Would like to start a thread to discuss the House of Visconti. 

Particularly interested in Gian Galeazzo (1351-1402) and his daughter Vanentina Visconti (the Duchess of Orleans)
and any relationship to the VMS.

Jacek and Agnieszka have kindly been keeping me in touch with their study of the written text, even though aware that I'm not in a position to offer any useful comment on 'cracking' the language. 

You can find the paper at academia.edu by searching 'Jacek Sygula' there.

I'll be honest and say that I'm not certain the paper isn't a hoax.

Would anyone better able to say something useful about the content care to comment?

No this is not a typo.

During a workshop held at the Beinecke this week, several manuscripts in the collection are being explained to students.
One of these is the 'Rothschild Canticles', and its picture on the Beinecke facebook page immediately drew my attention.

It is this one: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  

Both (tiny) volumes have been fully digitised:

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Imperfection, though frequently unavoidable, is generally seen as a detriment. In VMs investigations it is often problematic in the comparison of images. But the VMs is also something like a topsy-turvy world where things are not what they seem, but they are what they are. 

I have been wondering, from the perspective of the VMs composer, who would be the person most likely to make sense of the contents? And in the medieval era the majority of people were still illiterate. Those who could read were often associated with and educated through the church. It might be assumed that it would take a determined individual to even attempt to make sense of VMs contents - a person that is devoted and meticulous.

And the VMs itself is extremely problematic. Is it a natural 'foreign' document of unknown origin? Is it encoded, encrypted? Does it make sense at all? Without being able to read the text and given the strange botanical, astrological, balneological, pharmacological illustrations, the VMs is like an intentionally weird haystack in which a few useful needles have been hidden - such as the Oresme cosmos and cloud band, in two parts.

So if the VMs is an intentionally covert document, who is it hiding from? Not from the illiterate majority. It needs to hide from the determined, inquisitive, meticulous minority. How can that be done? One technique is the use of imperfection. Take the example of the 4 by 17 symbol sequence of VMs f57v. It might be a potential candidate for a VMs alphabet or numerical sequence, *but* not all four sequences are identical and there are other glyphs found in the text. Those meticulous investigators who require consistent detail as a criterion for further investigation will be deterred. That which was hidden remains hidden (the existence of positional relationships in the glyph sequence).

It is not necessary that every correspondence is perfect. What is needed is to show the existence of this complex construction is intentional. And it can only be intentional because it is too complex and contains multiple, independent factors that accord with history and tradition which provide verification. In a manuscript where little makes much sense, there are subtle, obscure and ambiguous inclusions of normal, standard, traditional, historical information for the prospective reader's potential discovery and subjective interpretation. The challenge put forth by author/text is one of recognition and understanding of this *normal* information in a strange environment. Does the reader pass or fail? Is the investigation derailed by minor discrepancies rather than seeing the evidence as a whole. Are the potential, subjective interpretations denied even before the existence of objective, positional confirmations is discovered? Are there intentional discrepancies and imperfections intended to divert and deter those who require everything to be totally nailed down and verified in detail? Part of the purpose of these complex constructions in the VMs is that they are hidden.

Philip Neal's pages are now at
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Neal's contributions to Voynich studies are invaluable.

They include his original translations of most of the important documents in Latin, and lucid notes on renaissance ciphers and people.

On a more personal note - I was surprised to see that although we have had Neal's meticulous translation and notes made freely available to us for a decade, that

Quote:Thomas Conlon is working on a professional edition of the Kinner-Kircher correspondence, to appear in due course, which will improve on my work.

People in baskets is a prevalent theme in the VMS, in both the zodiac-symbol pages and many of the pool pages, so I thought it deserved a thread on its own.

To start it off the discussion, here are people in loges with beakers, surrounding Adam and Eve, as drawn in a Ripley Scroll. These particular loges have an external architecture leaning:



17th-century interpretation of a scroll created by George Ripley in 1460.

First of all, in confessing my ignorance, I'd like to say that I envision the investigation to proceed at the glyph (symbol) level, rather than looking at the parts of individual VMs symbols.

The analysis of text is the search for a method of interpretation. But what is that method applied to? Is it to raw text or to abstracted statistics? What is the choice of subject material to be analyzed? And furthermore what is the source for the choice of methodology? Is method something the investigator learned or invented? And then it is just applied wherever and however?

Or could method and material both be contained in the text waiting to be discovered, common medieval information waiting to be recognized? Is the method contained in the text, in the seventeen symbol sequence of f57v? And is the specific text segment as subject for analysis designated by the markers on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and validated by references to a well-known religious tradition and related historical events?

Is there some way that these two elements might work in combination?

This my table has been prepared for the draft of our submission to the European HCC of this year, but since the submission was declined, the stuff is unlikely to be ever released, especially given that it did not have enough time to progress from the draft version.

The table, obviously, is also a raw draft and is posted into the forum for the sake of discussion, reference, and possible further development. It builds upon Cham's CLS and also incorporates ideas from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Here's how the table is to be interpreted. Each cell shows a combination of two "basic" shapes: the first one taken from the respective row on the left, the second one taken from the respective column on the top. The intersection of a basic shape with itself stands not for a "combination", but rather shows whether this basic shape does occur standalone in the VMS or not. If a combination or a basic shape does not occur in the VMS, the respective intersection cell is grayed out. The order matters. For example, e plus dash yields c, but dash plus e yields h. Some combinations are yet indefinite (as suggested by more than one character in a single cell).

   

I was thinking about the Voynich alphabet the other day at some interesting angle. Let's say the Voynich alphabet is a constructed alphabet. In other words, it's not taken from any script existing apriori, but rather invented by the guy(s) behind the Voynich. (This may be the case irrespectively of whether it conveys a cipher, an artificial language or even a natural language).

Now, it is often noted that many Voynich symbols resemble medieval Latin abbreviations. However, the abbreviations were quite various, while great part of the Voynich alphabet revolves around the "base shape + modifier (mostly tail modifier, but not exclusively)" scheme, where the two predominant base shapes are e and i, - as also already noted (by Cham and those before him). Let's suppose this is the real principle of construction, and not mere visibilty. That the guy indeed "constructed" characters by combining e and i shapes with modifiers. And, btw, a is e plus i.

Then the question emerges - why these two shapes, in particular? Have they had any special significance anywhere else - whether textually, graphically or semiotically? Where could they have been "borrowed" from, and why?

In a recent blog post I touched upon the subject of the similarity between the small-plants containers and the central rosette's towers.




This has obviously been noted before, but I haven't read any proposed solutions for it yet. Does anyone have an idea?