A Methodological Principle

The methodological challenges of the Voynich ms. – reputedly a “black box” – are fascinating. I want to suggest a methodological principle:

Where there is a choice between accident and design, give the benefit of the doubt to accidents.

On a macro scale this principle is effective against conspiracy theories. Did the manuscript disappear from a known whereabouts for 100 or so years by the accidents of history or was it deliberately kept hidden by the Bavarian Illuminati?

On a micro scale the principle is useful against the proliferation of detail. Does every flick and wriggle of the ink render EVA letter K into 30+ different forms by design or are they the accidents of the writing of various scribes? To apply the principle to the case: it is more likely there is one letter K with accidental scribal variations than to suppose the variations constitute intended linguistic elements or a hidden cipher.

It is a working principle, and it may not always be right, but it is right enough often enough to enable study to begin and proceed.

In a profoundly ambiguous work like the Vms. there are dozens of instances where the question is: is that by accident or by design? In principle, arguments that attribute things to design carry a heavier burden of proof. Accident is the default position.

 
The principle is akin to the popular adage: Never attribute to genius what you can attribute to stupidity. 

I apply this principle to the herbal illustrations. What I see is a catalogue of awkwardly drawn herbs and plants rendered according to certain medieval (cartoonish) conventions. Our difficulty in identifying the plants is more likely due to the poor drawings than to a deliberate ambiguity. Similarly, a rustic and untrained illustrator better explains any weird things in the herbal illustrations than to suppose they are ingenious visual ciphers. Such proposed ingenious visual ciphers require a strong measure of proof.

The text is an acute problem. There is every sign that it is indeed carefully designed, and so the question is harder to answer. It seems the same vord may be spelt various ways throughout the text. By design, a clue to structure, or the accidental outcome of pre-modern casual attitudes to spelling? If we had more samples of Shakespeare’s signature we might accuse him of combinatorics. When vords break rules, to what extent can we plead scribal error? How many unique words in the text are mistakes?

In general, I’m inclined to give a fair bit of latitude to the accidents of history, coincidences, sloppy handwriting, bad drawing, faulty memory, misspellings, miscalculations, scribal slips, authorial oversight and the messy detritus of reality and human fallibility. Some people think the marginalia on the last page of the manuscript is deliberately cryptic: I put it down to lousy handwriting.

The methodological problem is always where to draw lines and where to make distinctions. It can be a uniquely difficult task when studying a “black box” text with no obvious point of entry. There is all the more need for some guiding methodological rules of thumb.