Here’s a suggestion for a Voynich Manuscript paper that I think might well be revealing: taking raking IR images of f116v. But why would anyone want to do that?

Multispectral imaging

Since about 2006, I’ve been encouraging people to take multispectral images of the Voynich Manuscript, i.e. to capture images of the manuscript at a wide variety of wavelengths, so not just visible light.

My interest here is seeing if there are technical ways we can separate out the codicological layers that make up f116v. To my eyes, there seem to be two or three different hands at play there, so it would make sense if we could at least partially figure out what the original layer there looked like (before the other layer was placed on top, I guess at least a century later).

And in fact one group did attempt multispectral scanning, though with only a limited set of wavelengths, and without reaching any firm conclusions. (They seem not to have published their results, though I did once stumble across some of their test images lying around on the Beinecke’s webserver.)

The Zen of seeing nothing

Interestingly, one of that group’s images of f116v was taken at 940nm (“MB940IR”), which is an infrared frequency (hence “IR”). This revealed… nothing. But in what I think is potentially an interesting way.

Here’s what it looks like (hopefully you remember the michitonese at the top of f116v):

Main banks Transmissive

That’s right! At 940nm, the text is invisible. Which is, of course, totally useless for normal imaging. For why on earth would you want to image something at a wavelength where you can’t see any detail?

Raking Light

The interesting thing about this is that one kind of imaging where you’d want the text itself to be as invisible as possible is when you’re doing raking illumination, i.e. where you shine an illuminating light parallel to the surface. At the edges of penstrokes (if you’re looking really closely) at high-ish magnification, you should be able to use this to see the shadows of the edge of the indentations left by the original quill pen.

And so I’ve long wondered whether it might be possible to use a 940nm filter (and a non-LED light source) and a microscope / camera on a stand to try to image the depth of the penstrokes in the words on f116v. (You’d also need to use an imaging device with the RG/GB Bayer filter flipped off the top of the image sensor; or a specialist b&w imaging sensor; or an old-fashioned film camera, horror of horrors!)

What this might tell us

Is this possible? I think it is. But might it really be able to help us separate out the two or more hands I believe are layered in f116v? Though I can’t prove it, I strongly suspect it might well be.

Why? Because vellum hardens over time. In the first few years or so after manufacture, I’m sure that vellum offers a lithe and supple writing support, that would actually be quite nice to write on. However, fast forward from then to a century or so later, and that same piece of vellum is going to be harder, drier, more rigid, slippier, scrapier – in short, much less fun to write on.

And as a result, I strongly suspect that if there are two significantly time-separated codicological layers on f116v, then they should show very different writing indentation styles. And so my hope is that taking raking IR images might possibly help us visualise at least some of the layering that’s going on on f116v, because I reckon each of these 2+ hands should have its own indentation style.

Will this actually work? I’m quietly confident it will, but… even so, I’d have to admit that it’s a bit of a lottery. Yet it’s probably something that many should be able to test without a lot of fuss or expense. Does anyone want to give this a go? Sounds to me like there should be a good paper to be had there from learning from the experience, even if nothing solid emerges about the Voynich Manuscript.

10 thoughts on “Voynich Paper Suggestion #5: Raking IR images of f116v

  1. James Pannozzi on April 17, 2022 at 6:03 pm said:

    While you’re at it, be sure to suggest Ultraviolet light scans.

    All sorts of surprises may be uncovered.

    It’s the right track though. In the end, it may be technological
    sophistication rather than cryptological cleverness that
    removes the curtain.

  2. D.N.O'Donovan on April 17, 2022 at 7:08 pm said:

    Nick,
    Have you seen the Boyle and Burgess volume? In 2016, one of the contibutors, Eric Weiskott, put up short blogspost about his contribution in advance of publication. A para from the blogpost reads:

    quote
    My essay, “Multispectral Imaging and Medieval Manuscripts,” … introduces a new digital approach to medieval manuscripts by summarizing a Mellon-funded project in the digital humanities at Yale University.
    endquote

    https://ericweiskott.com/2016/04/03/multispectral-imaging-and-manuscripts/

    Jennifer E. Boyle, Helen J. Burgess (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature (2017)

  3. Hi Nick! This is totally unrelated to this topic, but it’s something I’ve wondered about for a very long time:
    Has the VMs ever been examined by a genuine expert in Latin paleography?

  4. Dennis S.: the Voynich Manuscript has indeed been examined by many Latin palaeography experts. Years ago, the main debate was whether its upright hand was a Carolingian hand or a 15th century hand: we now know it was the latter. Then the debate became whether it was a humanist hand or a (hybrid) humanistic hand (i.e. a hand ‘informed’ by humanist letter-forms, but not actually a humanist hand): again, we now know it was the latter. Palaeographers should (in my opinion) then have gone out looking for the closest hands they can find to try to narrow this down further – I went through numerous dated palaeography collection books at the British Library, and the closest I found was a 1450 hand from Rome. But there is plenty of room for this to be taken further.

  5. D.N.O'Donovan on April 20, 2022 at 9:01 am said:

    Nick,
    sorry to be a pain, but while I’m happy to accept that, within the range of Latin hands, that in the Vms is nearest to a mid-fifteenth century hand attested in Rome, it’s a comparative, not an absolute. If the range of hands investigated is limited by assumptions about what you expect should be the answer then you’ll only get an answer in the ‘more like’ or ‘less like’ range within that pre-determined range.

    I’m not arguing that it’s ultimately right or wrong; only that you can’t say “we know” as if it were a final word. If the Voynich text were written by a humanist in 1400, the range is more limited still, and you have the undeniable difficulty then that the page layout is not even remotely like a work produced by one of the Italian literati at that time. None of the neo-Greek simplicity, not even evidence (so far as I’ve seen) of the invariable – absolutely invariable – Latin practice of ruling out.
    Problems do remain to be addressed with any ‘humanist hand’ position – whether it’s ultimately proven right or not.

  6. Diane: it’s not a humanist hand, that’s the exact point. But it is a “humanistic hand”, which is just an annoying way of saying “the hand of a scribe who has been trained to use a humanist hand but who in the process of writing in a different type of style gives inadvertent hints as to their humanist training”.

  7. Darius on April 20, 2022 at 8:32 pm said:

    F116v ‘word/words of the goat’ (heretical material, see the feet of the beauty here), disrespectful, deriding comments after each passage…

    My expectations, limited by assumptions, is a clear range: papal scribes by say ~90%. And yes, you had this supposition, many times, definitely. I have my translations and for me that enough. If a hand can be identified which ‘inadvertent hints as to humanist training’ that would be fantastic! What about Flavius Blondus and his chancery colleagues – a spontaneous idea – an admirer of Titus Livius.

  8. D.N.O'Donovan on April 20, 2022 at 10:19 pm said:

    Nick, It’s easier to accept the idea of a ‘group of humanist-trained scribes’. Hired scribes would work on anything they were paid to work on and wouldn’t be troubled in the least by a format, or content, which would have offended the aesthetic sensibilities of the humanist literati. But then you come back to that niggling problem -a group of western Christian scribes who didn’t rule out their pages.
    Ah well, time enough to resolve that problem when more important ones have been dealt with. Thanks for the reply.

  9. Anon on July 20, 2022 at 7:44 pm said:

    Has anyone had an abstract accepted for the Voynich 2022 conference?

    What were your impressions of the submission process?

    @Nick – Did you submit any proposals/abstracts to the Voynich 2022 conference?

  10. Anon: no Voynich paper proposals from me this year, I’ve been hyperfocused on other Premier League cipher mysteries (as readers perhaps can tell).

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