Voynich Reconsidered: manuscripts and printed documents

As I observed in my new book Voynich Reconsidered (Schiffer Publishing, 2024), the Voynich manuscript was written on a vellum based on calfskin. Samples from four pages have been analysed for their radiocarbon content. These analyses established that, with a high probability, these pages were produced in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the first movable-type printing press in Europe. In 1455, he published the celebrated Gutenberg Bible.

In the light of these dates, and with regard to the nature of the presumed source documents of the Voynich manuscript, it seems to me that at least two hypotheses are permissible

• that the text was written in the second half of the fifteenth century: in which case, printed documents would have been available in many cities in Europe (and I conjecture that the Voynich producer might have preferred to use printed documents, for their low cost, uniformity and ease of distribution)
• that the text was written in the first half of the fifteenth century, in which case the Voynich producer would probably have had only manuscripts as source documents.

In an earlier article on this platform, I reported on my provisional mappings of selected Voynich "words" to words in medieval Galician, as represented by the first printed edition of Crónica Troiana, published in 1490.

There is a prior manuscript edition of Crónica Troiana, dated 1373, written by Fernán Martis as a prose translation from the French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure. I have a scanned pdf of the Martis manuscript; it has OCR text but the OCR is not usable. From a comparison of the first pages of the 1373 and 1490 editions, it's clear that the printed edition expanded the earlier abbreviations and concatenations, for example:

• "oconto" in 1373 became "o conto" ("the story") in 1490
• "q̃ndolles" in 1373 became "quando lles" ("when to them") in 1490.

The first six lines of Crónica Troiana, in the 1373 manuscript by Fernán Martis and in the first printed edition of 1490. Image credits: Fernán Martis, additional graphics by author. Higher resolution at https://flic.kr/p/2qijED9

I have provisionally reconstructed a digital text of the Martis manuscript by identifying some of the most common abbreviations and concatenations, and reverse-engineering them from the 1490 text. The resulting digitised text of the manuscript should permit an alternative calculation of the Galician letter frequencies, and thereby an alternative mapping from Voynich glyphs to Galician letters.