No Expert “Got it Right”

Number 9 on my list of Modern Voynich Myths states that when the 2009 radiocarbon test revealed a date range of 1404 and 1438, it showed the previous experts guessed the date correctly.

But this was, and is, utterly incorrect. As I wrote in Myths,

“Tallying the expert opinions, pre-C14, the majority of experts… I think it works out to about 14 out of 16 of them, by D’Imperio’s book, were dead wrong. In fact this was noted soon after the C14 was announced, in the 2009 ORF documentary, and its surrounding promotions: the results were touted as toppling the previous expert opinion, and being a total surprise. It was a surprise. But in a very short time, this reality morphed into “The experts got it right”, by using the two or so experts who did happen to have opinions near or in the C14 range, and ignoring the majority that were wrong. This new mythology is often used to support the false premise, “It cannot be a forgery, because how could a pre-C14 forger have happened to choose the ‘right parchment’?”. The thing is, they did not choose “the right parchment” for the work they laid on it, if forged.”

Despite this reality, I have continued to see this provably false claim pop up in many articles, blogs, documentaries and podcasts. And it is such a frequent falsehood, and buried among so many others, equally incorrect, and equally pervasive, that it no longer surprises me to see it. 

But when it recently popped up in a Facebook conversation with a friend of mine (a prominent Voynich scholar), I found myself compelled to revisit it. He told me that one of the reasons he believed the Voynich to be genuine was because of this supposed, correct, expert opinion. He wrote, “The [C14] dating of the vellum matches that provided by Panofsky to Voynich’s enquiry…”

So I referred to D’Imperio’s work again, and my old “list of experts”, to see exactly what Erwin Panofsky had to say. His opinion did not, in fact, match the dating at all, but gave a creation date 100 years later, of 1510-1520! Well he may have begun with an earlier date, as reported by Ethel after his first couple of hours with the manuscript, of “1410-20-30”, but he later modified his opinion to 1510 to 1520.

By 1954, when Panofsky was quizzed by William Friedman, he had “moved forward” from his two hour initial assessment, and gave his revised dating as 1510 to 1520. He did mention O’Neil’s sunflower identification in his final opinion. But the “sunflower” was not the only factor, as he wrote, “Were it not for the sunflower which, if correctly identified, would date the manuscript after 1492, I should have thought that it was executed a little earlier, say, about 1470. However, since the style of the drawings is fairly provincial, a somewhat later date, even the first years of the sixteenth century, would not seem to be excluded. I should not go lower than ca. 1510-1520 because no influence of the Italian Renaissance style is evident.”

On Rene Zandbergen’s site, Rene interprets both of Panofsky’s widely competing conclusions, “He believed the origin to be in the 15th Century, but allowed a later date in consideration of the tentative sunflower identification.” But I don’t at all agree with this conclusion, as we see Panofsky’s entire statement that it was not entirely about the sunflower to him: “… I should not go lower than ca. 1510-1520…”. The logical structure of that is clear… if he would not go lower than 1510, because “… no influence of the Italian Renaissance style is evident”, then we know the sunflower was a moot issue for him.

In any case, it is clear that Panofsky changed his mind, after that earlier, and brief, encounter with the Voynich.

So things were far worse for the already shaky myth than I had remembered, as we were left with only one pre-C14 expert who thought the Voynich dated from the early 15th century: Helmut Lehmann-Haupt. And he was actually not an expert in paleography, art history, linguistics, herbals, but a bibliographer. I mean, that’s fine as far as I’m concerned, but I point it out because the type of expertise applied to the Voynich problem is often used to inflate or diminish any particular chosen opinion by them. I think it might be hard to raise the bibliography of Haupt above, say, the respectable herbalist Charles Singer, for instance.

Here is a chart of the expert opinions, pre-radiocarbon dating, that I’ve compiled:

Pre-C14 Expert Dating

We clearly see that the experts not only didn’t “get it right”, but they actually all fell on either side of the C14 dating! That is, there is a desolate valley of 15th century opinions in the yellow C14 band, with mountains of opinions stretching out for decades both before and after it. Mr. Haupt is the lone resident of that valley.

Demonstrably, factually, the experts didn’t get it right at all, they got it very, very, wrong.

Or did they? And which ones did? Take your pick, that’s what everyone does. Those who chose to believe the Voynich is genuine, and from about 1420, defend their necessary rejection of all these experts on many grounds. I’ve heard many reasons given for ignoring their conclusions… this one was was not “really” an expert, or those ones were in “the wrong field”. They didn’t know enough, see enough. One contention I read was that Charles Singer’s work was really that of his wife’s! Well of course I disagree, but even if so, couldn’t his wife have been correct? In the case of Panofsky, his final conclusion is rejected, and replaced by his own, earlier one, which he himself had rejected! Well here is my compilation of these people, what their area of expertise was, and why they came to the conclusions they did:

Name	Area of Expertise	Dating	Reasons for opinion
Wilfrid Voynich	Bookseller	Late 13th century	Roger Bacon
Romaine Newbold	Philosophy, psychology of religion, cryptography	Late 13th century	Roger Bacon
Prof. Giles Constable	Professor of Medieval History, Harvard	16th century
Mr. Rodney Dennis	Curator of manuscripts in Houghton Library, Harvard College Library	16th century	Script appeared to be 16th century Humanist
Dr. Franklin Ludden		1475-1550	Style of drawings, features of nude figures, stylization of the botanical drawings
Rev. Theodore C. Peterson	A specialist in ancient languages and history, and an expert in religion, astrology and mystic manuscripts	13th to 14th centuries	The herbal with astrological tables, and comparison to works of Hildegarde of Bingen
Robert Steele	Expert on Medieval Mss., historian and Roger Bacon scholar, editor of Bacon works	13th century (reluctant?)	Felt the drawings have no Renaissance nor Medieval influence.
Hugh O’Neill	Prominent Botanist	Post 1493 (post-Columbian	Based on identification of sunflower and capsicum pepper
Helmut Lehmann-Haupt	Bibliographical consultant to H.P. Kraus	“… around, or a little after, the year 1400.”
Erwin Panofsky	Art Historian, expert on symbolism, iconography and iconology in art.	“… no lower than 1510-1520.”	Based on character of script, style of drawings, and costumes.
Elizebeth Friedman	Cipher expert	“… certainly later than 13th century… … 1500, plus or minus twenty years.”	Citing consensus of expert opinion
Dr. Albert H. Carter	Cryptologic Historian	“… far later than the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries”.	He saw no Gothic forms, and the coloring of illustrations
Dr. Charles Singer	Expert on the world history of the Herbal tradition	1520 or later	Various style and content
Leonell Strong	Cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer	1525 or later	Based on Strong’s opinion that Anthony Askham was the author
Robert Brumbaugh	American philosopher and a professor of medieval philosophy at Yale University	1500 at the earliest	Sagittarius hat, a “clock”, and other
Sergio Toresella	Expert on Ancient Herbals	late 15th century (1460-1480)	Comparison to other herbals

So herein lies the problem for anyone who wants to continue to claim the Voynich must be an early 15th manuscript because the pre-C14 experts believed it was: The experts did no such thing. This has always been a myth, and as it turns out, and even more vaporous one than I realized it was, back in 2015.

Those who hold onto this dis-proven belief… and believe me, they will continue to…  will be forced to bend themselves into pretzels by discarding a raft of impressive, valued scholars and scholarship, all earned with many centuries of combined studies, debate and real world testing and comparisons to the greatest collections of the world. They must all be called wrong… all the paleographers, botanists, herbalists, linguists, cipher experts, wrong, wrong, wrong…  and only Haupt, the bibliographer and book cataloger, correct.

And in addition, as is and has been done, they are replaced by post-C14, modern scholars, who have and will insist that they didn’t need to see the C14 results to know what all those old investigators didn’t know: That this is an early 15th century manuscript. Even, that it is immediately obvious. I was told, by one, that the C14 dating had no impact on their 15th century dating conclusions. But, respectfully, we can never know, because we live in a post-C14 Voynich world.

Well anyway, what do I think? Actually, I think they are all correct to some extent. Even the post-C14 experts. But how can this be? One reason that explains every opinion at once: The Voynich is a fake. All of what these experts thought they saw, and a great many amateurs also see; all the ages and purposes they opined on as being the Voynich, are, to some degree or another, in the Voynich. It all there because the Voynich is a forgery, and forgers are rarely good at getting it right. Their works are often rife with anachronisms and anomalies of all kinds, and the Voynich is a prime example of this.

The Voynich is a particularly sloppy stew, with content reflecting a very wide range of ages and styles, and so each person who examines must pick only one of them, or otherwise believe it a fake. It can’t be all these things at once, and still be genuine, or of any one time. The effect is like the parable of the three blind men feeling the elephant, each coming to different conclusions as to what it might be. It is only when one steps back, and takes in- and much more importantly, accepts all the evidence- that one can see this elephant for what it really is: A rather clumsy and inconsistent fake. That is what all this expert testimony actually tells us, without having to discard one respectable shred of it.