I’ve never written with a quill pen or done calligraphy before; I’m just going by what you guys (especially JKP) have taught me here. It looks to me like the round Voynichese glyphs — the ones that involve pushing the writing utensil in all directions, particularly [o] and [d], were usually drawn in one stroke. Based on what you’re saying in this thread, this is remarkable, as drawing a full circle or figure 8 in one stroke would seem to violate the principles of good quill nib penmanship. And yet, the VMS is not rife with ink splotches and evidence of quill splitting. What might this say about either the writer, and/or the writing utensil used? Might either of these have been different from a typical medieval European manuscript?
You can sometimes get away with things if the letter is very small. In other words, if the upstroke (which is the one to avoid making) is short, you can sometimes get the stroke in without spattering.
Technically, it's cheating, it's tempting fate. The downside is even if you get away with it, loops will often fill in because even if the pen doesn't jitter, to cause the spatter, there will sometimes be a bit of a glob of ink coming from the side of the quill that is incurved (the part that holds the ink).
Also, some strokes that look like they were done in one stroke are sometimes two. It depends how well you can match them up. I've seen calligraphers who can do a perfect circle in two strokes (although this takes skill).
Renegade, I think your observation is correct, some of the "o" shapes do appear to be done in one stroke (although many are done in two, which is partly why some of the "o" shapes are hard to distinguish from "a" shapes). This was not considered good penmanship, but people will try to get away with as much as possible if they are trying to get things done quickly. I don't know if the scribes were trying to do this quickly. The script has more of a laborious look (the spacing is all over the place) rather than a "quick" look, but this might be because they were writing with unfamiliar glyphs or possibly because it is a cipher or some other system of conversion that takes attention away from penmanship.
There are plenty of filled loops in the MS.
Here is another example of pen spatters, the dots and spreading the occur when you push the quill against its natural direction, rather than adding a separate stroke.
I don't see these often, even though I'm always looking at manuscripts, so I assume most writers/scribes knew how to avoid this:
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attachment=3948]
Medieval scribes are always drawn with a quill in one hand and a nib-trimming (and scraping) knife in the other.
What do you think of this... it's not the same shade of red as the lines added to embellish the capital letters, it's more brown. It looks like a splash and a wipe. The stains do not occur on the previous or following pages:
[attachment=3952]
I think you should send forensics in, to me it looks like drops from bleeding
Last time I saw a stain like that was when I smooshed a mosquito that had just finished its lunch...
That's what it looked like to me too, but I wanted to see if other people saw the same thing I did.
Around 2/3 of the second column the letters become a bit wider because our clumsy scribe is working with a bandaged finger. Must be the long hours copying.. I'm surprised they didn't cut themselves more often.
Some of the manuscripts were 500, 600 pages, sometimes written by one scribe.
I don't know how they did it. It's not comfortable writing with a quill and sharpening it every few lines. Even with a ballpoint pen, it would be mindnumbing to do nothing but copy day-in and day-out. It often took a year to pen a manuscript.