Is heretical content the reason for the unique script in the Voynich?
The script itself, being new, necessarily conceals. It restricts readership to those who can read the new script. Why has this been done in this instance?
In the historical context, a common (and often pressing) reason for concealment is to avoid accusations of heresy and/or to discuss matters heterodox. It must be considered a strong possibility. Namely: the Vms. is in a unique script in order to conceal content which may have been deemed heretical or unorthodox.
But against this is the fact that the manuscript is visually abundant. In form (and by construction) it is a book of illustrations accompanied (overwritten?) with a text (commentary?)
Are the illustrations not also heretical then? If the authorities were to catch you with this book, what would they make of the pictures? Would they suspect the work of heretical content? Or are the pictures benign to hide the far more heretical nature of the text? Or are the illustrations just as encoded as the text – a totalized encipherment of text and pictures both?
Once again we run into the axial problem of the uncertain relation between text and illustrations.
I don’t detect anything stridently or blatently heretical in the illustrations. They are odd, but benign. I would describe the work as nominally Christian, but not ecclesiastical.
It is, in any case, a work of the natural sciences (cosmology) and not a theological or religious text, first and foremost. Religious matters are not forefront. But it may entertain cosmological heresies, heliocentrism and so on.
Of course, those who held theological heresies were often drawn to speculative and unorthodox cosmologies, so theological heresies may, in that case, be implicit.
Another possibility is that the cosmological doctrines in the text are external importations: the unfiltered teachings of the infidel. But then the text doesn’t knit well with the illustrations (and the map) which I think are local, not exotic.
My point is, though, that the illustrations are not explicitly heretical. It is a copiously illustrated work, and I don’t think the illustrations convict the illustrator of any obvious heresy.
But nor do they confirm the illustrator in orthodoxy. It is Christian, but not explicitly Catholic. I note that the explicit Christian symbolism in the ms. is restricted to the map (Christian architecture) and to the nymphs. There seems to be a concern to show that the naked nymphs, at least, are Christians.
I am personally of the opinion that the marginalia on the last page, featuring crosses + and the word MARIA (as far as I can tell) is perhaps some sort of Christian benediction.
The script itself, being new, necessarily conceals. It restricts readership to those who can read the new script. Why has this been done in this instance?
In the historical context, a common (and often pressing) reason for concealment is to avoid accusations of heresy and/or to discuss matters heterodox. It must be considered a strong possibility. Namely: the Vms. is in a unique script in order to conceal content which may have been deemed heretical or unorthodox.
But against this is the fact that the manuscript is visually abundant. In form (and by construction) it is a book of illustrations accompanied (overwritten?) with a text (commentary?)
Are the illustrations not also heretical then? If the authorities were to catch you with this book, what would they make of the pictures? Would they suspect the work of heretical content? Or are the pictures benign to hide the far more heretical nature of the text? Or are the illustrations just as encoded as the text – a totalized encipherment of text and pictures both?
Once again we run into the axial problem of the uncertain relation between text and illustrations.
I don’t detect anything stridently or blatently heretical in the illustrations. They are odd, but benign. I would describe the work as nominally Christian, but not ecclesiastical.
It is, in any case, a work of the natural sciences (cosmology) and not a theological or religious text, first and foremost. Religious matters are not forefront. But it may entertain cosmological heresies, heliocentrism and so on.
Of course, those who held theological heresies were often drawn to speculative and unorthodox cosmologies, so theological heresies may, in that case, be implicit.
Another possibility is that the cosmological doctrines in the text are external importations: the unfiltered teachings of the infidel. But then the text doesn’t knit well with the illustrations (and the map) which I think are local, not exotic.
My point is, though, that the illustrations are not explicitly heretical. It is a copiously illustrated work, and I don’t think the illustrations convict the illustrator of any obvious heresy.
But nor do they confirm the illustrator in orthodoxy. It is Christian, but not explicitly Catholic. I note that the explicit Christian symbolism in the ms. is restricted to the map (Christian architecture) and to the nymphs. There seems to be a concern to show that the naked nymphs, at least, are Christians.
I am personally of the opinion that the marginalia on the last page, featuring crosses + and the word MARIA (as far as I can tell) is perhaps some sort of Christian benediction.
*****
In my Cusean Ladin hypothesis, two sensitivities arise:
I think the work may be some application of Llull’s Ars Magna extended to the natural sciences. Llullism in the relevant period is contested and doctrinally suspect. Nicholas of Cusa – Llull’s biggest fan, and avid collector of Llull manuscripts – was highly influenced by Llullism, yet only mentions Llull’s name twice in his entire ouvre. He was very careful about mentioning Llull. There were contemporary campaigns against Llullism.
If the text is explicitly Llullist, there might – in the relevant period – be reason to conceal the content with a unique script.
The second sensitivity in my preferred scenario is that the Ladin traditions – which I see depicted in the illustrations – were at this time subject to sustained accusations of witchcraft. Such an atmosphere of suspicion might give cause to invent a new script in which to record matters too easily demonized by witch hunters.
In either case, heresy or witchcraft, the invention of the script would be explained as an act of self-protection. Such an explanation would hold good if the text is either a natural language or a cipher.
For all of that, though, I am not convinced that that is what we have. Even though we have an unfamiliar script which restricts readership to in-house, I do not detect a prime motive of concealment in the work as a whole. On the contrary: it is a very generous work, light-hearted in places. Nor is it combative. There are no signs of contention. It is not born out of conflict. There is no atmosphere of good vs. evil. It is appears to be innocently expository. It may be a preservation document – it preserves material threatened with censorship. But again: no sign of contention, no obviously adversorial content.
To eliminate another possibility, it contains no military images and offers no scenario in which military or diplomatic secrets are being concealed. It is set apart from works like those of Fontana and the cipher-makers. It does not seem to participate in the same intellectual world of espionage, political intrigue and warcraft. I don’t detect those sophistications either on the face of things or as a subtext. There seems to be no subterfuge behind the script. If the work is not very religious: it is even less political.
We are always taken back to the conundrum: why is such an inoffensive or even banal text written in an invented script? To conceal what from whom? What is it about the illustrations that required a script other than the Roman script or other existing scripts?
****
There are other reasons why people make new scripts. I keep an open mind on other possibilities.
For instance, the reason may not be to restrict readership but, on the contrary, to facilitate readership. That is, if it is a script encoding a previously oral-only tongue. This is a possibility in the historical context too, because it was an age of congealing national identities based largely on languages. Many peoples might have had an incentive to create (or try to create) a new script to distinguish their language from others. In that case, we only need to explain why this attempt failed.
Such a scenario fits far better in terms of the text’s relation to the illustrations. A neat configuration would be:
The illustrations depict the Ladin alpine herbal tradition.
The plaintext is Ladin.
The script has been made to bring oral Ladin into writing and give it a distinct script.
Too neat. But it may double-up with the aforementioned concealment motives. As well as giving a script to Ladin, it also has the effect of concealing misunderstood traditions from witch hunters. And there’s no reason it cannot be a Llullian text (about a Ladin landscape) in Ladin. (why not? Llull wrote in Catalan.) The script might both advance the Ladin language, and conceal sensitive content in one move. Indeed, some combination of motives might have led to a situation where necessity was the mother of invention.
R.B.
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