Before I begin: I just stumbled upon a bot-generated webpage that claimed to be “A discussion of the geography, accuracy and geometric salesman relating to the 14C farrago of the Voynich“. Who’d have thought random text could be so splendidly insightful?

Irena Hanzíková

Anyway… might Irena Hanzíková be our Voynich theorist of the day? A recent piece in Novinky.cz (the highest-traffic Czech news-site, and the online face of Czech newspaper Právo) has a nice picture of her:

The Voynich Manuscript is, she says, nothing less than “o knihu života” (the book of life), and that “Obsah bude pro všechny překvapením” (the content will surprise us all).

But the article does (thankfully) give us a short snippet of her transcription / decryption of folio 49 (it doesn’t say recto or verso) to keep us going while she gets the rest countersigned by a notary: apparently it says “Vedle cti doutná zlomyslnost, prospěch má sestru zradu, cílem je poznat svět, přesto svítit do tmy” (and, in case you hadn’t guessed, it is written in Old Czech).

Giuseppe Bianchi

Of course, Hanzíková has plenty of competition: such as Giuseppe Bianchi, a surveyor from Arquata Scrivia in North-West Italy, whose April 2016 article in La Stampa describes his wondrous Voynich microwriting theory.

He believes the key to understanding the Voynich lies in f1r (the first page) and f116v (the last page), because the whole manuscript is sort of an experiment in “proto-typography” – forming letters with (terrifically tiny) stencils, where each stencil is equivalent to a particular code. Here’s how the second word of the (in)famous “michiton oladabas” breaks down into stencil presses, which is (I have to say) a lot like an odd cross between William Romaine Newbold’s supposed microwriting and the Phaistos Disk’s shape-stamping:

There’s plenty more on YouTube, if microstamping Voynich theories are your bag.

Glen Russum

Enthusiastic smoker Glen Russum has his own Voynich theory to fill his YouTube video with (for example)

I want for Yous to do most of the paying Sam Can Not

be doing it without Help o what I am saying to Help

I think I am wanting all 8 to Pay His and Hers, and

she also. Not I, Sam They I’m Not going to Pay-

not so- not for all 8 of Us! Have Mercy! Please woMen

Do not be so cruelly cruel. …. (do) Care

The first YouTube commenter calls this “Just ridiculous“: but having seen plenty of genuinely ridiculous Voynich theories, I’d be hard-pressed to say whether this has even managed to attain ridiculousness yet. I guess you’ll have to make up your own mind.

Volder Z

“Volder Z”, by way of comparison, is trying to carve out the perilously narrow linguistic furrow most famously ploughed by Stephen Bax’s ard. Volder takes some bits out of Bax’s box while discarding others; rules out most European languages; then moves to his own brand of “modified Syriac” (i.e. start with Syriac but twiddle with ~50% of each indiviudal letter, even though Syriac was written right-to-left *sigh*); and tries to logically deduce the gallows pronunciation in terms of aspirative plosives.

Of course, there are the inevitable problems (he thinks that EVA “i”, “v” and “q” don’t have sounds), and Volder has an entire second video (which I lost the will to watch after only a few minutes, but perhaps you will fare better). But the short version [spoiler alert] is that he thinks it is a super-early Romany language.

There’s a kind of relentless Mormon logic to Volder’s entire linguistic edifice that Bax utterly shares: that just because you can apply a certain frame of reference to a thing, not only should you do it, but that doing so guarantees you a good result.

And the rest…

I could go on (e.g. Karin Marie Olt, who was shown the solution by twins “Lisa and Leonardo” in her dream, now has a Facebook page and has published her own book, etc), but that’s not really the point.

For me, the single biggest reason why I haven’t covered these kinds of Voynich theories here for such a long time is that they – and even stuff like the bot text I started this page with – all merge into a single thing for me.

The way I see the Voynich Manuscript – as a series of micro-stories, all told by the manuscript’s internal evidence, but not as yet gelling into a complete macro-story – is so diametrically opposite to these Voynich theorists that it’s hard to bridge the gap between them. Asking which is the Voynich theorist of the day, week, month, year or decade would be missing the point: I don’t really want any of them, sorry. 🙁