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Has Someone Messed with the Voynich Manuscript?

This question has often been asked, along with assertions that the entire document is a hoax. It took scientific analysis to establish that the text was probably added in the early 15th century rather than centuries later by Wilfrid Voynich, the book dealer who acquired the document from a Jesuit cache.

Even if all the text were written in the early 1400s, that still doesn’t guarantee it was all done by one hand. It has been suggested a number of times that several people contributed to the VMS.

There are at least three styles of handwriting: 1) the main text (one hand or possibly more), 2) the marginalia and last page, and 3) the labels under the zodiac symbols.

Analysis suggests there may be two underlying “languages” or patterns to the text, as well. But what about the handwriting itself?

That’s a long subject and probably should be released as a paper rather than a blog article, but there’s an interesting example on one of the plant pages that certainly looks like someone has altered the original text by adding extra characters.

The Voynich “Style”

Before illustrating the unusual text, it’s necessary to look at how letters are normally formed in the VMS. I’ll use a specific character as an example, taken from the same page as the anomalous characters.

There is a glyph that somewhat resembles a leaning “r” with a backwards-looping tail that occurs frequently in the VMS. The tail varies but the stem is drawn in a reasonably consistent way. It leans back at approximately the same angle and is somewhat blunt on the ends, with minimal or no uptick at the bottom of the stroke to join it to the next letter as is found on the glyph that resembles an “a”. You can tell from the thick and thin strokes that the VM author holds the quill to a slightly left-leaning angle.

Now, take a look at the last two lines of text on Folio 10r. Unusual characters have been added that do not match the shape of normal VM glyphs.

Jan van Bijlert Saint Luke the Evangelist Detail, Christie’s Amsterdam 13 April 2010

Note: Some of these details may not be apparent to the viewer if you have never learned calligraphy (or spent a number of hours carefully studying the shapes of the VMS characters). Subtleties such as the angle of the pen are hard to discern unless you have training and you might want to consult the original high-resolution scans so you can look at these details more closely than they are illustrated here.

The Added Characters

On the last four lines of Folio 10r are several anomalous characters. I’ve highlighted the main text r-with-tail in blue and the anomalous characters in red (I hesitated about including the “o” on the second-last line as it’s probably a regular VM character).

These characters differ from the surrounding text in a number of ways. It’s also possible that the figure-8 glyph on the bottom line has been added (or overwritten) by another hand but it’s hard to tell and it is contextually consistent with the main text, so I’m assuming it’s part of the regular text.

Note that in the unusual characters, the pen is held at a slightly different angle. On the high-res scans, you can particularly see this in the bottom “o” character which leans a tiny bit more to the left and correctly applies the thick and thin characteristics of a calligraphic “o” that is not usually seen in regular VM “o” shapes. Notice also that the average size of the added “o” glyphs (particularly the bottom one) is slightly larger than the average size of the “o” in the main text.

It’s not just the shape and size of the 1st and 3rd “o” that are different, note that the added characters are tightly spaced (four of them touch adjacent characters), which is unusual for VMS script. Also note that the positions of the first and second “o” are inconsistent with the usual VM text formula for glyph placement. The “4” character is rarely preceded by other characters, it’s usually preceded by a space, and it’s very unusual for it to be preceded by an “o”. It is typically followed by an “o”.

The leaning “r” glyph differs even more from the main text than the “o”—it’s barely recognizable as a VMS character. It doesn’t have the typically straight stem, it’s not as blunt at the beginning or end of the stroke, and the stem curves backwards in a very nonVMS way.

It doesn’t connect the tail in the same way, either. The VMS “r” is created in two strokes like the c/e with a tail—first the stem, then the tail, with the tail attached slightly below the top of the stem. The anomalous “r” appears to be drawn in a continuous stroke, from bottom to top left and adding the tail without lifting the pen, so that the tail attaches to the top of the stem rather than partway down. Even if it were drawn in two strokes, the attachment is at the very top and there is almost a hook on the top-left that doesn’t occur in the regular VMS “r”.

Why Add Extra Characters?

It’s odd that only a few characters would be added in a very specific place on this page.

Was it to obscure the underlying meaning or to correct it? Was it to clean up the margin?

It doesn’t appear to be a correction to the sound or meaning of the text, because the first “o” appears to be incorrectly placed by someone who hasn’t noticed the glyph-combination patterns that dominate the rest of the manuscript. Either the scribe knew something we didn’t know or understood it even less than contemporary researchers.

It also doesn’t seem likely that text was added to clean up the left margin because the margin on this page was fairly wavy anyway, adding a few characters at the bottom (especially if the second “o” was part of the original text) doesn’t significantly alter the overall impression of the page.

You’re probably wondering if this alien hand appears elsewhere in the document. I think it does, although the example on the left from Folio 14v is only one character, so it’s hard to assess. It’s definitely not a standard VMS character.

Look at the left curve of the glyph marked in red. It’s the same curve as the fractured “r” on the previous folio and the VMS rarely has tails swooping from the bottom of a letter (they occur, but not often).

Summary

Why would someone add letters that don’t contribute to formatting or the formulaic consistency of the text, with ink and a quill that are similar enough to the surrounding text that the anomaly doesn’t jump out at you right away?

Were they practicing? Did they pick an inconspicuous spot on an inner page to see if they could match the text, with the possible intention of adding more elsewhere in the document? If so, I would call it a failed experiment unless the scribe later figured out how to mimic the VMS characters more closely.

Was someone just playing around? Could it have been a younger person who wanted to be part of the big project and didn’t understand that there was a pattern to the text? Could it be the same person who painted some of the drawings in a more sloppy manner than others?

I don’t have an explanation for the extra characters but I think it’s important to note that the ink very closely matches the rest of the text, even if the letter shapes do not. It makes you wonder if it was done with the same quill and ink pot, even if by a different person.

J.K. Petersen

Evidence for the First Page Position

There are signs that the Voynich Manuscript may have been unbound when discovered (note that there have apparently been numerous “discoveries” of the manuscript in the sense of it being passed down through several hands) and possibly even rebound, and we have no definite map (other than pages written back-to-back) for their original order.

At some point, as often happens in libraries and other book repositories, someone added page numbers, but it doesn’t seem likely that the numbers were originally penned by the VM author—both the ink color and the handwriting style are different. Also, there are clues that suggest the manuscript may never have been finished (or may be incompletely assembled). If it was never completed, perhaps the author died or it was taken out of the author’s hands for other reasons, in which case there may not have been time to add page numbers if page numbers were originally intended (medieval manuscripts were not often numbered).

So, we do not know, with absolute certainty, that the first page in the manuscript is the first page written, but the red embellishments on the left look like a tentative attempt at slightly illuminated paragraph starters and the slightly tentative nature of the first page script, which becomes more practiced and smooth on subsequent pages, suggests it might indeed, be the first page, in which case another oddity in the script becomes an important clue.

Also, later in the manuscript, there are few, if any erasures, whereas there are erasures on the first page, along with some anomalies.

Note that the “t” or “c” shape with the cap (the glyph in the pic above left that later becomes the bench character, also known as EVA-ch) is followed by a “g” or 9 shape. This is not typical Voynichese. A little farther along the same line (right) there is an erasure, possibly to remove an error (although the many other alterations to the first page, especially along the top and right side, open the possibility that a drop of “erasing” fluid (acidic liquid) was inadvertantly dropped while erasing the alphabet column on the right, perhaps by someone other than the author).

Let’s pretend, for the sake of exploration, that the first page in the VM was 1) intended as the first page by the VM author and 2) was penned before most or all of the subsequent pages, then the disconnection of some of the letters that are later written as joined might provide some insights as to whether this glyph is a ligature or a single letter.

The Connected Glyphs

On page one, on the first line, note the disconnected shapes. The first one shown in the detail below is clearly disconnected, the second one appears to be, but it’s harder to know for sure. It’s even possible that the glyph on the left that resembles a “t” was followed by the superscripted curve, and then the second glyph that looks like an “r” or rotunda, rather than the letters being written first and the curve added over them later as appears to be the case in the rest of the manuscript. Was the VM author taking the first steps toward developing the distinctive script and a comfortable way to write it?

Later in the manuscript, and even on this page, the glyphs tend to be connected, which is not an uncommon scribal habit when a shape has to be written over and over, but the fact that they are disconnected in a number of places on what appears to be the first page suggests that this shape may be two glyphs combined, rather than one character, which would significantly affect the translation, as well as any computational analyses.

The same shape at the end of the first line (below left) might be disconnected also, but it’s harder to tell. It’s debatable as to whether the space in between is a disconnection or a pen stutter but it looks like it might be a pen stutter followed by a disconnect.

The shapes on the right are widely spaced as well, but the parchment is rough and it’s hard to tell if these have gaps between the shapes or the quill ink running out. The following example, however, is not ambiguous—there is clearly a gap between the first glyph and the second, underneath the cap.

In the earlier examples, the second shape (after the cap) was hard to discern. It could be a rotunda, a “t” shape, a “c” shape, or an “e” shape without the crossbar (not all scribes at the time made a strong distinction between “c” and “e” shapes).

Another thing to note about this shape or ligature, which sometimes has a curved glyph above it and sometimes doesn’t, is that the curved glyph is similar to the cap used in Latin sigla conventions. (Postscript, 2016: See the post about Latin abbreviations for more on this.)

J.K. Petersen

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Category Archives: The Voynich Text

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