On January 1st 2017, I conducted a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to find out which beliefs about the VM were strongest in our community. I thought it would be fun to try this again, three years later. Members have come and gone, and people change their minds, so the results may be different this time around.

First and foremost, this is just for fun and has no scientific merit whatsoever. We do not aim to find any consensus, it is just about aggregated personal opinions.

The rules are simple: 

• You must answer yes or no to each question. 
  
• No maybe's allowed, you have to choose. If you believe a statement is 51% likely, then you pick YES. For once, speculation is obligatory.
  
• Answer in a reply to this post. Spolier tags are allowed if you don't want to influence others. Last time two or three people preferred to keep their answers private and PM them to me, that is also allowed.
  
• Try to answer each question, even if you don't have a strong opinion about it (that's better for the dataset )
  
• Please answer in a numbered list to avoid confusion.
  
• I will analyze the results and compare them to 2017 as soon as we have enough submissions.
  

1. Does the text contain any meaning?
   
2. Has the text been purposefully enciphered to conceal its meaning?
   
3. Do the images match the text?
   
4. Are the plants meant to refer to real plants?
   
5. Is the majority of the plants exotic from a European perspective (Asian, African, American...)?
   
6. Have the images been made ambiguous or otherwise strange to conceal their true meaning?
   
7. Is alchemy an important part of the manuscript?
   
8. Is astronomy and/or astrology an important part of the MS?
   
9. Is medicine an important part of the MS?
   
10. Is the MS the creative product of one mind, i.e. an author? (Taking into account the possibility that one or more scribes helped to fashion the physical manuscript)
    
11. Is the MS authored by a known historical figure?
    
12. Will we ever be able to read the MS?
    
13. Will there be any breakthrough in Voynich studies in 2020?
    
14. Is the MS any kind of hoax?
    
15. Have (part of) your views about the MS changed notably over the last few years?
    

It has come to my attention that Arthur Tucker has passed away on August 5 2019.

Here is his obituary: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

He was known as co-author with Janick of "Unraveling the Voynich Codex".

The team of Tucker / Janick have been working on a sequel to their publication, called "Flora of the Voynich Codex: An Exploration of Aztec Plants" which is in print and available as an ebook here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Here is a vast list of his achievements, publications, teaching, honors & awards etc: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Hi, all,

If you're in or near NYC, you may be interested in a lecture I'm giving on Friday, Jan. 24 at the Annual Meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America, where I'll be presenting the results of my study of VMS scribes. My session starts at 4:30 PM. More info here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. My work will be published this spring in a journal called Manuscript Studies (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and in a collection of essays (Digital Palaeography, ed. by S. Brookes, M. Rehbein and P.A. Stokes (London: Routledge)) that will likely come out in 2021.

Also - if you live in Europe and get ZDF, tune into Terra X on Jan. 19 for a Voynich piece that will include an interview with me and an appearance by Ray Clemens. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

- Lisa

There is a new paper about the VMS: "Principal component analysis of characters in the Voynich manuscript and their classifications based on comparative analysis of writings in known languages"

The paper by Jonas Alin can be found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The author concludes: 

Quote:the Voynich language, unlike the known languages, shows proportionally larger separation also along PC2 in its character transition frequencies, showing that the Voynich characters probably abide by more complex co-occurrence rules than characters of typical known languages.

There is a paper from 2016 about the VMS: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The preprint version of the paper by Juan Pablo Cárdenas, Iván González, Gerardo Vidal and Miguel Angel Fuentes is available at arxiv.org: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The authors come to the conclusion that the Voynich manuscript contains "a written text which has been ciphered, possibly by a permutation process of its words".

The authors build networks for adjacent words for text samples of different kings. One outcome for the network build for the Voynich manuscript is that it contained the "only analyzed text that does not present a significant difference between assortativities before and after randomization." 

They conclude that the "anomalous behaviors with respect to clustering and assortativity between its original and ciphered versions, suggest that the manuscript is a ciphered text, even with a lower disassortativity. We use the term ciphered because the manuscript has a word frequency distribution that follows Zipf’s law, and because the correlation between <C> and <l> also fits the power function of other texts."

In another thread Aga Tentakulus mentioned the "Habsburg" crown in f72v, the folio of Libra/October.

Habsburg or not, an idea came to me that the crown may designate that this is the tax collection month.

What do you think? What was the usual time in middle ages to collect taxes for the crown?

The comparison of the apparent similarity between the VMs critter (f80v) and the fleece-like portion of the medallion of the Order of the Golden Fleece has a long history and potentially multiple sources with few instances of dissent. For those familiar with both images, it is easy to see some general similarities and specific differences. One major difference being the reversal of direction of the head and tail. Naturally there has been discussion about whether and how this comparison might be related to VMs investigation.
 
The Order of the Golden Fleece was a knightly order instituted in 1430 by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, on the occasion of his marriage (#3) to Isabel of Portugal.
 
Having recently obtained a good source, I have discovered some interesting information. Richard Vaughan, in his book, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy, says: “The Golden Fleece soon became an important motif in the art and literature of the Burgundian court.” And this source (p. 162) provides much of the information discussed in the two paragraphs below.
 
The Golden Fleece was borrowed from the Classical myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. And here there is a problem, not with the Fleece, but with Jason. The story of ‘Jason and Medea’ is a Greek tragedy, in which Jason promised to be eternally faithful to Medea, and later deserted her. It was called perjury by the contemporary French author, Alain Chartier. The problem was having a knightly order tied to a figure involved in betrayal. So, there was a problem of ‘optics’ in modern terms, and there were two attempts to fix it. Both were promulgated by bishops who were promoted by Philip the Good.
 
The first was by Guillaume Fillastre (the younger), bishop of Verdun, Tour and Tournai. He tried to put a pro-Christian spin on the story of Jason. The second was Jehan Germain, bishop of Nevers and Chalon. He eliminated Jason altogether and replaced him with the biblical Gideon. Both of these men also had held the office of chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece. And in 1448 there is a record of Philip the Good ordering a tapestry based on the theme of the “History of Gideon and the Golden Fleece”. The existence of this tapestry is mentioned in the 1468 marriage of the last of these Burgundian dukes, Charles the Rash, to Margaret of York. So, within the first 18 years, Jason had been replaced by Gideon – a biblical hero had been substituted for a classical betrayer. Compared with an alteration of that magnitude, the slightly ambiguous combination of the Golden Fleece with the Agnus Dei image from the Apocalypse of S. Jean is relatively minor.
 
In the VMs illustration, the representation of the ‘critter’ does not stand in isolation. There are two other patterns associated with it. They might be said to vaguely resemble clouds and rain. But while their identity is unknown, it is unclear what they represent. Now it is understood that the meandering line is a nebuly line. And that a nebuly line is a potential cosmic boundary. And that a nebuly line was used as a cosmic boundary in the VMs cosmos. The combination of fleece-sheep-lamb-type critter and a cosmic boundary, once the combination is recognized, leads quite naturally to the examination of the available examples of religious illustrations of the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei), in which there is also a cosmic boundary. There are several ways to represent cosmic boundaries and there are a variety of images produced in a relevant time period. However, it is only with the discovery of the Agnus Dei image in the Apocalypse of S. Jean that the proper interpretation of the third part is verified. The potential droplets in the VMs representation are droplets of blood in the Agnus Dei illustration. And these two representations share a common structure of three parts in sequence: lamb, cosmic boundary, droplets. So far, these two are the only examples of this structure.
 
The Apocalypse of S. Jean was produced in Liège in 1313 by Colin Chadelve. So how does it tie in with the Order of the Golden Fleece started in 1430? Liège was a possession of the Dukes of Burgundy and it was not a pleasant relationship. Liège was defeated by John the Fearless in 1408, by his son, Philip the Good, in 1430, and sacked by his son, Charles the Rash, in 1465, and that was the end – of the Dukes of Burgundy in 1477. More important, however, is the historical notation that the Apocalypse of S. Jean was in the library of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (r. 1419-1467) and there were multiple opportunities for that to occur.
 
Both elements, the motif of the Golden Fleece and the illustration of the 1313 version of the Agnus Dei structure existed together within the sphere of Burgundy starting in 1430. And this is a date that falls within the primary statistical range of the Carbon-14 dates for the VMs parchment.
 
Furthermore, this use of combined images exists elsewhere in the VMs. The VMs cosmos is a combination of the Oresme (BNF  Fr. 565 fol. 23) Diagram and the Shirakatsi ‘Eight Phases of the Moon’ Diagram, with certain alterations to diminish the visual similarities.
 
It’s like this. If someone were to combine images of Marilyn Monroe and Groucho Marx, most of us would recognize what had been done, unless that is now too old for some. In the VMs, the situation has been one where no one could identify either image. That may be starting to change.

Cod. Sang. 755 folio 186

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What's the MM here? Miserere mei?

A very exciting theme of a healthsome drink (btw, I took to it a couple of years ago!)

MSMurQ 12 folio 86v, entitled "von den brusten" (the title is on 86r):

   

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Note how it's written in one word, and how "g" and "e" are joined together.

But "milch", not "mich". I've seen "milch" elsewhere in this MS, by another scribe, and again as "milch".

Stumbled upon this while looking at 15th century pharmacopaeas.

The portion in question is in folios 63v-68r and is the 16th century addition (as the description says), annotated as follows (emphasis mine):

Quote:16. Jh. Anweisungen zur Herstellung von Geheimtinte, eines Bienenlockmittels, dauerhaftem Schuhleder, Elfenbeinersatz, Zauberlampen, von Mitteln gegen Trunkenheit und anderen. Einzelne Wörter in Geheimschrift.