VMs: And the VMS' big secret is...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I woke up this morning with this one thought: what if the Voynich's biggest 
secret is simply... the Voynichese crypto system?

As I art-history date the VMS (from its iconography) to Northern Italy 
circa 1450-1475, this places it (probably) after the 1454 Treaty of Lodi 
(the formation of the 25-year-duration Most Holy League, which prompted all 
the North Italian states to send envoys to each other, and then to try to 
acquire crypto systems to ensure that those same envoys could send/receive 
information securely) - ie, right in the middle of the Quattrocento cipher 
arms race.

A new (and much improved) kind of cryptographic system would have been a 
potentially valuable secret - so perhaps the function of the VMS was simply 
to test out this new system?

As we know from history, the culture of using nomenclature-type ciphers was 
to prove hard to shift, even in the presence of demonstrably more secure 
16th century systems (like polyalphabetic ciphers, etc) - so even if the 
VMS did prove to be a successful proof-of-concept demonstration, its coding 
system too was not enough to sway the established crypto culture.

Put in more contemporary dot-com terms: might the VMS simply be a 
proof-of-concept demo for a Quattrocento cryptographic startup which folded 
before getting to market?

Why else would the VMS include (as I currently suggest) an encrypted model 
of its novel encoding/decoding instrument (ie, the 9-rosette map), and an 
encrypted version of its code-tables (ie, the astrological volvelles) if 
the coding system was not the secret itself?

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....


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