Author Profile

The hunt for the author, our perpertrator, (one of the great time-wasters of history) goes on. 

What can we say about him? What can we say for sure? 

"Just the facts, ma'am." 

Unfortunately, the Voynich world is post-fact. Not only does no one agree on anything, no one can agree on anything. 

But there are things which, by any legal measure, are beyond reasonable doubt, given the balance of probabilities. (Yes, the burden of proof is different in a court of law than it is in a laboratory.) 

Profiling our author ought to be a central exercise in these studies:

*Our author is an early Renaissance humanist who is motivated by the recovery of ancient learning.

*He is situated in northern Italy.

*He is therefore an educated man and may have attended an Italian university and received a humanist education (perhaps, in this period, in addition to the scholastic curriculum.) 

*He is a person known to us in history, most likely as a minor humanist; not someone unknown, yet not someone famous. 

*He was active and engaged in private study. The Voynich manuscript may have been a side project and he is otherwise known to us for things unrelated. 

*He is multilingual but speaks German which is possibly his first language.

*He speaks and reads Latin and has a deep familiarity with (has studied) the Latin manuscript tradition. 

*He is probably not unfamiliar with Greek, even if not fluent. 

*He may have travelled to Greece or more likely had association with Greek emigres in Italy.

*He is a student of Greek mythology.  

*He is familiar with or knows of the Lapidary of Alfonso, probably indirectly. 

*He is familiar with and has studied and contemplated the Brescia copy of the Canones of Ptolemy, directly. 

*He is an acquaintance of the Bishop of Brescia who held the Canones manuscript in his library at the time. 

*He is interested in recovering the ancient teachings of Ptolemy. 

*He is a student of both botany and astrology (and possibly geography; that is, the Ptolemaic sciences.)  

*He and his illustrator have more training in technical drawing and cartography than in botanical drawing and depictions of the human form. 

*He did not have unlimited means. He was not wealthy. His manuscript project did not have lavish backing from a wealthy sponsor. 

*He was a Christian, but whether clergy or laity is an open question. His motivations are not religious in this instance. 

* * *

There is scant evidence that our author may have been a woman. Few, if any, women of the period answer to the above interests, connections and education. Proposals that a woman wrote the work are based on a misreading of the illustrations as concerning women's health. 

We cannot surmise how old the author might have been. (My guess is younger rather than older. A young man with intellectual energy.) 

Placing our author in northern Italy, when the Lapidary of Alfonso is in Spain, does not present difficulties. For a start, the great scholarly works created by Alfonso were already over a century old and were famed. 

Most obviously, Catalan tutors and teachers were well established in northern Italian universities and brought the Spanish/Arab intellectual legacy with them. We do not need to have our author visit Madrid. 

By the standard of the Voynich illustrations, we might suspect our author has not seen the glories of the Alfonso Lapidary itself, but knows it secondhand, by description. 

But he knows the Brescia Canones firsthand. It was his encounter with that work - and especially its icon of Helios - that was the stimulus, the catalyst, that moved him to create the Voynich manuscript. 

* * *

Who fits this profile? 

Even if this profile is only partially accurate and some of its details are wrong or miscontrued, we can surely identify a likely circle of candidates in the relevant period? 

In my view, the connection with Ptolemy's Handy Tables (Canones) is the most secure and offers the best locus of inquiry. Our author knows that work, and we know where that work was: in the library of the Bishop of Brescia. 

Here is a name that ought to be on the short list but I have never seen mentioned: Bartolomeo Bayguera. 

He was a small-time humanist notary who worked for the Bishopric of Brescia for most of his life. 

He was in a position to have long-term access to Ptolemy's Canones.

He was a lesser character on the sidelines of the early Renaissance humanist movement, and was in the right area at the right time. 

* * *

There is a recent tendency in research to concentrate on the scribes. It has been established that a small team of scribes worked on the manuscript (hardly a surprise really), either  concurrently or at different times, and there is the task of tracking their contribution to the production of the text.

But this draws attention away from the author.

What do we mean by author? In his recent posts, Bob Edwards has called the Voynich author the 'Producer' - he who organised, funded and designed the project. 

Edwards proposes that, beyond that, the 'Producer' may have left the scribes with considerable latitude. 

How much direction and oversight did the Producer provide? 

It is hard to imagine that this 'Producer' was as vague as telling his team, "I want lots of circles!" He surely provided designs and instructions in cosiderable detail. He was the cosmologist, not the scribes. He was the botanist, ot the scribes. The nymphs were his idea, not the scribes. 

In any case, the work seems a singular conception, as does the strange text and script, and it was surely the brain-child of one individual - a humanist - not something cobbled together by a committee. 

In the beginning, the idea of the manuscript took shape in the mind of some individual. 

Who was this person - we will call him the Author - and what do we know about him?

The early Renaissance humanist movement was not as widespread and ubiqitous as some might imagine. The circle of humanist scholars was not extensive. It was, at this stage, a limited phenomenon. The range of possible candidates is not vast and prohibitive. It should be possible to narrow it to a short list of contenders. 

Remarkably, on this, as on nearly all other matters, not a single inch of progress has been made in the last hundred years. This speaks much more about the inadequacy of investigators and failed methodologies than it does about the inpenetrability of the problem. 

The failure to gather agreement and to move forward on that basis is a critical and structural difficulty. We have known most of what we will ever know about the Voynich manuscript since at least  the 1970s. We just haven't joined the dots. 

R.B.