceutical treatises of the time in scope.

It's possible to imagine that there's some (maybe anatomic or procedural) information encoded in the illustrations of the interconnecting tubes, but then what are all the repeated illustrations of the women for, and if the purpose is to hide the

In the other examples of encryptions, erasures and censoring, it's always limited passages About certain things the author was too morally concerned to expose. It's hard to imagine that the whole thing contains taboo knowledge.

Isnt it true that right when this was written, was the beginning of curious valuable books that also pushed taboos such as sorcery, alchemy etc. What this seems like to me is someone painstakingly making an esoteric book to sell for a lot of money. The suggestion that the language-like qualities of the voynich can be generated by using a grid and writing syllables, seems so much more likely to me than that someone came up with a code that still hasn't been cracked.

Really my main question would be if you think it's real, why do you think we haven't been able to crack it? Humans are usually great at cracking deliberately encrypted things especially when they are encrypted without the help of technology. the manuscript is undoubtedly of European origin and while it's possible it's not encrypting a European language, you'd expect that we could crack any code someone came up with in the 1400's with this much time and effort going into it.

I can see this being an elaborate fake, it looks to me like an esoteric book of sorcery, which seem to have been popular at the time. And it was sold for a lot of money various times, so it likely worked.

2