28-11-2025, 12:06 PM
Right, so you're going to get all different answers to this question, depending on the origin scenario favored by the one responding.
The most conservative estimate is that at least two people worked on the text, which is considered original to the MS. So at least two people knew a lot about the MS. And after that, there are only questions:
In my opinion, all we can say is that the people in the Prague area who left us writings about the MS did not fully understand it. But can we say for certain that all understanding of the MS was gone from the world when someone brought the MS to Prague? Even that is impossible.
In other words, there are two extremes:
* The people who made it kept it secret or lied about it right away. The knowledge was lost when they died.
* The MS was kept in the community that produced it, and even throughout the binding efforts, people still understood what it was. When the MS left the community, the new owner still knew what it was. The tie between the manuscript and the understanding of it was only severed when it entered the historically attested Prague circles.
It feels like neither of those extremes are the most likely solution, but I don't think anything in between can be excluded.
The most conservative estimate is that at least two people worked on the text, which is considered original to the MS. So at least two people knew a lot about the MS. And after that, there are only questions:
- Lisa sees five scribes, so that would be 5 people. How many people did the drawings, were they the same as the ones who did the text? In most manuscripts, the artists are not the scribes. Again, two is a conservative estimate, so maybe there were more.
- Even if we stick with two, this means that there was talking about the MS. What context was this in? A hidden cave? A monastic community? A scriptorium or copy shop? A school/university? A medical facility? How many people were there, how many were aware of the MS? Is it so inconceivable that the makers told other members of their community about this? Nothing in the MS looks particularly heretical or punishable... For all we know, the creation of the MS, or at least the knowledge of what it is, was shared by a whole community. Why not a hundred people? Even if it was Brother Geoffrey's crazy project, why couldn't a hundred others have known about it?
- Did the person who added the month names understand the MS? If you favor one way or the other, try to do the exercise of imagining that you have to defend the opposite view in a debate. It's not hard at all. So in this case, we're creeping towards the 16th century and understanding of the MS is still an option.
- Did the people who bound the MS understand it? So far, the general idea is that they didn't, because they misbound it. But following Lisa's suggestion that the MS was conceived of as unnested folded sheets, misbinding would have been the only option. There was no good order available. So we can't even exclude that the "misbinder" understood the MS.
In my opinion, all we can say is that the people in the Prague area who left us writings about the MS did not fully understand it. But can we say for certain that all understanding of the MS was gone from the world when someone brought the MS to Prague? Even that is impossible.
In other words, there are two extremes:
* The people who made it kept it secret or lied about it right away. The knowledge was lost when they died.
* The MS was kept in the community that produced it, and even throughout the binding efforts, people still understood what it was. When the MS left the community, the new owner still knew what it was. The tie between the manuscript and the understanding of it was only severed when it entered the historically attested Prague circles.
It feels like neither of those extremes are the most likely solution, but I don't think anything in between can be excluded.