What was God thinking when he created the platypus? Is it a mammal or a bird? A warmblooded hairy semiaquatic egg-layer? What sort of mammals lay eggs, live in water and have a bill like a duck? By any measure it is one of the strangest critters on Earth.
The Voynich manuscript bears comparison: it is the platypus among medieval herbal manuscripts. What exactly is it? How do we classify it?
By now it should be abundantly clear that the Voynich manuscript is not your garden variety Renaissance codex. It is, at very least, unusual. But how unusual is it?
The platypus is unusual, but once we place it among the other unusual fauna of the Australian continent it perhaps seems slightest less freakish.
The Voynich manuscript is weird, but there are plenty of other weird manuscripts from the same period. Modern readers might be inclined to consider it utterly unusual. In fact, it is a specimen in a menagerie of texts that strike modern readers as odd.
The platypus doesn’t come from another planet. It is just a strange by-way of evolution. So too, the Voynich manuscript is not beyond explanation; it is, perhaps, some sort of hybrid but it is not entirely outside the literary norms of its period. There is a tendency to exaggerate its oddity.
But there is also a tendency to downplay it. There are those who want to say that the manuscript is not so weird, but is rather just a middling and somewhat crude work that is probably no more mysterious in content than a few recipes for treating period pain, if it is not an outright hoax made for ignoble purposes. But this is like calling a platypus just another swamp rat. No, it's not an extraterrestrial, but neither is it a rodent.
It is important to have a well-honed estimation of where the Voynich stands among manuscripts, to what extent it is typical of its period and kindred literature and to what extent it is idiosyncratic and unfathomable.
It seems to me that, however we consider it, the manuscript, like the platypus, is at very least an outlier among its kind. The kangaroo is pretty strange, too, but it is nothing compared to the platypus. At least it doesn't lay eggs!
Whatever solution we offer to the mysteries of the Voynich, there is no escaping the fact that something about it is unprecedented. Even if it is a hoax, it is a hoax on a scale unlike other hoaxes. If it is a cipher it must be a cipher unlike others. If it is some sort of Latin text, its Latin has been rendered unlike other Latin texts. If it's a natural language, it is not any of the major languages, or even the known minor ones.
Similarly, wherever we turn in the work we find things that have no real parallel in our canon. The herbs are not the usual herbs. The astrology is not the usual astrology. There is nothing unusual about a crudely drawn astrological herbal, but there is about this particular crudely drawn astrological herbal. In fact, the strangeness extends throughout the whole work. It belongs to a genre, but within that genre it is an outsider.
It is important to remember this and modify our expectations accordingly. Exceptionalism is not a strong category of argument here. If someone proposes that the herb illustrations encode information in a strange or complex way, it is not a strong argument to say, "No other work does that." Well, no, the Voynich is an outlier. We must expect unexpected things. Why do we expect it to conform to norms and precedents?
Assuredly, it is subject to limits set by its historical context and its genre, but there is no reason why we cannot find things in the Voynich that are exceptional and unprecedented. It appears to be, after all, a private book. It is made for a small readership, possibly as small as one. It is happily eccentric.
For practical purposes we cannot be content to say "It looks like X but it cannot be X because no other manuscript does X." We must allow for the platypus.
R.B.
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