I recently radared a Voynich Manuscript namecheck in a short online blogpost riffing on meaning, love and secrecy. If you manage to get past the author’s densely-textured surface style, there are some good moments in there:

  • The secret assures us the nearly sure possibility of content but retracts its guarantee at the very limit of its donation. The secret does not only tease, it seduces.
  • The secret and its content are terrible adversaries and anyone who confuses the content of a secret with the secret itself is an imbecile.

I rather like the image conjured up of the secret and the content being at war with each other – it is certainly true that we Voynich researchers spend a lot of time hunting for places where the content overflows the jar, subtly breaking the visual monotony of the ciphertext factory. These are the casualties lining the battlefront of this curious civil war, and are almost paratextual insofar as they comfortably reside on neither side of the line.

For me, the strange paradox that emerges from this is that even though the ciphertext artefact side of the Voynich Manuscript is known as “the most mysterious manuscript in the world”, if its contents ultimately prove to be as hyperrational as I suspect then there should be no great degree of interpretation involved in reading it – no symbolism, no allusion, no internal textual layeredness. That is, perhaps the Voynich Manuscript’s contents will turn out to be the least mysterious manuscript in the world?

10 thoughts on “The least mysterious manuscript in the world…

  1. Of course you know I feel that the Voynich borrows from reality, but is most probably a fantasy document. So I agree with you in a broad sense, although I would (in my case) use “no symbolism, no allusion…” to “very little symbolism, some allusion, to some known or unknown fictional premise, culture, or literature”. In a couple of your recent posts, you seem to be thinking of the possibility of irrationality to the Voynich. Can I take that to a opening to a fantasy document? And/or to meaningless content, to match the (possibly) partly-meaningless illustrations? Rich.

  2. Rich: for now, I remain wedded to the notion that what we see in the VMs is unreadable by dint of hyperrationality rather than of irrationality. My “no symbolism, no allusion…” remark was most definitely pointed at the plaintext. Of course, it is possible that the VMs does indeed prove that bored scribes can obfuscate ‘squeamish ossifrage’ countless ways… but for now that remains a (hopefully) somewhat ironic jest. 🙂

  3. Gotcha. Thanks… Rich.

  4. Dennis on March 16, 2010 at 5:50 pm said:

    In other words, it’s mysterious like a Rorschach blot is? It means nothing, but the meaning is what we project, and that’s trivial?

  5. Dennis: no, not really – rather, that there’s probably a sharp comparison between the very mysterious ciphertext and the very unmysterious plaintext.

  6. Diane on March 17, 2010 at 6:23 am said:

    Sorry to be dull, but I think its just another example of a script, and language, that we’ve lost.

    The most *interesting* thing for me is that anything like this survived into the early fifteenth century.

    Engaging though: especially the way it uses a particular symbolic notation – not as cipher; more as a visual shorthand.

    I’m thinking in particular of the symbols used to mark the directions on fol.66v and on the map. Very engaging.

    I also love the spotted lily-tail “lion.”

    But occult secrets? Anything’s possible, I suppose.

  7. Diane on March 17, 2010 at 6:28 am said:

    PS – very clever post, Nick. yum.

  8. Rene Zandbergen on March 17, 2010 at 12:30 pm said:

    What little plaintext we do have is rather mysterious…

  9. Rene: don’t get me started on different types of unreadability again. 🙂

  10. Diane: the particular problem I have with ancient language Voynich theories is the way that the “4o” pair also appears in a whole set of (far less complicated) 1440-1456 cipher alphabets linked to the Sforza retinue / court. To me, it resembles a ciphertext, it has mucked-around statistics like a ciphertext, and its alphabet has an unusual character pair that appears in cipher alphabets from near-enough exactly the same period as its vellum dating. Of course, I have no idea how old its content will turn out to be – but for now the story that it is a mid-Quattrocento artefact both in its execution and in its cryptography seems fairly hard to budge. Opinions differ, though! 🙂

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