Two wrong assumptions

There are two fundamental assumptions regarding the Voynich ms. that I think are mistaken, at least as they are commonly understood:

1. It is a scientific treatise.
2. It is a medical treatise.

Scientific Treatise

There is a widespread assumption that the work contains cutting-edge science done by an early scientific genius (with the corollary that it was written in cipher to protect it from the Church and other enemies of modern science.)

This is what encourages people to see canisters as microscopes.

It is better to regard it as a deviant work of traditional cosmology than as a work of proto-science. Although it might be described as ‘early modern’ (synonymous with 'late medieval') it does not prefigure modern science. Rather, it presents a development of medieval cosmology that did not lead into modern science. It is not a lost work from the science/progress narrative.

This assumption accounts for a huge number of serious misreadings of the work throughout its entire history including the belief it was written by Roger Bacon (because it must have been written by one of the heroes of modern science.)

Underpinning this type of scientism is such spurious reasoning as:

1. It is written in a cipher.
2. The best cryptologists and modern computers cannot crack the cipher.
3. Therefore, it must be the work of a genius and contains secrets of advanced science.

Many versions of this reasoning are rife in Voynich Studies.

Medical Treatise

The work does not present a system of medicine. It provides no account of anatomy, physiology or disease. It is better described as a work of pharmacology, but even then a rustic folk pharmacology rather than that of the urban apothecary.

More specifically, it seems to be a work that concerns a tradition of herb gathering. The centrepiece of the work is not a human figure with astrological correspondences such as we might find in a medical text: it is a map of a very specific region.

The only things depicted in the work are herbs, their (stellar) astrological correspondences, cycles of the year, a map and methods of preparing and preserving herbs. There are no depictions of the medical applications of the herbs. Rather, on my reading, the work concerns the where and when of collecting wild herbs within a particular landscape.

It is not a medical text as such: it is a text about herb gathering.

The medical text assumption leads to such spurious reasoning as:

1. There are lots of naked women
2. Therefore it is a work about gynecology.

(With the corollary that it is encrypted to protect it from a male-dominated Church etc.)

Both of these assumptions - the scientific treatise and the medical treatise - are almost structural in the study of the Voynich manuscript. Both of them routinely lead researchers astray. 

The hypothesis presented in these pages attempts to have a more nuanced approach to these matters, avoiding wrong conclusions from exactly these assumptions. (The Ladin tradition is a tradition of herb gatherers, and the Cusean intellectual model in which I want to place the work is rationalist but not empiricist and, while it contributed to things like Paracelesean medicine, it made no contribution to modern science as we understand it.) We misconstrue the work if we regard it as either scientific or medical in an unqualified modern sense. In both cases, I think it is a work outside of those categories.

R.B.