06-08-2025, 06:39 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-08-2025, 06:40 PM by Jorge_Stolfi.
Edit Reason: typos
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(06-08-2025, 04:52 PM)quimqu wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm intrigued by the notion that the scribe working on the Voynich Manuscript might have been unsupervised.
I hope we can agree that the Author did not compose the VMS directly on vellum. It would make no sense, for several reasons. He must have written a draft on paper first, which then was clean-copied to vellum by a Scribe.
Would the Scribe be the Author himself? If you believe that there were multiple scribes, obviously all but one of them were not the Author. But even if there was a single Scribe, I think that there is enough evidence that he was not the Author.
Besides, the Scribe was someone who was skilled with driving a pen, able to write small characters (only 1.5 mm tall) on the rough vellum surface. Not all people who could write would have such a skill. Moreover, once the draft was complete, copying it to vellum was a boring, laborious, and mechanical task. It would make perfect sense for the Author to just hire some Scribe for that task. And, for the same reason, the Scribe must have worked most of the time unsupervised, apart from a bit of training and instructions at the beginning and a cursory check at the end. Like most scribes and secretaries have been doing up to this day. At most, the Scribe may have called on the Author a few times to resolve some hard-to-read glyphs in the draft, or for further instructions about the figures.
But then surely the Scribe did not understand at all what he was copying. Especially if one assumes that the text is encrypted, or mechanically generated gibberish.
Quote:you’d expect any errors introduced would be caught and corrected, perhaps by a supervisor or reviser. Yet, as some of you suggest, a few copying errors appear to have survived in the final version, which seems inconsistent with an oversight process.
Indeed those copying errors and other features argue against the copying being closely supervised by someone who could read it.
Note that the more people we bring into the Author club, the less likely the scenario becomes.
Quote:Given the manuscript’s importance
I suspect that the manuscript is vastly more important to us than it was to the Author.
All the best, --jorge
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