VMs: Re: Is the Voynich Manuscript a dream diary?

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > An e-friend, Maureen Roy, took one look at those web sites and
    > decided that the VM is nothing more sinister than some young
    > girl's Dream Diary. Has anyone ever thought of this before?
    
The biology section could be such thing, perhaps.  However 
the herbal (over a hundred pages, IIRC)  is definitel not the
stuff that a young girl would dream of.

    > Dream journals could not have been common in much of the middle
    > ages, but who knows?

*That* is not a problem. For instance, Hildegarde de Bingen's books
(13th c.), which have been often mentioned as a paragon for the VMS,
are now believed to be her "migraine diaries".

    > That would explain why it's in a secret language
    
People have considered the possibility that the VMS was written by a
child, just for fun. Secret codes are a fairly common game among
children and adolescents. (I myself exchanged a few cipher letters
with a colleague in high school, just for the fun of it. Eventually
the ciphers got too hard to break and the game ended. 8-)

The trouble with this theory is the sheer size of the VMS, and its
surprising consistency. Can a child stay focused that long on a
solitary game, with fairly arbitrary "rules" which he/she invented
herself? Where would be the "fun" of that?

All the best,

--stolfi