Recently I began to pay attention to the region of what is now southern Poland - around Czestochova, Katowice and Krakow, this not in the least part induced by that guy Wroblicius having originated from Mstow and later settled in Krakow which was one of the scientific centres of the time.
Occasionally I stumbled upon this You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. about the work "Algorismus Minituarum" by Marcin Król, the famous Polish 15th c. scientist. This paper reproduces some pages of BJ 1927 (Jagellonian Library, Krakow) which (as the notes tell us) is a contemporary copy produced by Jan z Olkusza (Jan from Olkusz, that being some 40km from Krakow) - who, as I understand, was a mathematician and astronomer himself, and it is said that the Jagellonian Library holds his 1444 copy of Euclid. Unfortunately, no scans of his manuscripts seem to be available on the net. However, I very much like the writing style. He seems to use several styles for some letters, but some "h", "l", "p", "t", "b", "g" are quite close to what we have in You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. marginalia, this let alone the long tail "s" and "f" (see fig. 1 and fig.6 in particular), and the "d" which in some places tends to what we find in "oladabas". Also, I like the decorations surrounding the capital "M", similar to those that sometimes surround the gallows.
This is clearly not the hand of the Voynich marginalia, but the style may be suggestive?!
So I wonder if there is some writing style or school which is characteristic to the 1st half of 15th c. and the whereabouts of Krakow?
I'm glad you're looking into this region, Anton. I feel it hasn't had enough attention.
I'll let you know how the handwriting scores in similarity to the 116v annotations.
Edit (addition): I got a score of 63 (out of 126) for similarity. Anything above 60 is good, above 70 is very good, and above 80 would be excellent, but is nearly impossible to find.
The main differences were small things, like the angles, the curves, the style of final-ess, "a" and "e" (although the e was written several different ways in the examples). The ascenders tend to be consistently shorter than VMS 116v and a little more curvy.
I'm looking at some of the handwriting that is in a similar score range and they are from all over (Vienna, England, Germany, Paris, Italy), so unfortunately, there are no geographic patterns, they all learned to write the same way. What's interesting, however, is that almost all the ones that score similarly were written between c. 1430 and c. 1480.
I guess anything above 80 would mean the same person's handwriting?!
Don't know how your score works, but, as I said, it is curious that this Jan z Olkusza uses different styles even within the same page (most notable in "h") - this may affect the score, of course.
One thing that is notably different is the "r".
Quote:I'm looking at some of the handwriting that is in a similar score range and they are from all over (Vienna, England, Germany, Paris, Italy), so unfortunately, there are no geographic patterns, they all learned to write the same way. What's interesting, however, is that almost all the ones that score similarly were written between c. 1430 and c. 1480.
But can that style or fashion be traced to some common origin? If you take the earliest examples of those, would they point at some narrower area?
Unfortunately, Gothic script was used from England to Naples. I don't know how people WALKING those kind of distances could have spread script styles so widely and quickly, but they did.
When styles changed from pre-Gothic to Gothic, it changed pretty much everywhere. And when it changed from Gothic to the humanist and early modern styles, it changed pretty much everywhere.
I have not been able to figure out how this happened so rapidly and thoroughly, but I have read that there were "wandering scribes". Perhaps these scribes were also giving writing lessons to earn extra money as they traveled.
There must also have been "model books", but I have been unable to find them except for a few. What I do find quite frequently, however, is pen tests in manuscripts. It occurred to me recently that maybe some of them are not "pen tests" as they are usually called. Maybe some of them are exemplars for writing a specific script style.
I do know that professional scribes were encouraged to copy each other as closely as possible so several scribes could work on the same project without too many disruptions for the reader. Of course, many of the surviving manuscripts are compilations. Collectors grab them from numerous sources and have them bound together, so anthologies tend to be in many hands.
I've sampled several manuscripts where the bibliographers and historians have no idea where they are from because the style of writing was so widely dispersed.
Once paper became available, it became a little easier to locate origins, because each paper mill had its own watermark. But parchment doesn't have this. Unfortunately, not all the repositories photograph or comment on the watermarks.
Quote:I do know that professional scribes were encouraged to copy each other as closely as possible
Does that mean that when a copy of a manuscript was produced, not only the text itself, but also the writing style was replicated?
Anton, that's a good question and not an easy one to answer.
A lot of manuscripts that were copied were quite old and they would use an updated script style to copy. Also, something I've noticed and was confirmed recently by a historian is that they didn't pay much attention to line lengths (they didn't copy the exact width of the columns. Line endings could differ substantially from the exemplar.
But... I saw something recently that intrigued me... it was an early medieval manuscript and someone had added information and had used the old style of writing. I don't see that very often.
I also saw one recently that copied the old style of writing BUT the letters that have changed (like "r" and "a") were updated to the new style.
So... I guess there isn't one answer, but MOST of the time, as far as I can tell, if 15th-century scribes copied an early-14th-century manuscript, they would typically use 15th-century writing (styles changed quite a bit from 13th to 15th centuries). The illuminations sometimes changed a fair amount, as well. Same concept, but different drawing style and usually different clothing styles. Numbers were almost always updated to the newer styles.
One more example from Krakow, as I understand these are marginal comments by Jan z Dąbrówki (rector of the Jagellonian) on the "Polish Cronicle".
Note how many similarities with the Voynich, but, once again, the "r" is just altogether different.
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The letters to look for are the g (with a long curved tail, a down-pointing oval loop, and a lowered serif on the right) and the shape of the "h" (with a rounded rather than pointed hump, with a long back-flowing descender). Those seem to be good indicators of similarity.
The letters m, p, and r are quite common. The 116v writer did those much the same as everyone else. The "t" is unusual, it leans in a way that is not common.
And the one to particularly look for is the figure-8 final-ess. That's not common. I've only found a few. Most scribes use Greek sigma or a "B" shape for the final-ess (very common). In Italy they would often use the snake-shape (a modern "s") or sometimes even the long-ess as final-ess. But figure-8 ess is the least common.