I can say this is the first time I've clicked on a Voynich Manuscript themed video and been hit in the face with factual and referenced research. Great stuff!
Yes! If it's a fake, then a fake what exactly? The thing it is trying to be a fake of doesn't exist. We know from actual forgeries and fakes that they always intend to be clearly understood as something: a painting by Van Gogh, a page from a book of Hours, a manuscript leaf illustrating Columbus' arrival in the New World (the Spanish Forger did something like this).
@@voynichtalk I mean the answer is right there.. a fake document with mysterious unknown origins and meaning. It seems fairly plausible that someone in the 1420’s made this up either to sell for money or possibly to convince people of mysticism. Think of how many hoaxes exist today with creationists trying to prove dinosaurs and humans lived alongside each other or that aliens influenced early civilization.
Truly an astoshingly refreshing dive into the Voynich Manuscript. Instant sub. I look forward to updates on the locations regarding the handwriting analysis, that is so interesting!
Awesome, thank you! We do have some surprising insights in the locations. If all goes according to plan, we will report on the study in full in August.
My issue with the theory of it being a fake has always been: why would you fake an ugly and unreadable book of herb-lore? A lot of effort and expense went into producing the manuscript, if it was a fake, made for profit, then why not make the subject matter something more appealing and valuable? The philosopher's stone, the holy grail, a cure for baldness, etc.?
This is a very good point. The vellum alone would probably have been more valuable. Such a big pile of unused pre-1450 vellum is extremely rare (I'm not sure if there is any known case. I do know of some later ones.)
My issue with this kind of stance (also often find in ufology) Is that humans will fake almost anything with any type of motivation. You literally cannot conclude that something is unlikely to be done by a human so it wasn't done by one. We have so many examples to the contrary
@@voynichtalk I think it's not a good point actually. The obvious answer is that if it *is* a fake, then it was intended to be as mysterious as possible, because that's what would get a lot of attention. And if that's the case then it clearly worked - the manuscript is now extremely famous and people are still talking about it to this day.
@@voynichtalk What do you mean? I'm pointing out that, if we entertain the hypothesis that it may have been created at a later date but was deliberately made to appear to be a mysterious manuscript of the 15th century (thus being a fake), then there is an obvious motive on the part of the creator to make it unreadable and strange.
Hey I just wanted to say thanks I found this channel about a month ago and watched all the videos within a day or two. I really enjoy medieval literature so I had heard about the voynich manuscript but it was fascinating to go on such a deep dive. Glad to hear you plan to try to post around once a month I was you the best that you for the content!
I’ve always been fascinated by the Voynich manuscript, I even own a copy, and I’ve been frustrated by 90% of the material I’ve read or watched about it ignoring and leaving out key and clear evidence in favor of humoring pet theories instead. What you’re doing is so so awesome! I’ve been resigned to the reality of having to dig through academic papers myself or even do my own research for this kind of insight. I’m so happy someone is out there doing the work and providing good content that finally focuses on the surprising amount of information we can glean from the evidence, when people aren’t ignoring it favor of pet theories. I love pinning down the sleeves and hat to 1400-1430, that’s new to me and very exciting! One thing I didn’t see in the video, if I didn’t miss it, and you may mention it in other videos, but the crenelations on a wall depicted in the MS (don’t have the page number handy) is a particular kind , “dovetail” I think, authentic to 15th century Europe. Sorry for the long comment, just so happy to find your channel!
@@ModernEphemera thanks! I know the feeling of frustration you describe, I felt the same when I first started reading about the MS. It's a mess out there. But since I still remember that feeling, I want to provide some solution :) I will make a video about swallowtail merlons later, it's on the shortlist.
Die Burg von Lazise am Gardasee, es gab zu jener Zeit nur zwei Burgen dort, mit die eine Turum-Bedachung hatten. Sirmione (eine Burg der Templer und der Katharer), und Lazise. Die Burg stellt Lazise dar. Sie existiert noch immer, aber ohne das Dach über dem Turm. Auf zeitgenössischen Abbildungen des 15.16. Jh. ist der Turm noch zu sehen. Die Templer haben sich an den Gardasee zurückgezogen, nach wie vor findet man dort in jeder Kirche, das rote Kreuz des Templer-Ordens.
@@voynichtalk Thanks for the reply. I think it’s obvious the text genuinely dates to the early 15th century. I want to believe it has meaning but the thing that makes me believe it doesn’t is no mistakes or corrections. Apparently it’s extremely common for similarly dated manuscripts to have misspellings or other errors marked out and corrected. Apparently the Voynich manuscript has none. No need to make corrections if the text has no meaning in the first place. That’s another thing I like about your video though, how you broke out the age, intent, and presence of meaning as entirely separate arguments from eachother. Sort of obvious when you think about it but I’ve never seen someone break it down like that, and it’s hard to do so if you’re approaching it from a specific theory. Edit: But then again, regarding meaning, I’ve read that the botanical texts have unique Voynichese words at the start of each entry, which is pretty bizarre if the text is meaningless. Haven’t verified that myself yet though.
Greetings from the US, I absolutely love the extreme detail you go into with the videos, even to the degree of finding the exact decade of fashion. Incredibly amazing, you're the GOAT!
Am I the only one who thinks it's plausible someone could just make up a language and make up fantasy herbs just like people today come up with fantasy languages, fantasy maps, fantasy creatures because they like fiction and fantasy as a genre? Someone in the past could have done that for the same reason.
Of course they did. Honestly, the Victorian era and its infatuation with mysteries and religious rituals is still present in how we in the West regard common life in the past. Sometimes it is just as easy as someone a long time ago wanted to do a Thing. And now we speculate that the Thing is somehow a calender.
He says in the beginning of the video that it is plausible, so definitely not the only one. I won't comment on the language, but I don't think the herbal illustrations even need to be fantasy. Or rather, I don't think any medieval illustrator painted anything but fantasy herbs. If you look at any pre printing-press herbal guides, you'll notice a distinct lack of realism in the illustrations. I believe that most illustrators didn't even know what the plant looked like - and if they did, illustrations had to be exclusively left to artistic interpretation.
Fantastic video! Recommended out of nowhere, and this is my first hearing about the manuscript, but I am now quite fascinated. I really appreciate your straightforward and measured delivery. Looking forward to more.
I'm going to feed the algorithm before even watching this. A channel with 2k subs, tackling a well-covered and controversial subject, for 31minutes? I am impressed just by the ambition and initiative. The next 31minutes is your chance to win a sub.
Yep, this is something special. Focused script avoids rehashing the well-trodden narrative. Good (and real) voice. Detailed and thorough research. Superb production values. 10/10. you win a sub!
Thanks! I'd have ten times more views if I claimed to have solved it... But well, this is only my second video that got some more traction, so there is still room for growth :) To be honest I never even expected to reach anything close to 10k viewers.
I had no idea that hats and sleeves could so easily give away the date the manuscript was likely written! But it does make perfect sense: fashion between 1990 and now seems to have changed less than in 1390 to 1424, but I'd find it pretty easy to tell which decade a photo in a magazine was taken based on clothes alone. The blossom hat doesn't lie...
yep! And it's not like it's something you can depend on by itself, an artist could always be depicting an older period, or just not up on the latest fashion, but when you combine it with other things that all point to the same narrow date range, it can form part of a very reliable dating
And other little things I discovered: There are a total of 104 two letter words possible in the Voynich script. There are 13 letters that can appear as a first letter, and 8 that can appear as a last letter. In English, that number is 26*26, so 676 possible two letter words. English has 127 two letter words, so about 18% of all possible combinations. The Voynich script has 89 different two letter words. That's 85% of all possible two letter words. That doesn't make sense. Three letter words have similar problems.
The Voynich script does not make any sense as a directly written language. Perhaps the most confusing part is: The »words« get shorter from the beginning to the end of a line; and the same (but a little weaker) from the top lines to the bottom lines. And there are still some in-»word«-patterns, which are easily explained by different glyph forms on the start, in the middle and at the end of a word, until you notice how much the »alphabet« shrinks down to something, which simply can not be a direct represantation of phonemes of a language we know of. That's the fascination of the Voynich manuscript: At a first glance, it looks easy and you don't unterstand, why it can be that hard to read it. And it seems to be written so incredible fluently, surely by a proficient hand. No trace of using elaborated cryptological calculations or tools. But the deeper one dives in it, the more the confusion gets overwhelming.
@goebelmasse I did some superficial checks on a transliteration. There's 29000 words. There are 6000 unique words. 4000 of them appears only once. That makes no sense.
Thanks very much for this Koen! To add my 2 cents to the "Fake" arguement from a purely common sense standpoint and why it never made very much sense to me. One or more statements are usually true. 1. A fake is made to look older than it is 2. A fake is made to look like it was by someone famous 3. A fake pretends to offer special/secret knowledge 4. A fake pretends to be more valuable than it is, or immitate something very valuable (3 and 4 are more modern ideas of "fake" but I'll leave them in) Answers. 1. You covered this in detail. 2. The manuscript does not attribute itself to anyone. 3. No one can read it. Also this would mean every alchemy manuscript is "fake". 4. The manuscript was made using relatively inexpensive componants and the artwork is poorly done. So, what are you peddling to Rudolph? I think all considered the answer you are left with is point 3.. which essentially means you wrote an alchemy book to sell, which is hardly a grand conspiracy and not a "fake".
Yeah, exactly. Regarding encoding, I guess people would only call the text fake if it pretends to be an encoded text, while in fact it's nonsense. But like I said in the video, meaning and the author's intentions can only be speculated about right now.
Yeah, my linguistics professor thought it was best described as a hoax rather than a fake. Its encoding is nonsense and 98% of the text encodes nothing even if the remaining 2% contains easter eggs. It isn't however faking its age.
It would be interesting to know what exactly it was that led to Voynich believing it was a work by the famous medieval scholars Roger Bacon or Albertus Magnus. That could eventually lead us to the possibility, that the manuscript indeed is a forgery, that of a skilled person in the early 1400, who sold it to a rich collector and lover of antique books, to which an original document that was presumably from the hands of no other than an already legendary figure like Roger Bacon would be very appealing to have in his own posession, The fact that it is written in a strange kind of secret writing could make it even more attractive, for the hypothetical buyer would most likely himself be a conaisseur of ancient texts, maybe hoping his scholarly expertise would allow him to decipher its meaning or even discover some sensational alchemystic revelation like the actual recipe on how to turn lead into gold... The art of forging documents or other rare and special artifacts is a very ancient trade and it definitely existed in various form in the early 15th century,l most prominently in the form of the manufacturing of fake christian relics that were bought and sold for fantastic sums of money. Anyway, I highly appreciate the solid approach of the video to give us an overview on reliable evidence on the Voynich Manuscript. A true You tube gem!
Dem Codex lag 1912 ein Brief bei, der auf Bacon verwies, was falsch ist. Derselbe Brief erzählt auch, dass der dumme Kaiser Rudolf II. das Manuskript für überteuerte 600 Golddukaten gekauft hätte, was auch nicht stimmt, er hat es vererbt bekommen. Der Codex wurde in etwa zwischen 1503 und 1509 geschrieben, also beginnendes 16.Jh. nicht 15. Jh. und schon gar nicht um 1400 AD, da die Tiere die das Pergament geliefert haben, 1400 noch gar nicht geboren waren. Der Codex kann leicht entschlüsselt werden, nur scheint sich die Yale Universität dafür nicht zu interessieren, also sei es halt so, es ist doch viel interessanter darüber Märchen zu erzählen, als sich ernsthaft mit dem Codex zu befassen.
I'm not an expert, but looking at the language they used it seems to me that it may in fact not contain any real information and the person who wrote it produced one or more books just to be decoration.
I'm no expert, and I'm not even a big Voynich follower! But language is always fascinating, so Voynich vids pop up in my recommends. And one by this channel a while back mentioned the fact that the frequency analysis was out of whack, and that some characters seem to come up more often at the end of a page - nothing to do with the text, but the position on the page. That convinced me that it was decoration. I mentioned it in the comments on another Voynich channel, and the guy replied that he'd felt that way too, and discussed it at length elsewhere. I think our consensus would be; 'the pics have meaning, the text is gibberish'!
@@LittleNala But there was significant effort poured into producing said gibberish-it looks like a real script at first glance-which raises questions about the motives of the authors.
@@CjqNslXUcM Imitation. Could have been a mentally challenged person, autistic maybe. The person was able to "write" a book without being able to read, just by imitating what others do.
@@CjqNslXUcM Absolutely! I would not deny for one second that it took a lot of work. As Kobold666 below says, perhaps it was an autistic person (with access to funds, of course). But have you seen the sort of things people do just for larks? They build the Notre Dame from matchsticks! The amount of time and cash I put into my own hobbies is embarrassing! ;-) I honestly don't think the fact someone put a lot of effort into it is a deal breaker. People do all sorts of nutty stuff - always have.
@@CjqNslXUcM Another point against the decoration theory is that, as another commenter mentions, the words at the start of each entry in the botanical sections are unique, which would be unnecessary if it were just decoration
Not fake in the sense of being a document not of the age it seems to be from. But fake in the sense of pretending to be, but not really being a document with decipherable text, we don't know.
exactly. it could just be a mentally ill person creating and using a script of their own design I'm developmentally delayed, but i would do a similar system when I realized how similar pqbd was and WM symmetry was this might just be some artistic and autistic teenager's system we don't know what the hell it's saying. but it's not fake as in, it's genuine artifact, and we don't know the intentions. it's just unknown. it's like the concept of a crochet machine.
Just to play devils advocate a bit: would it be possible that the whole manuscript is legitimate and from the 1410-1425 period… but that the lettering was somehow altered to make the thing unintelligible for whatever reason? Or would ink analysis have picked up on that? Love the fashion break down! Dates the document very firmly!
@@adamshinbrotYes but this was insanely expensive to make so it would have been a very risky move unless you already knew of somebody who'd almost certainly buy it.
Having pinned down the date period of the manuscript might it be worth making a list of all known persons who lived then who had an deep interest in the type of material illustrated in the manuscript?
Yes. One issue is that many named figures we know of lived later. It's really only the big names that survive to this day. Who knows how many anonymous people with these kinds of interests were active in the first quarter of the 15th century?
@@geoffreypiltz271 Hartlieb is named sometimes, and would indeed be a good candidate if you really want a named author. Problem is, his active years are a bit late.
If it's a fake, then the person behind it went to great lengths, both personal and financial, to produce it in a time period where such materials were rare and highly expensive. It would have cost more to produce it than to sell it, defeating the purpose of being a scam. Occam's razor says that the simplest answer is usually the most logical and closer to the truth, and with that in mind it makes far more sense that the text itself is authentic. However it was probably written in an invented language only the author(s) used. That's why nobody can "crack" it, because it's not a code. It's an invented language. For what purpose? One can only speculate, but it clearly had a purpose to it. I personally hold the view that it was an early biology book of some sort, perhaps also tied with an Esoteric/Occult tradition based on the artistic depictions and alchemical symbols.
11:19 -- Vellum can be "recycled". There are a handful of extant manuscripts where the original underlying text was erased (well, scraped off) and new text applied to the surface.
Yes, these are called palimpsests. We know from imaging of the MS that the Voynich is not one. And I don't even think anyone claims this. This is probably something I should have mentioned though!
@koengheuens I wasn't suggesting that this was the case with the Voynich manuscript -- indeed I agreed with the proposed date of creation given the preponderance of the evidence -- but I wanted to highlight how many forgeries do make use of period-correct materials, even when they are actually created much later. Establishing the date of the canvas/vellum/paper does not guarantee the date of the painting/manuscript/print.
Whoever the unknown individual able to create such convincing fake is they deserves a metal And maybe if they put their genius into something more productive, we would be on Mars by now
Yeah exactly. This became increasingly clear to me as I was writing this video. If someone made this later, their expertise was so great that they literally became a medieval scribe. John Dee lived in a time where the subject of art history was virtually non-existent, and artists had the custom of adapting fashion to that of their own period. And Wilfrid Voynich was a trader, a businessman. Definitely not an art historian.
A video where you talk about what we can know about the author of the Voynich manuscript would be interesting. Like, is it fair to say he had a lot of disposable income?
Fascinating video! So, all evidence points to the manufacture date of the Voynich manuscript being in the early 15th century. Ok. But I would love to watch the forthcoming videos. Would it be too difficult to consider the text as pseudoscript, created purely for ornamental purposes? As for the mélange of real and fantastical plants, we should remember works by Gessner, Aldrovandi, and others, who depicted accurate renderings of local fauna alongside fantastic creatures, such as seven-headed snakes.
Over 50 years ago, during boring school classes, I used to cover my exercise books with long tracts of made up text. Sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, the lot. One time, a teacher walked past and said how creative it was, but that I really should be actually taking note of the lesson he was teaching! ;-) So for personal reasons, I feel the Voynich script is something similar, No malice or cheating - just text made up to look attractive on the page. The whole manuscript is a work of art - it doesn't contain any hidden secrets. It is art - that's all. A 'pastiche' of a contemporary (late Middle Age) scientific tract.
It's possible, though an objection would be that expensive and carefully prepared vellum is not exactly a notebook. They already had cheaper paper available to them in these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the VM turns out to be some kind of student's project though.
@@voynichtalk Oh no, that's not what I meant at all! I can relate to it because I did it at school, but I think this was some wealthy person with an art background, indulging themselves with a little project to raise eyebrows. Nothing to so with students or schoolkids. Sorry if I gave that impression - it never crossed my mind.
@@elio7610 I only said I could relate because I did it when I was a schoolkid. I didn't think the person who produced the VM was also a schoolkid! I think they were a wealthy person with creative tendencies, and leisure time, who did it as a form of art project. Sorry - I didn't make clear that it never crossed my mind that the VM was made by a student for fun! I think whoever did it had money, and time, and a creative itch.
I fell asleep to voynich manuscript videos a few times just cause they're long, and now it keeps recommending videos of it to me. I don't even know what the voynich manuscript is.
If you're a Blue Archive player I think you've heard of this. The game used various popular OOParts as skill leveling materials such as Voynich Manuscript, Baghdad Battery, Antikythera Mechanism, etc.
The Voynich manuscript was written between 1503 and 1509, under the direction of Julius Caesar Scaliger, on behalf of the imperial couple Maximilian I and Bianca Maria Sforza (Imperial House of Habsburg). The code for the decryption was sent to Yale University years ago, but they did not respond. In other words, the university does not want to know anything about it, wants to do the research themselves, which they are allowed to do, after all, many researchers earn good money from it, which is lost when decrypting it. The mysterious man they use as a symbol of their channel is Cesare Borgia, you can compare the image with oil paintings from the time. For example, the picture by the painter Giorgione, based on the model of the painter Altobello Melone. Take a close look at Giorgione's Cesare Borgia, as in the picture a veiled woman running after the devil is the woman Lucrezia Borgia. I think the picture is just as mysterious as the Voynich Codex is, except that nobody is interested in it to say it clearly and unambiguously. Don't make the mistake of using the parchment, which was dated between 1404 and 1448 (approximately), as the point of manufacture, which is what most Voynich enthusiasts do by mistake. The animals that provided the parchment were still alive at that time. The original estimate of the 16th century is correct. If you then look into the circumstances surrounding the codex, you will come across enormous things that unfortunately nobody is interested in, once again. Giorgione's picture is a copy of the picture by Melone, i.e. Cesare Boriga, who did not exist historically, which is the man who appears as an archer, the zodiac sign in the Voynich manuscript. Lucrezia Borgia appears as a virgin, the twins are Jofre Borgia and Sancia of Aragon (Bisceglie). The manuscript reveals the environment of the Boriga, Sforza, Aragon and D'Este families. But who is really interested in that, I tell you, absolutely nobody. It is much more interesting to constantly claim that the codex cannot be deciphered, which is easy, while researchers who have really worked on it are silenced, the code is known and can be found on TH-cam. But deciphering it is complex and not interesting from today's perspective, so let's leave it at that.
@@voynichtalk Ich hab's geschaut. Sie liegen falsch, aber was solls..., bla...bla... bla, der Codex wurde zu Beginn des 16. Jh. geschrieben unter Papst Alexander VI., wie erwähnt von Kaiserin Bianca Maria Sforza in Auftrag gegeben, unter der Leitung von Julius Caesar Scaliger. Der Mann taucht später bei Nostradamus wieder auf. Arbeitete angeblich 17 Jahre für Kaiser Maximilian. Der Codex wurde in Lazise am Gardasee v erfasst. Wissen sie warum der Codex 116 durchnummerierte Seiten besitzt? Rückwärts sind es 232 Seiten (nummeriert), nicht alle Seiten des Codex wurden dabei berücksichtigt. Wenn sie das herausfinden kommen sie dem Codex näher. Sie werden es nicht herausfinden, obwohl es sehr einfach ist, alles ist sehr einfach, wenn man das Umfeld der Entstehung kennt, da all diese Familien wie zuvor genannt , eng miteinander "verbändelt" waren. Seite 1 suchen sie die Symbolik, die sich darin offenbart, sie finden sie Alchemistisch, wie als Initialen, das Hilft, wollen sie den Codex wirklich entschlüsseln oder nur darüber philosophieren, was die meisten Pseudo-Forscher tun? Die Bildentschlüsselung auf Seite 79 ist überaus interessant, die bringt sie weiter, über die Initialen auf Seite 1.
The book is not a hoax. Voynich's book describes in detail the relationship between the process of living beings with their formation and their relationship with alchemy... While the emblem in the picture describes the process... Example: female = cathode male= anode, Planetary symbol=chemical elemental element. Red= anode current Green= cathode current Star= oksigen
I've never believed the manuscript was a fake, but it always struck me as pretty odd that if the author/scribe went to the trouble of inventing some super secure encryption in order to keep the contents secret, they'd then include so many images within the book, if those images bore any significance to whatever the text contained, it just wouldn't make any sense. But what do I know? I'm just a random idiot on the internet 🤔🤪😁
It's not uncommon for medieval images to also be "encoded" in a way. You don't even have to go to alchemy to find examples. A flute under a maiden's bed may mean that she's promiscuous. Stuff like that. They were used to non-literal imagery.
I'm aware it's common for scribes to include images on manuscripts, I think you misunderstood my point - why write down a secret in code, only to illustrate the exact meaning on the same manuscript? It'd be like the CIA including a handy key in plain text with every top secret message they sent to their field operatives. I'm not convinced the imagery is important to decyphering the text, unless it's also part of the code, forms some sort of public key perhaps, OR we are missing something significant entirely. Just a thought. There's a lot of nonsense on the internet about this manuscript, it's so nice to have something available to us from someone who actually knows what he's talking about by the way - thank you.
Maybe it's an early example of schizophrenia or autism originated outsider art, a mediaeval equivalent of Henry Darger's The Story of the Vivian Girls or Louis Wain's Cat paintings. It is not fake, but meaningless or almost meaningless (though it contained great meaning to the author).
That's what I think too. There's a lot of pieces of art like that in the modern day that would undoubtedly confuse potential future archeologists and researchers.
I’ve done quite a bit of academic research on outsider art (and I’m autistic to boot) and while I’m not sure how much I believe that’s what it is, I can definitely see the connection. It’s fairly obvious that the artist isn’t formally trained (pretty much the absolute baseline of any definition of ‘outsider art’ and it’s many offshoots) when compared to more formal manuscript art created by monks and scribes from the time. The fictional language also reminds me quite a bit of James Hampton’s ‘Hamptonese’, another very well known outsider artist whose language we’ve yet to decipher. It makes me both deeply saddened and deeply inspired to think how many beautiful and creative pieces of outsider art we may have lost through the centuries because of people’s lack of love or care for them and their creators
> Maybe it's an early example of schizophrenia or autism originated outsider art Maybe, or maybe the author had a stroke or a brain tumor; or literally any other pathology of the nervous system. It's a very 'modern' thing to attribute everything unusual as being the result of autism in particular. It's not a particularly informative exercise to speculate on his/her neurological function, there's just no way of knowing. It's a profound waste of time and effort, and reeks of terminally online Americans and their obsession with autism specifically. I say that as an aspie.
Usually, if we can't get an equation to work out, we check our assumptions and method. Maybe that's where the problem lies. Manuscript was manufactured in the early fifteenth century. Doesn't tell us when the content was made. Also - Koen is wrong about the archer's costume. . The hat isn't the type thy say it is, neither is the jacket... but why fuss about tiny details like that. Koen is a lucid and intelligent commentator.
At this point, the age seems to be settled. The question is: Is there anything encoded in the text, or is it just nonsense. A few years back, I have heard about some statistical analysis which indicates that it is indeed meaningless, due to certain repetitions which come at predictable intervals. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the details and also can’t seem to find it again. But whoever did it actually developed a heuristic with which he could replicate it. Or so I seem to remember. However, if true, that would mean that someone around 1410-1425 went through a whole lot of trouble developing such a heuristic, spent tons of money on parchment and put a lot of effort into writing the document, without obvious motive. So my follow-up question would be whether we know of a market for obscure books in the late Middle Ages? Were there people like Emperor Rudolf? Could it be feasible for this to have been a money making scheme? I certainly have never heard of that and it would seem to be more reasonable to simply copy a real book if you already have the parchment and the talent to do so. But then, encoding a proper text with an exceedingly complicated cypher also seems to be strange. Only the communication of state secrets or something comparable seem to warrant such an endeavour and those would be transmitted in letter form, not book form, let alone the fact that the illustrations don’t seem to fit that kind of thing at all. At this point, I’m leaning slightly towards the "nonsense content" camp. But it’s certainly strange either way.
I'm not aware of any clear figure like Rudolf in the Middle Ages. My impression is that manuscripts were preferably custom ordered by the wealthy. Anything is possible, but without concrete examples it's all speculation. I agree with your sentiment that this would be an utterly bizarre use of vellum for committing fraud. Therefore, I'm inclined to see the MS as something the makers produced for themselves. The question of meaning vs no meaning remains wide open. I still slightly prefer the former.
The Council of Constance brought many men of means, including prodigious book buyers like Poggio Bracciolini, to the Bodensee region for *four years*. I've always wondered if someone got to writing at this time, claiming to be able to present a unique Hermetic text.
This is definitely possible. The period of the council (1414-1418) and the years after it coincide well with my preferred narrower date range for the MS. This would still leave the question why and how they came up with this exact system though.
I remember Rene Zandbergen floating that idea around 2009. Nearly a quarter of century later, nothing has moved it beyond a flight of imagination. Maybe you could.
@@dianeodify Thank you, Diane! I believe that the best that could come of it at this point would really just be a work of historical fiction, a book and/or a movie, since we don't have anything beyond circumstantial evidence. The public's intrigue around the manuscript and witch trials could garner a penny at the box office.
A lot of people claiming it could be a work of a mentally ill person or someone autistic or some example of outsider art in the comments. But it feels the sheer cost of such an endeavor would eliminate that possibility, no?
Theories like these feel kind of weird to me, like a cop out. "Probably some crazy person did it". There is no way this could ever be demonstrated, especially within a society where religion and magical thinking are pervasive to begin with.
If you assume all the *content* was first created in fifteenth century, and in Europe, but you can't understand it, then why not test those first two premises. The manuscript itself was made then. If **everything in it** was 15thC European , we wouldn't be relying on a few tiny details selected from the drawings and... marginalia to make the argument.
There is some evidence that two different people wrote (or copied) the manuscript; apparently there are some subtle differences in the handwriting. Someone else may have done the illustrations.
to be frank, i love the Voynich Manuscript because it reminds me of the freebase cocaine addicts that scribble my hometown's walls with strange messages about piety, health and demons. i don't really care if it serves its original purpose anymore. for one, we know it's man-made, so whatever it means can't be more interesting than whoever devised it, and if you believe in it, in any way shape or form, to have been manufactured by a person, after all this time... is it important what it says, really? maybe the real Voynich Manuscript was the friends we made along the way, the things we learned on our time there, and the outlook it gave us in life. It really is a wonderful codex, in that sense. The closest to actual magic we have.
Great job! Wouldn't it also be useful to compare it to the dates of the herbal books that share the same plants illustrated by Voynich's scribes. Most interesting of all would be the dates of the books that share plants with Voynich that cannot be identified today.
That would be tricky. Herbal manuscripts are highly tradition-forming. The plants come in standard groups that are copied, recombined etc throughout the centuries. The Voynich is one of the very few known herbal manuscripts that absolutely does not adhere to any of these traditions... It's really hard to compare it to anything else.
@@voynichtalk I have read that some of the plants that can't be identified are found in at least one other herbal manuscript. Maybe that's where we should focus, the plants that can't be identified. Do I take it that you don't agree with Elizabeth Sherwood's identifications?
@@GeraldM_inNC well, I can't say that she's wrong about everything. But let's say her list of identifications is definitely not my favorite :) To be honest, my feelings about the plants have changed so often that I don't even know what to think anymore. If there is a connection, I'd probably say it's mostly to the Greek (i.e. Byzantine) traditions. See herculeaf.wordpress.com/2024/07/04/some-thoughts-on-dioscorides/
That was the first line of attack taken, because Wilfrid said the content was all medieval European. By 1967, they knew it was a dead-end. But people keep trying to do that.. again.. and again... but end up giving a potted history of herbals with a few images from the manuscript used as 'clip art' .
Not long after Lisa‘s last post on her TH-cam channel, I saw a castle with a swallow tail, battlements and the clay drainage tile. I saved it and never sent it to her. I regret it now. I think you might find it interesting. I’m pretty sure it was past Bulgaria More east not quite turkey or Armenia. I’ll have to look for it and find it for you. I think you’ll find it interesting
@@dudefish9517 yeah that would be cool. However, note that swallow tails were added to buildings in a much wider area after 1450. So some form of confirmation must be found that the merlons in questions aren't newer additions to the building.
One of the reasons why I researched and saved the site which I’ve since deleted. Was the clay tile sticking out of them gravel bank at the base of the castle wall. I mean, you could see the swallowtail and the sections of tile in same shot. I like your approach and give you credit for being concise.. Thanks for your response. Good luck with the channel.
Im more happy with this conclusion, someone will figure it out and that probably kills the mystery when it turns out to be the frst naughty cookbook XD
I'd rather buy a $300 knockoff of a kislux and have $3000 in the bank. At the end of the day it's just a bag and will wear out like any other bag. The cost of the raw materials isn't that high. The real question is, how much do you value the authenticity?
Yeah we had the first one this year (2024). We picked the 4th of August (04/08 in international notation) because the shelf number of the manuscript is Beinecke MS 408 :)
Some notes - 1. Good point that efforts to represent other scripts might be hopelessly inaccurate 'Pseudo-Kufic' - etc., doesn't imply dishonest intentions. 2. On the point of 'intention' - the term is commonly used in iconographic analysis, where it is near-synonymous with purpose. It bothers some amateurs, but as you rightly say when speaking about the painting by Mantegna, a person who has done their background research *can* discuss the maker's intentions - it's not to be called 'speculation' unless there's nothing more to it than guesswork. 3.The same goes for informed opinions about dating a manuscript. It all depends on how good the scholar is whose opinion is sought. Amateurs often forget that we have literally tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts, and still more paintings, all of which have been accurately dated by specialists - even as long ago as the 1800s without use of destructive tests such as radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon dating was seriously flawed - biased by the patron's unconscious biases. Also affected tests of pigments - only a very small number were selected; the palette is still much larger and mostly still undefined. 4. About titanium. A big difference between titanium in black ink, and titanium white paint. It is said that titanium was found in ink from one of Gutenberg's Bibles. The amount of research needed to address this question is huge - natural deposits, comparative analytical studies of inks, investigation of imported materials, history of 'india ink' and much more. HUGE research topic before any opinion possible. 5. Pigments have to be assumed added at, or later than, the time the manuscript was made so the clothing argument is dubious. Beside that, the investigations only looked at a very narrow range of a very few regions in Europe, so affected by a substantial bias in the fashions sampling. Sorry. 6. It's important not to fall into the trap of conflating information about a manuscript's manufacture, and the origin or date of what it contains. Showing that a copy of the Bible was made in fifteenth-century Italy doesn't make the Bible a fifteenth-century Italian composition, does it? That's why, I think, Fagin Davis specifies "fifteenth-century *object* 7. Also, ,I dispute your claiming that the book-dealer and scholar who gave the ms to Yale is a greater specialist in medieval art than Erwin Panofsky, who had correctly dated it (1410-1420-1430) in 1932 when everyone else still believed the 'Bacon' story.
You seem to have misunderstood: Helmut Lehmann-Haupt is not a book dealer. He got his PhD in art history, worked at various museums and was one of the most respected bibliographers at the time. I agree that I should have included Panofsky, but then explaining his turn towards the New World would have added 10 minutes to this video...
@@voynichtalk Yes, I know that Helmut Lehmann-Haupt was a scholar, but he was working with/for Kraus as his assistant, and spoke as agent for the bookdealer who was had been trying to find a buyer for the Vms. I also understand why you didn't want to mention Panofsky. After 1939, Panofsky didn't feel like openly opposing persons such as Friedman or O'Neill, and with good reason in McCarthy's America. But Panofsky's name has massively more weight, to this day, and he still had the right of it about dating and was the first to do it. He was also insistent, directly to Friedman, that it was genuine. To keep the balance, an historian has to be careful about what is included and what is effectively 'blanked' - but I'm sure you know that.
The monasteries would make a lot of the books by commission from various nobles and well to do citizens. It is not a stretch to think that at some point a monk cranked out nonsense for some illiterate that was buying a book as a status symbol. But this is exactly what these Ai LLM's could solve by comparing word associations and lengths to all known languages in a matter of hours.
My personal pet hypothesis is that the manuscript was written by a monk or a nobleman in a state of what we might now call psychosis/delusion/schizophrenia. From the rigid repetitiveness of Voynichese, which makes it unfit to convey any real meaning, to the plant drawings, which resemble those from treatises on herbology, but go ‘off the rails’ and depict plants that cannot possibly be real. To me, it all very closely resembles the writings of for example present day crackpot physicists, which often include nonsensical concepts and symbols, and are often little more than an impression of what mathematical formulas would look like to someone who has no real background in physics. The question is of course where a medieval crackpot would have gotten this much expensive vellum. Perhaps he was from a wealthy family.
For anyone interested in reading more, check Rene Zandbergen's opinion on the modern fake theory here: www.voynich.nu/extra/nofake.html
I can say this is the first time I've clicked on a Voynich Manuscript themed video and been hit in the face with factual and referenced research. Great stuff!
Thanks! Scripting this video did feel like writing an actual paper, but it's encouraging to see that people appreciate the extra effort.
I agree you did a good job. Lots of compelling arguments. Thank you for your time and effort. I subscribed and I’m looking forward to your next video.
A 'fake' implies that it's passing off as something that it's not. But it's anybody's guess what that authentic something even is.
Yes! If it's a fake, then a fake what exactly? The thing it is trying to be a fake of doesn't exist. We know from actual forgeries and fakes that they always intend to be clearly understood as something: a painting by Van Gogh, a page from a book of Hours, a manuscript leaf illustrating Columbus' arrival in the New World (the Spanish Forger did something like this).
@@voynichtalk I mean the answer is right there.. a fake document with mysterious unknown origins and meaning.
It seems fairly plausible that someone in the 1420’s made this up either to sell for money or possibly to convince people of mysticism.
Think of how many hoaxes exist today with creationists trying to prove dinosaurs and humans lived alongside each other or that aliens influenced early civilization.
Great video. Really interesting that you and others were able to narrow down the handwriting and fashion to such a narrow period. Very convincing
Thanks!
This is what YT does best. Clear, highly informative scholarly works for the masses.
I really like the way you broke down the "fake" theory in the end.
That was the most fun part to animate. Always gotta get some shootin' in there.
Truly an astoshingly refreshing dive into the Voynich Manuscript. Instant sub. I look forward to updates on the locations regarding the handwriting analysis, that is so interesting!
Awesome, thank you! We do have some surprising insights in the locations. If all goes according to plan, we will report on the study in full in August.
My issue with the theory of it being a fake has always been: why would you fake an ugly and unreadable book of herb-lore? A lot of effort and expense went into producing the manuscript, if it was a fake, made for profit, then why not make the subject matter something more appealing and valuable? The philosopher's stone, the holy grail, a cure for baldness, etc.?
This is a very good point. The vellum alone would probably have been more valuable. Such a big pile of unused pre-1450 vellum is extremely rare (I'm not sure if there is any known case. I do know of some later ones.)
My issue with this kind of stance (also often find in ufology) Is that humans will fake almost anything with any type of motivation. You literally cannot conclude that something is unlikely to be done by a human so it wasn't done by one. We have so many examples to the contrary
@@voynichtalk I think it's not a good point actually. The obvious answer is that if it *is* a fake, then it was intended to be as mysterious as possible, because that's what would get a lot of attention. And if that's the case then it clearly worked - the manuscript is now extremely famous and people are still talking about it to this day.
@@patavinity1262 but in that case, it would not be a fake. It would just be itself.
@@voynichtalk What do you mean? I'm pointing out that, if we entertain the hypothesis that it may have been created at a later date but was deliberately made to appear to be a mysterious manuscript of the 15th century (thus being a fake), then there is an obvious motive on the part of the creator to make it unreadable and strange.
Hey I just wanted to say thanks I found this channel about a month ago and watched all the videos within a day or two. I really enjoy medieval literature so I had heard about the voynich manuscript but it was fascinating to go on such a deep dive. Glad to hear you plan to try to post around once a month I was you the best that you for the content!
Thanks!
I’ve always been fascinated by the Voynich manuscript, I even own a copy, and I’ve been frustrated by 90% of the material I’ve read or watched about it ignoring and leaving out key and clear evidence in favor of humoring pet theories instead.
What you’re doing is so so awesome! I’ve been resigned to the reality of having to dig through academic papers myself or even do my own research for this kind of insight. I’m so happy someone is out there doing the work and providing good content that finally focuses on the surprising amount of information we can glean from the evidence, when people aren’t ignoring it favor of pet theories.
I love pinning down the sleeves and hat to 1400-1430, that’s new to me and very exciting!
One thing I didn’t see in the video, if I didn’t miss it, and you may mention it in other videos, but the crenelations on a wall depicted in the MS (don’t have the page number handy) is a particular kind , “dovetail” I think, authentic to 15th century Europe.
Sorry for the long comment, just so happy to find your channel!
@@ModernEphemera thanks! I know the feeling of frustration you describe, I felt the same when I first started reading about the MS. It's a mess out there. But since I still remember that feeling, I want to provide some solution :) I will make a video about swallowtail merlons later, it's on the shortlist.
Die Burg von Lazise am Gardasee, es gab zu jener Zeit nur zwei Burgen dort, mit die eine Turum-Bedachung hatten.
Sirmione (eine Burg der Templer und der Katharer), und Lazise. Die Burg stellt Lazise dar. Sie existiert noch immer, aber ohne das Dach über dem Turm. Auf zeitgenössischen Abbildungen des 15.16. Jh. ist der Turm noch zu sehen. Die Templer haben sich an den Gardasee zurückgezogen, nach wie vor findet man dort in jeder Kirche, das rote Kreuz des Templer-Ordens.
@@voynichtalk Thanks for the reply. I think it’s obvious the text genuinely dates to the early 15th century. I want to believe it has meaning but the thing that makes me believe it doesn’t is no mistakes or corrections. Apparently it’s extremely common for similarly dated manuscripts to have misspellings or other errors marked out and corrected. Apparently the Voynich manuscript has none. No need to make corrections if the text has no meaning in the first place.
That’s another thing I like about your video though, how you broke out the age, intent, and presence of meaning as entirely separate arguments from eachother. Sort of obvious when you think about it but I’ve never seen someone break it down like that, and it’s hard to do so if you’re approaching it from a specific theory.
Edit: But then again, regarding meaning, I’ve read that the botanical texts have unique Voynichese words at the start of each entry, which is pretty bizarre if the text is meaningless. Haven’t verified that myself yet though.
Greetings from the US, I absolutely love the extreme detail you go into with the videos, even to the degree of finding the exact decade of fashion. Incredibly amazing, you're the GOAT!
Wow, thanks!
Am I the only one who thinks it's plausible someone could just make up a language and make up fantasy herbs just like people today come up with fantasy languages, fantasy maps, fantasy creatures because they like fiction and fantasy as a genre? Someone in the past could have done that for the same reason.
Of course they did. Honestly, the Victorian era and its infatuation with mysteries and religious rituals is still present in how we in the West regard common life in the past.
Sometimes it is just as easy as someone a long time ago wanted to do a Thing. And now we speculate that the Thing is somehow a calender.
He says in the beginning of the video that it is plausible, so definitely not the only one. I won't comment on the language, but I don't think the herbal illustrations even need to be fantasy. Or rather, I don't think any medieval illustrator painted anything but fantasy herbs. If you look at any pre printing-press herbal guides, you'll notice a distinct lack of realism in the illustrations. I believe that most illustrators didn't even know what the plant looked like - and if they did, illustrations had to be exclusively left to artistic interpretation.
The Medieval version of "Everybody so creative!"
There is an xkcd comic about exactly this
If that’s the case the language would be easily found, but there is no language in the book. It even lacks an alphabet of the necessary size.
This is a very clear, highly informative and entertaining video! I can only recommend it to everyone who wants to know more about this manuscript.
Thanks! For anyone interested in reading more, check Rene's opinion on the modern fake theory here: www.voynich.nu/extra/nofake.html
You could also recommend it to those who don't want to know more. And why not? It's a great video
Pinned comment is from a bot or foreign speaking friend of content creator most likely. The wording is a literal translation that doesn’t quite track.
@@adamb.c.1553 Rene Zandbergen is one of the most well known Voynich researchers out there. Visit his site at voynich.nu.
Fantastic video! Recommended out of nowhere, and this is my first hearing about the manuscript, but I am now quite fascinated. I really appreciate your straightforward and measured delivery. Looking forward to more.
Thanks! I find clarity very important, so it's reassuring to hear that even people who hadn't heard about the manuscript before were able to follow.
I'm going to feed the algorithm before even watching this. A channel with 2k subs, tackling a well-covered and controversial subject, for 31minutes? I am impressed just by the ambition and initiative. The next 31minutes is your chance to win a sub.
Yep, this is something special. Focused script avoids rehashing the well-trodden narrative. Good (and real) voice. Detailed and thorough research. Superb production values. 10/10. you win a sub!
Thanks! I'd have ten times more views if I claimed to have solved it... But well, this is only my second video that got some more traction, so there is still room for growth :) To be honest I never even expected to reach anything close to 10k viewers.
I had no idea that hats and sleeves could so easily give away the date the manuscript was likely written! But it does make perfect sense: fashion between 1990 and now seems to have changed less than in 1390 to 1424, but I'd find it pretty easy to tell which decade a photo in a magazine was taken based on clothes alone.
The blossom hat doesn't lie...
yep! And it's not like it's something you can depend on by itself, an artist could always be depicting an older period, or just not up on the latest fashion, but when you combine it with other things that all point to the same narrow date range, it can form part of a very reliable dating
Thanks for your brillant content! Fellow historian here, expert for Minoan scripture. Really good work!
And other little things I discovered: There are a total of 104 two letter words possible in the Voynich script. There are 13 letters that can appear as a first letter, and 8 that can appear as a last letter. In English, that number is 26*26, so 676 possible two letter words. English has 127 two letter words, so about 18% of all possible combinations.
The Voynich script has 89 different two letter words. That's 85% of all possible two letter words. That doesn't make sense. Three letter words have similar problems.
The Voynich script does not make any sense as a directly written language. Perhaps the most confusing part is: The »words« get shorter from the beginning to the end of a line; and the same (but a little weaker) from the top lines to the bottom lines. And there are still some in-»word«-patterns, which are easily explained by different glyph forms on the start, in the middle and at the end of a word, until you notice how much the »alphabet« shrinks down to something, which simply can not be a direct represantation of phonemes of a language we know of.
That's the fascination of the Voynich manuscript: At a first glance, it looks easy and you don't unterstand, why it can be that hard to read it. And it seems to be written so incredible fluently, surely by a proficient hand. No trace of using elaborated cryptological calculations or tools. But the deeper one dives in it, the more the confusion gets overwhelming.
@goebelmasse I did some superficial checks on a transliteration. There's 29000 words. There are 6000 unique words. 4000 of them appears only once. That makes no sense.
Could the manuscript be some sort of accounting document? Maybe the symbols could be encoded numerals in a decimal or duodecimal system?
Thanks very much for this Koen! To add my 2 cents to the "Fake" arguement from a purely common sense standpoint and why it never made very much sense to me.
One or more statements are usually true.
1. A fake is made to look older than it is
2. A fake is made to look like it was by someone famous
3. A fake pretends to offer special/secret knowledge
4. A fake pretends to be more valuable than it is, or immitate something very valuable
(3 and 4 are more modern ideas of "fake" but I'll leave them in)
Answers.
1. You covered this in detail.
2. The manuscript does not attribute itself to anyone.
3. No one can read it. Also this would mean every alchemy manuscript is "fake".
4. The manuscript was made using relatively inexpensive componants and the artwork is poorly done.
So, what are you peddling to Rudolph?
I think all considered the answer you are left with is point 3.. which essentially means you wrote an alchemy book to sell, which is hardly a grand conspiracy and not a "fake".
Yeah, exactly. Regarding encoding, I guess people would only call the text fake if it pretends to be an encoded text, while in fact it's nonsense. But like I said in the video, meaning and the author's intentions can only be speculated about right now.
Yeah, my linguistics professor thought it was best described as a hoax rather than a fake. Its encoding is nonsense and 98% of the text encodes nothing even if the remaining 2% contains easter eggs. It isn't however faking its age.
I like the idea that one of the churches most important saints randomly created a book filled with gibberish for no reason.
very convincing breakdown! and excellent video as well
Thanks!
I just want to say thanks for all your hard work managing all that info
Thanks, I really appreciate that. This video represents months of work, including the previous research. But most of it was fun ;)
@koengheuens, 👍 In my opinion, it's really science.
Thank you @Koen, there is hardly a better way to summarize the current evidence for determining the age of the VMS.
Of course, there's a huge difference between dating an object, and dating or placing its text or its images.
Very impressive video. Also a great demonstration of the importance of digital humanities.
Very impressive analysis. You have the most well researched videos on the Voynich Manuscript.
This is some impressive research. Thanks for sharing it with those of us who only take a superficial interest in the subject.
incredibly good video man, thanks for your work 👍
It would be interesting to know what exactly it was that led to Voynich believing it was a work by the famous medieval scholars Roger Bacon or Albertus Magnus. That could eventually lead us to the possibility, that the manuscript indeed is a forgery, that of a skilled person in the early 1400, who sold it to a rich collector and lover of antique books, to which an original document that was presumably from the hands of no other than an already legendary figure like Roger Bacon would be very appealing to have in his own posession, The fact that it is written in a strange kind of secret writing could make it even more attractive, for the hypothetical buyer would most likely himself be a conaisseur of ancient texts, maybe hoping his scholarly expertise would allow him to decipher its meaning or even discover some sensational alchemystic revelation like the actual recipe on how to turn lead into gold...
The art of forging documents or other rare and special artifacts is a very ancient trade and it definitely existed in various form in the early 15th century,l most prominently in the form of the manufacturing of fake christian relics that were bought and sold for fantastic sums of money.
Anyway, I highly appreciate the solid approach of the video to give us an overview on reliable evidence on the Voynich Manuscript. A true You tube gem!
Dem Codex lag 1912 ein Brief bei, der auf Bacon verwies, was falsch ist.
Derselbe Brief erzählt auch, dass der dumme Kaiser Rudolf II. das Manuskript für überteuerte 600 Golddukaten gekauft hätte, was auch nicht stimmt, er hat es vererbt bekommen.
Der Codex wurde in etwa zwischen 1503 und 1509 geschrieben, also beginnendes 16.Jh. nicht 15. Jh. und schon gar nicht um 1400 AD, da die Tiere die das Pergament geliefert haben, 1400 noch gar nicht geboren waren.
Der Codex kann leicht entschlüsselt werden, nur scheint sich die Yale Universität dafür nicht zu interessieren, also sei es halt so, es ist doch viel interessanter darüber Märchen zu erzählen, als sich ernsthaft mit dem Codex zu befassen.
11:49 is there a reason you presume the vellum to be unused at the time of a possible forgery? could it not have been palimpsest?
It's been established by specialist that it's not a palimpsest. Indeed, if it were, we'd be looking at a completely different scenario.
Thank you so much for making this video! I love your approach, especially since the field is filled with crazy conspiracy people.
WOULD YOU please release that list of manuscripts... I would love to add and check for some of my own I have found throughout the years!!!
Which one do you mean? About the fashion or about the handwriting?
@@voynichtalk the manuscripts list he teases about... I have to know, lol...
That's for Voynich Manuscript Day, 4 August :)
Impeccable analysis!
Extremely well done video and thorough research, my hats off to you, sir.
Thanks!
I'm not an expert, but looking at the language they used it seems to me that it may in fact not contain any real information and the person who wrote it produced one or more books just to be decoration.
I'm no expert, and I'm not even a big Voynich follower! But language is always fascinating, so Voynich vids pop up in my recommends.
And one by this channel a while back mentioned the fact that the frequency analysis was out of whack, and that some characters seem to come up more often at the end of a page - nothing to do with the text, but the position on the page.
That convinced me that it was decoration.
I mentioned it in the comments on another Voynich channel, and the guy replied that he'd felt that way too, and discussed it at length elsewhere. I think our consensus would be; 'the pics have meaning, the text is gibberish'!
@@LittleNala But there was significant effort poured into producing said gibberish-it looks like a real script at first glance-which raises questions about the motives of the authors.
@@CjqNslXUcM Imitation. Could have been a mentally challenged person, autistic maybe. The person was able to "write" a book without being able to read, just by imitating what others do.
@@CjqNslXUcM
Absolutely! I would not deny for one second that it took a lot of work.
As Kobold666 below says, perhaps it was an autistic person (with access to funds, of course).
But have you seen the sort of things people do just for larks? They build the Notre Dame from matchsticks! The amount of time and cash I put into my own hobbies is embarrassing! ;-)
I honestly don't think the fact someone put a lot of effort into it is a deal breaker. People do all sorts of nutty stuff - always have.
@@CjqNslXUcM Another point against the decoration theory is that, as another commenter mentions, the words at the start of each entry in the botanical sections are unique, which would be unnecessary if it were just decoration
Not fake in the sense of being a document not of the age it seems to be from. But fake in the sense of pretending to be, but not really being a document with decipherable text, we don't know.
exactly. it could just be a mentally ill person creating and using a script of their own design
I'm developmentally delayed, but i would do a similar system when I realized how similar pqbd was and WM symmetry was
this might just be some artistic and autistic teenager's system
we don't know what the hell it's saying.
but it's not fake as in, it's genuine artifact, and we don't know the intentions. it's just unknown.
it's like the concept of a crochet machine.
@@nxtvim2521 This was exactly my thought--that it was the work of a mentally ill person.
Even if fake, it's still an incredible work of art.
A lot of fakes are.
What a cool video! Good job on the research!
Thank you!
I've been curious about the Voynich Manuscript for years. I'm just discovering your channel today, and I'm so glad it's here. :]
Great video on a very exciting subject - thanks a lot!
Just to play devils advocate a bit: would it be possible that the whole manuscript is legitimate and from the 1410-1425 period… but that the lettering was somehow altered to make the thing unintelligible for whatever reason? Or would ink analysis have picked up on that?
Love the fashion break down! Dates the document very firmly!
if it were a palimpsest, it would've been noticed
If there is no meaning in text, I wonder why somebody paid so much for the vellum unless there was a specific potential buyer.
First intelligent comment under this vid... 🙂
Maybe it was made with the intention of selling it to a specific wealthy buyer.
History is full of wealthy people spending fabulous sums on their insane projects without any intention of profiting.
@@wilhelmvonn9619Yes, that is what my comment already included.
@@adamshinbrotYes but this was insanely expensive to make so it would have been a very risky move unless you already knew of somebody who'd almost certainly buy it.
Having pinned down the date period of the manuscript might it be worth making a list of all known persons who lived then who had an deep interest in the type of material illustrated in the manuscript?
Yes. One issue is that many named figures we know of lived later. It's really only the big names that survive to this day. Who knows how many anonymous people with these kinds of interests were active in the first quarter of the 15th century?
@@voynichtalk Johannes Hartlieb?
@@geoffreypiltz271 Hartlieb is named sometimes, and would indeed be a good candidate if you really want a named author. Problem is, his active years are a bit late.
Thank you for this. Can't wait to see what the marginalia suggests is the place of writing.
Thanks! The regional study should be ready for presentation by August. I'll make some other videos in the mean time though :)
It's nice that some of the wonderful mysteries in the world aren't made up and sensationalized
If it's a fake, then the person behind it went to great lengths, both personal and financial, to produce it in a time period where such materials were rare and highly expensive. It would have cost more to produce it than to sell it, defeating the purpose of being a scam.
Occam's razor says that the simplest answer is usually the most logical and closer to the truth, and with that in mind it makes far more sense that the text itself is authentic. However it was probably written in an invented language only the author(s) used. That's why nobody can "crack" it, because it's not a code. It's an invented language.
For what purpose? One can only speculate, but it clearly had a purpose to it. I personally hold the view that it was an early biology book of some sort, perhaps also tied with an Esoteric/Occult tradition based on the artistic depictions and alchemical symbols.
Very good video. Thank you for uploading this
Glad you enjoyed it!
11:19 -- Vellum can be "recycled". There are a handful of extant manuscripts where the original underlying text was erased (well, scraped off) and new text applied to the surface.
Yes, these are called palimpsests. We know from imaging of the MS that the Voynich is not one. And I don't even think anyone claims this. This is probably something I should have mentioned though!
@koengheuens
I wasn't suggesting that this was the case with the Voynich manuscript -- indeed I agreed with the proposed date of creation given the preponderance of the evidence -- but I wanted to highlight how many forgeries do make use of period-correct materials, even when they are actually created much later.
Establishing the date of the canvas/vellum/paper does not guarantee the date of the painting/manuscript/print.
Amazing, and here I am writing like a toddler!
Honestly, I dont mind one way or the other. It's just so nutty, I'd love it if was published last year.
Good points, I love the breakdown. when I say it’s fake, I mean there is no meaning behind the images. That their art not codes.
Whoever the unknown individual able to create such convincing fake is they deserves a metal
And maybe if they put their genius into something more productive, we would be on Mars by now
Yeah exactly. This became increasingly clear to me as I was writing this video. If someone made this later, their expertise was so great that they literally became a medieval scribe. John Dee lived in a time where the subject of art history was virtually non-existent, and artists had the custom of adapting fashion to that of their own period. And Wilfrid Voynich was a trader, a businessman. Definitely not an art historian.
A video where you talk about what we can know about the author of the Voynich manuscript would be interesting. Like, is it fair to say he had a lot of disposable income?
That's a great idea! I will add it to my list of topics.
I enjoy Koen's deadpan humor.
Great video!
Fascinating video! So, all evidence points to the manufacture date of the Voynich manuscript being in the early 15th century. Ok. But I would love to watch the forthcoming videos. Would it be too difficult to consider the text as pseudoscript, created purely for ornamental purposes? As for the mélange of real and fantastical plants, we should remember works by Gessner, Aldrovandi, and others, who depicted accurate renderings of local fauna alongside fantastic creatures, such as seven-headed snakes.
Over 50 years ago, during boring school classes, I used to cover my exercise books with long tracts of made up text. Sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, the lot. One time, a teacher walked past and said how creative it was, but that I really should be actually taking note of the lesson he was teaching! ;-)
So for personal reasons, I feel the Voynich script is something similar, No malice or cheating - just text made up to look attractive on the page. The whole manuscript is a work of art - it doesn't contain any hidden secrets.
It is art - that's all. A 'pastiche' of a contemporary (late Middle Age) scientific tract.
Asemic writing.
The book is not exactly a cheap, mass produced, notebook, though. Would anyone use high quality paper so frivously back then?
It's possible, though an objection would be that expensive and carefully prepared vellum is not exactly a notebook. They already had cheaper paper available to them in these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the VM turns out to be some kind of student's project though.
@@voynichtalk
Oh no, that's not what I meant at all!
I can relate to it because I did it at school, but I think this was some wealthy person with an art background, indulging themselves with a little project to raise eyebrows.
Nothing to so with students or schoolkids. Sorry if I gave that impression - it never crossed my mind.
@@elio7610
I only said I could relate because I did it when I was a schoolkid.
I didn't think the person who produced the VM was also a schoolkid!
I think they were a wealthy person with creative tendencies, and leisure time, who did it as a form of art project.
Sorry - I didn't make clear that it never crossed my mind that the VM was made by a student for fun!
I think whoever did it had money, and time, and a creative itch.
I fell asleep to voynich manuscript videos a few times just cause they're long, and now it keeps recommending videos of it to me. I don't even know what the voynich manuscript is.
@@Guts3570did you fall asleep to this one? 😭
@@voynichtalk no, but make it about an hour longer and I will
If you're a Blue Archive player I think you've heard of this.
The game used various popular OOParts as skill leveling materials such as Voynich Manuscript, Baghdad Battery, Antikythera Mechanism, etc.
The Voynich manuscript was written between 1503 and 1509, under the direction of Julius Caesar Scaliger, on behalf of the imperial couple Maximilian I and Bianca Maria Sforza (Imperial House of Habsburg).
The code for the decryption was sent to Yale University years ago, but they did not respond.
In other words, the university does not want to know anything about it, wants to do the research themselves, which they are allowed to do, after all, many researchers earn good money from it, which is lost when decrypting it.
The mysterious man they use as a symbol of their channel is Cesare Borgia, you can compare the image with oil paintings from the time. For example, the picture by the painter Giorgione, based on the model of the painter Altobello Melone.
Take a close look at Giorgione's Cesare Borgia, as in the picture a veiled woman running after the devil is the woman Lucrezia Borgia. I think the picture is just as mysterious as the Voynich Codex is, except that nobody is interested in it to say it clearly and unambiguously.
Don't make the mistake of using the parchment, which was dated between 1404 and 1448 (approximately), as the point of manufacture, which is what most Voynich enthusiasts do by mistake. The animals that provided the parchment were still alive at that time. The original estimate of the 16th century is correct.
If you then look into the circumstances surrounding the codex, you will come across enormous things that unfortunately nobody is interested in, once again.
Giorgione's picture is a copy of the picture by Melone, i.e. Cesare Boriga, who did not exist historically, which is the man who appears as an archer, the zodiac sign in the Voynich manuscript. Lucrezia Borgia appears as a virgin, the twins are Jofre Borgia and Sancia of Aragon (Bisceglie).
The manuscript reveals the environment of the Boriga, Sforza, Aragon and D'Este families. But who is really interested in that, I tell you, absolutely nobody.
It is much more interesting to constantly claim that the codex cannot be deciphered, which is easy, while researchers who have really worked on it are silenced, the code is known and can be found on TH-cam. But deciphering it is complex and not interesting from today's perspective, so let's leave it at that.
@@ninamira8051 please rewatch video
@@voynichtalk Ich hab's geschaut. Sie liegen falsch, aber was solls..., bla...bla... bla, der Codex wurde zu Beginn des 16. Jh. geschrieben unter Papst Alexander VI., wie erwähnt von Kaiserin Bianca Maria Sforza in Auftrag gegeben, unter der Leitung von Julius Caesar Scaliger. Der Mann taucht später bei Nostradamus wieder auf. Arbeitete angeblich 17 Jahre für Kaiser Maximilian. Der Codex wurde in Lazise am Gardasee v
erfasst.
Wissen sie warum der Codex 116 durchnummerierte Seiten besitzt?
Rückwärts sind es 232 Seiten (nummeriert), nicht alle Seiten des Codex wurden dabei berücksichtigt.
Wenn sie das herausfinden kommen sie dem Codex näher.
Sie werden es nicht herausfinden, obwohl es sehr einfach ist, alles ist sehr einfach, wenn man das Umfeld der Entstehung kennt, da all diese Familien wie zuvor genannt , eng miteinander "verbändelt" waren.
Seite 1 suchen sie die Symbolik, die sich darin offenbart, sie finden sie Alchemistisch, wie als Initialen, das Hilft, wollen sie den Codex wirklich entschlüsseln oder nur darüber philosophieren, was die meisten Pseudo-Forscher tun?
Die Bildentschlüsselung auf Seite 79 ist überaus interessant, die bringt sie weiter, über die Initialen auf Seite 1.
The book is not a hoax.
Voynich's book describes in detail the relationship between the process of living beings with their formation and their relationship with alchemy... While the emblem in the picture describes the process... Example: female = cathode male= anode,
Planetary symbol=chemical elemental element.
Red= anode current
Green= cathode current
Star= oksigen
I've never believed the manuscript was a fake, but it always struck me as pretty odd that if the author/scribe went to the trouble of inventing some super secure encryption in order to keep the contents secret, they'd then include so many images within the book, if those images bore any significance to whatever the text contained, it just wouldn't make any sense. But what do I know? I'm just a random idiot on the internet 🤔🤪😁
It's not uncommon for medieval images to also be "encoded" in a way. You don't even have to go to alchemy to find examples. A flute under a maiden's bed may mean that she's promiscuous. Stuff like that. They were used to non-literal imagery.
I'm aware it's common for scribes to include images on manuscripts, I think you misunderstood my point - why write down a secret in code, only to illustrate the exact meaning on the same manuscript? It'd be like the CIA including a handy key in plain text with every top secret message they sent to their field operatives. I'm not convinced the imagery is important to decyphering the text, unless it's also part of the code, forms some sort of public key perhaps, OR we are missing something significant entirely. Just a thought. There's a lot of nonsense on the internet about this manuscript, it's so nice to have something available to us from someone who actually knows what he's talking about by the way - thank you.
@@ste76539perphaps the lenguage is knowed and the manuscript was for someone? Thats why the creator likely put drawing.
Maybe it's an early example of schizophrenia or autism originated outsider art, a mediaeval equivalent of Henry Darger's The Story of the Vivian Girls or Louis Wain's Cat paintings. It is not fake, but meaningless or almost meaningless (though it contained great meaning to the author).
That's what I think too. There's a lot of pieces of art like that in the modern day that would undoubtedly confuse potential future archeologists and researchers.
I’ve done quite a bit of academic research on outsider art (and I’m autistic to boot) and while I’m not sure how much I believe that’s what it is, I can definitely see the connection. It’s fairly obvious that the artist isn’t formally trained (pretty much the absolute baseline of any definition of ‘outsider art’ and it’s many offshoots) when compared to more formal manuscript art created by monks and scribes from the time. The fictional language also reminds me quite a bit of James Hampton’s ‘Hamptonese’, another very well known outsider artist whose language we’ve yet to decipher. It makes me both deeply saddened and deeply inspired to think how many beautiful and creative pieces of outsider art we may have lost through the centuries because of people’s lack of love or care for them and their creators
> Maybe it's an early example of schizophrenia or autism originated outsider art
Maybe, or maybe the author had a stroke or a brain tumor; or literally any other pathology of the nervous system.
It's a very 'modern' thing to attribute everything unusual as being the result of autism in particular. It's not a particularly informative exercise to speculate on his/her neurological function, there's just no way of knowing. It's a profound waste of time and effort, and reeks of terminally online Americans and their obsession with autism specifically.
I say that as an aspie.
Usually, if we can't get an equation to work out, we check our assumptions and method. Maybe that's where the problem lies. Manuscript was manufactured in the early fifteenth century. Doesn't tell us when the content was made. Also - Koen is wrong about the archer's costume. . The hat isn't the type thy say it is, neither is the jacket... but why fuss about tiny details like that. Koen is a lucid and intelligent commentator.
At this point, the age seems to be settled. The question is: Is there anything encoded in the text, or is it just nonsense. A few years back, I have heard about some statistical analysis which indicates that it is indeed meaningless, due to certain repetitions which come at predictable intervals. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the details and also can’t seem to find it again. But whoever did it actually developed a heuristic with which he could replicate it. Or so I seem to remember.
However, if true, that would mean that someone around 1410-1425 went through a whole lot of trouble developing such a heuristic, spent tons of money on parchment and put a lot of effort into writing the document, without obvious motive.
So my follow-up question would be whether we know of a market for obscure books in the late Middle Ages? Were there people like Emperor Rudolf? Could it be feasible for this to have been a money making scheme? I certainly have never heard of that and it would seem to be more reasonable to simply copy a real book if you already have the parchment and the talent to do so.
But then, encoding a proper text with an exceedingly complicated cypher also seems to be strange. Only the communication of state secrets or something comparable seem to warrant such an endeavour and those would be transmitted in letter form, not book form, let alone the fact that the illustrations don’t seem to fit that kind of thing at all.
At this point, I’m leaning slightly towards the "nonsense content" camp. But it’s certainly strange either way.
I'm not aware of any clear figure like Rudolf in the Middle Ages. My impression is that manuscripts were preferably custom ordered by the wealthy. Anything is possible, but without concrete examples it's all speculation.
I agree with your sentiment that this would be an utterly bizarre use of vellum for committing fraud. Therefore, I'm inclined to see the MS as something the makers produced for themselves.
The question of meaning vs no meaning remains wide open. I still slightly prefer the former.
The Council of Constance brought many men of means, including prodigious book buyers like Poggio Bracciolini, to the Bodensee region for *four years*. I've always wondered if someone got to writing at this time, claiming to be able to present a unique Hermetic text.
This is definitely possible. The period of the council (1414-1418) and the years after it coincide well with my preferred narrower date range for the MS. This would still leave the question why and how they came up with this exact system though.
I remember Rene Zandbergen floating that idea around 2009. Nearly a quarter of century later, nothing has moved it beyond a flight of imagination. Maybe you could.
@@dianeodify Thank you, Diane! I believe that the best that could come of it at this point would really just be a work of historical fiction, a book and/or a movie, since we don't have anything beyond circumstantial evidence. The public's intrigue around the manuscript and witch trials could garner a penny at the box office.
A lot of people claiming it could be a work of a mentally ill person or someone autistic or some example of outsider art in the comments.
But it feels the sheer cost of such an endeavor would eliminate that possibility, no?
Theories like these feel kind of weird to me, like a cop out. "Probably some crazy person did it". There is no way this could ever be demonstrated, especially within a society where religion and magical thinking are pervasive to begin with.
If you assume all the *content* was first created in fifteenth century, and in Europe, but you can't understand it, then why not test those first two premises. The manuscript itself was made then. If **everything in it** was 15thC European , we wouldn't be relying on a few tiny details selected from the drawings and... marginalia to make the argument.
@dianeodify >we wouldn't be relying on a few tiny details
We aren't?
Did you watch the video?
Terrific video.
thanks!
I think it was written by a brilliant and talented, albeit severely mentally ill man. I think no deceit was intended.
Yeah. Kind of like the medieval Temple OS.
I don't think you need to be mentally ill to imagine things or put made up things on vellum.
@@vogonp4287 Medieval dementia.
@@vogonp4287 Definitely my favorite comparison.
There is some evidence that two different people wrote (or copied) the manuscript; apparently there are some subtle differences in the handwriting. Someone else may have done the illustrations.
Who else waited for Johnny D to fall back down
He's still in orbit.
to be frank, i love the Voynich Manuscript because it reminds me of the freebase cocaine addicts that scribble my hometown's walls with strange messages about piety, health and demons. i don't really care if it serves its original purpose anymore.
for one, we know it's man-made, so whatever it means can't be more interesting than whoever devised it, and if you believe in it, in any way shape or form, to have been manufactured by a person, after all this time... is it important what it says, really? maybe the real Voynich Manuscript was the friends we made along the way, the things we learned on our time there, and the outlook it gave us in life. It really is a wonderful codex, in that sense. The closest to actual magic we have.
Great job! Wouldn't it also be useful to compare it to the dates of the herbal books that share the same plants illustrated by Voynich's scribes. Most interesting of all would be the dates of the books that share plants with Voynich that cannot be identified today.
That would be tricky. Herbal manuscripts are highly tradition-forming. The plants come in standard groups that are copied, recombined etc throughout the centuries. The Voynich is one of the very few known herbal manuscripts that absolutely does not adhere to any of these traditions... It's really hard to compare it to anything else.
@@voynichtalk I have read that some of the plants that can't be identified are found in at least one other herbal manuscript. Maybe that's where we should focus, the plants that can't be identified. Do I take it that you don't agree with Elizabeth Sherwood's identifications?
@@GeraldM_inNC well, I can't say that she's wrong about everything. But let's say her list of identifications is definitely not my favorite :)
To be honest, my feelings about the plants have changed so often that I don't even know what to think anymore. If there is a connection, I'd probably say it's mostly to the Greek (i.e. Byzantine) traditions. See herculeaf.wordpress.com/2024/07/04/some-thoughts-on-dioscorides/
That was the first line of attack taken, because Wilfrid said the content was all medieval European. By 1967, they knew it was a dead-end. But people keep trying to do that.. again.. and again... but end up giving a potted history of herbals with a few images from the manuscript used as 'clip art' .
If you were ever a Dungeon Master you know what this is.
Depends upon what one might mean by "fake"?
But is it "real"? idk tough call
Are those Pages scanned with uv for find former images like happens with old man made bibles and the former hebrew words they have??
@@kaiokendo yes, it's been scientifically determined that it's not a palimpsest. The writing is original.
@voynichtalk has a former image the parchments???
Not long after Lisa‘s last post on her TH-cam channel, I saw a castle with a swallow tail, battlements and the clay drainage tile. I saved it and never sent it to her. I regret it now. I think you might find it interesting. I’m pretty sure it was past Bulgaria More east not quite turkey or Armenia. I’ll have to look for it and find it for you. I think you’ll find it interesting
@@dudefish9517 yeah that would be cool. However, note that swallow tails were added to buildings in a much wider area after 1450. So some form of confirmation must be found that the merlons in questions aren't newer additions to the building.
One of the reasons why I researched and saved the site which I’ve since deleted. Was the clay tile sticking out of them gravel bank at the base of the castle wall. I mean, you could see the swallowtail and the sections of tile in same shot. I like your approach and give you credit for being concise.. Thanks for your response. Good luck with the channel.
Im more happy with this conclusion, someone will figure it out and that probably kills the mystery when it turns out to be the frst naughty cookbook XD
Ok fine, you got me, I wrote it
20:06 I need a tattoo of this
Always thought the script in this manuscript looks alot like Sindarin from Lord of the Rings, I wonder whether Tolkien did that on purpose?
I'd rather buy a $300 knockoff of a kislux and have $3000 in the bank. At the end of the day it's just a bag and will wear out like any other bag. The cost of the raw materials isn't that high. The real question is, how much do you value the authenticity?
Can it be a knockoff if nothing like it exists?
Imagine trying to code break someone's illustrated fanfic
Really Voynich manuscript day is on my birthday? This is a sign hahae.
Yeah we had the first one this year (2024). We picked the 4th of August (04/08 in international notation) because the shelf number of the manuscript is Beinecke MS 408 :)
@koengheuens That makes sense!
imagine if people are just trying to decode medieval lorem ipsum
very impressive!
This video like almost all videos fails to explore the real issue with the manuscript. THE WRITING!!
A deep analysis of the writing needs to be done.
My guess is that it was just an art project to practice using the pen and drawing...
What if it’s just a sketch book?
Some notes -
1. Good point that efforts to represent other scripts might be hopelessly inaccurate 'Pseudo-Kufic' - etc., doesn't imply dishonest intentions.
2. On the point of 'intention' - the term is commonly used in iconographic analysis, where it is near-synonymous with purpose. It bothers some amateurs, but as you rightly say when speaking about the painting by Mantegna, a person who has done their background research *can* discuss the maker's intentions - it's not to be called 'speculation' unless there's nothing more to it than guesswork.
3.The same goes for informed opinions about dating a manuscript. It all depends on how good the scholar is whose opinion is sought. Amateurs often forget that we have literally tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts, and still more paintings, all of which have been accurately dated by specialists - even as long ago as the 1800s without use of destructive tests such as radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon dating was seriously flawed - biased by the patron's unconscious biases. Also affected tests of pigments - only a very small number were selected; the palette is still much larger and mostly still undefined.
4. About titanium. A big difference between titanium in black ink, and titanium white paint. It is said that titanium was found in ink from one of Gutenberg's Bibles. The amount of research needed to address this question is huge - natural deposits, comparative analytical studies of inks, investigation of imported materials, history of 'india ink' and much more. HUGE research topic before any opinion possible.
5. Pigments have to be assumed added at, or later than, the time the manuscript was made so the clothing argument is dubious. Beside that, the investigations only looked at a very narrow range of a very few regions in Europe, so affected by a substantial bias in the fashions sampling. Sorry.
6. It's important not to fall into the trap of conflating information about a manuscript's manufacture, and the origin or date of what it contains. Showing that a copy of the Bible was made in fifteenth-century Italy doesn't make the Bible a fifteenth-century Italian composition, does it? That's why, I think, Fagin Davis specifies "fifteenth-century *object*
7. Also, ,I dispute your claiming that the book-dealer and scholar who gave the ms to Yale is a greater specialist in medieval art than Erwin Panofsky, who had correctly dated it (1410-1420-1430) in 1932 when everyone else still believed the 'Bacon' story.
You seem to have misunderstood: Helmut Lehmann-Haupt is not a book dealer. He got his PhD in art history, worked at various museums and was one of the most respected bibliographers at the time.
I agree that I should have included Panofsky, but then explaining his turn towards the New World would have added 10 minutes to this video...
@@voynichtalk Yes, I know that Helmut Lehmann-Haupt was a scholar, but he was working with/for Kraus as his assistant, and spoke as agent for the bookdealer who was had been trying to find a buyer for the Vms. I also understand why you didn't want to mention Panofsky. After 1939, Panofsky didn't feel like openly opposing persons such as Friedman or O'Neill, and with good reason in McCarthy's America. But Panofsky's name has massively more weight, to this day, and he still had the right of it about dating and was the first to do it. He was also insistent, directly to Friedman, that it was genuine. To keep the balance, an historian has to be careful about what is included and what is effectively 'blanked' - but I'm sure you know that.
It's real. A real fake. It says nothing.
there’s no basis for pronouncing the V in Voynich as an F
Its a Germanic pronunciation.
@ if by ‘Germanic’ you mean German/Dutch, but Voynich was Polish/Lithuanian/Russian, then later Polish/British
The text contains no meaning in any known European language, whether or not it was made in the early 1400's.
Really looks like those schizophrenic writings that you might see sometimes.
That it might have been created by someone that was illiterate or mentally ill is not entirely implausible.
The monasteries would make a lot of the books by commission from various nobles and well to do citizens. It is not a stretch to think that at some point a monk cranked out nonsense for some illiterate that was buying a book as a status symbol.
But this is exactly what these Ai LLM's could solve by comparing word associations and lengths to all known languages in a matter of hours.
By the early 15thC few monasteries had active scriptoria any more. The monastic rules and focus changed over time.
Its an og junk journal.
I've yet to hear any rebuttal to the linguistic analysis highly suggesting its just some algorithmically generated gibberish.
I'm having bacon for breakfast today. Thanks Koen! ;)
Enjoy! ;)
Fantastic video, as usual. Thank you.
Its almost certainly a fake created by a con artist in historical times.
My personal pet hypothesis is that the manuscript was written by a monk or a nobleman in a state of what we might now call psychosis/delusion/schizophrenia. From the rigid repetitiveness of Voynichese, which makes it unfit to convey any real meaning, to the plant drawings, which resemble those from treatises on herbology, but go ‘off the rails’ and depict plants that cannot possibly be real. To me, it all very closely resembles the writings of for example present day crackpot physicists, which often include nonsensical concepts and symbols, and are often little more than an impression of what mathematical formulas would look like to someone who has no real background in physics.
The question is of course where a medieval crackpot would have gotten this much expensive vellum. Perhaps he was from a wealthy family.
But what does it say?!
Naw jp