Voynich Vegetables

Emperor Rudolph II kept a pet tiger running wild in his castle at all times.   People who came to the castle were assured that if the tiger hurt them that the Emperor would reimburse them or their heirs.

I'm just saying... the guy was wild.

Rudolf II inherited the Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta from his grandfather Emperor Ferdinand The First (who had an impressive five-head).

The Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta ("The Model Book of Calligraphy") is a magnificent creation.

It features plants, animals, pretty writing, and many purely fictional fantasties of supernatural things.

The Voynich Manuscript is a... it falls quite short of magnificent... I can say that it is a work of astonishing dedication.

Dedication... to tomfoolery.

It also features plants, animals, and many purely fictional fantasties of supernatural things - including somewhat less pretty (but entirely fraudulent) writing.

https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002046

It featured the calligraphized signature of E Rudolpnus (that's how he spelled it in the manuscript, not accounting for a few umlauts or whatever) very many dozens of times.

The signatures are generally in the bottom-left of the page, and are occasionally written vertically on its edge.

Rudy had created his own colouring book - very similar to the manuscript his grandfather had given him - and was practicing his signature.

Then, he had a bold idea.

He could convince people that his nonsensical paintings were of archaic - perhaps even alien - origins.

He scraped his signatures and family crest off, weirded the whole thing up with a fake script and a few embellishments, and sent it to a friend.

The friend used a dialect from Malta.

The friend was fooled by the hoax, attempted to equate the symbols within the script to alphabetical characters, and eventually hazarded a guess that the book must be from "West France".

I have now been distracted by the influence of Emperor Rudolpnus' humour for too many hours of my precious life.

From this manuscript, however, I discovered a new form of identification of written characters, and coined them "hydroglyphs".

Hydroglyphs occur when a manuscript gets wet, water stands on the page, ink leaches out of/off of the page, the ink floats on top of the standing water, the water carrying the ink moves, the water carrying the ink dries, and the ink carried by the water re-adheres to the page in a new location (often with a different orientation).

Rudy would have approved of the actual knowledge incidentally gained from his prank.