VMs: Re: Personal Guess

["Matthew Platts" <mdp114@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> When? 1450-1500
Agreed

> Where? Northern Italy
Agreed

> Who? An unknown subculture
> What? An encyclopedic work on a system of herbal
> medicine, derived somewhat from western
> European folk and esoteric thought, but
> with many original, shamanistic elements.
> Written in some Romance dialect, in a verbose
> word game-like cipher.

My own belief is that is was written by a single natural philosopher, whose
work in biology (ie dissections) was considered taboo at the time, and so
had to be done in secret. Hence the figurative representations of bodily
functions, with the naked nymphs and the pipes.. I believe that it has some
deliberate redundancy (like the 'King Tut' game) and that the glyphs are
either alphabetical or phonetical - there are too few for a pictographic
language... I don't think there is any special significance to the gallows
characters.

More so, that requiring it to be folded wouldn't make sense, partly because
the ink would crack when the vellum was folded, or there would be otherwise
a sure indication of folding by the original authors... who would, I am
sure, have decoded it at one point or another...

MDP


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