The Voynich Ninja

It tested as calf skin.

(15-03-2020, 01:25 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(15-03-2020, 11:51 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.damages in the vellum

Dear all, this is not a rhetorical question: What most likely went wrong with the sheet of vellum used to make f112? I'm not being funny here, I look at both sides of that sheet in the hi-res scans, and I could believe there's something not quite right about that skin, but I can't put my finger on what it is.

I think it may have come from a smaller animal and so the uneven edges of the sheet had to be preserved in order to get roughly the right amount of "page". I have attached an image from the Hamburg Bible (Denmark, Kongelige Bibliotek MS. GKS 4 2°, vol. I-III, f. 183v) where you can see a monk negotiating with a parchment seller and holding a sheet of parchment with a wavy edge and a hole. If you folded that sheet in half you would get roughly the shape of f. 112.

Other ways parchment could have that irregular include the parchmenter having difficulty removing that part of the skin from the armpit/legpit and tearing it a bit too much, or the knife slipping as the parchment was cut out of the frame. There's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with photographs of the process of making parchment, and you can see that the finished piece has very curved edges. The next step would usually involve trimming the curved edges to make a more regular rectangular sheet, and then preparing several sheets for writing by ruling and folding, but if your original piece is a bit too small, then you have to live with the curved edges.

I don't know how helpful it is for me to give an assessment of the parchment without having seen the MS in person, but to me the VMS parchment (nevermind anything on it!) is quite odd. The parchment is good rather than the bottom end of the market - the sheets are relatively big and they have been prepared well for the most part. There are not many holes and there are very few under-size leaves (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is one). I'm not saying that the VMS is the fanciest parchment available in the early 15th century, but it's also not the cheapest/worst. The large plant section, which has generous margins and blank space, shows that page design was something the scribes and artists were thinking about, rather than cramming everything in as small as possible because of fears of limited writing space.

(15-03-2020, 05:48 PM)arca_libraria Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it may have come from a smaller animal [...]

Quoting myself here as I realise that my original post wasn't especially clear English. I do not mean that f. 112 or any of the other smaller pages are made from the skin of different animals such as sheep or goats, I mean that there is variation in the size of cows due to maturity, breed, season etc., so there can also be variation in the size of sheets of parchment obtained from cow skins.

To return to the original thread topic of line padding and layout - has there ever been any work comparing the width of each glyph? I know there are multiple different transcriptions that all have strengths and weaknesses, and each divides the glyphs and spaces up slightly differently, but has anyone measured whether the glyphs get wider at the end of a line in order to achieve the right-justification? Or do the glyphs have a relatively consistent width within each line without any significant stretching towards the end of the line?

You only have to use the folio browser and the overview of the quire order on Rene's website and you will  see what the original bifolios looked like and how irregular they were

When I went to the Beinecke in 2006, I checked this page very carefully. There is no flaw or difference in the vellum around the empty area.

I concluded that this was intentional, and was a copy of the layout of a predecessor document, that was also written on vellum, but had a vertical flaw in this area. That is to say, we are looking at a copy of a blank space (probably around a vellum tear).

It's clear on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that the original ink wasn't "taking" correctly toward the right edge. There are a number of instances where letters seem to be half written but abandoned, with the remnants being very blurry.  Something's obviously wrong.

I think some of us are talking about f. 112 as a whole, some of us are talking about the faded letters in the outer margin on f. 112r and some are talking about the rectangular blank spot on f. 112v?

The blank rectangle on f. 112v always reminds me of the spaces left in incomplete manuscripts for the addition of minor decorative initials, but I don't think that's the case here because it wouldn't really work with the page layout on f. 112v, and it wouldn't be consistent with the design decisions almost everywhere else in the manuscript. If the f. 112v scribe was copying from an exemplar, then I don't know why he didn't close such a small gap when copying f. 112v unless he didn't understand what he was copying?

(15-03-2020, 09:22 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's clear on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that the original ink wasn't "taking" correctly toward the right edge. There are a number of instances where letters seem to be half written but abandoned, with the remnants being very blurry.  Something's obviously wrong.

You're right. I can't tell from the photos whether it's excessive grease/oil on the outer edge, or damage to the laminate layer* that's causing the problem. I don't know if it's because f. 112r is a hair-side and the hair was a bit difficult to remove (you can easily see the follicle dots on the page) and so the surface was damaged, or maybe the scribe just rested a greasy hand on the outer edge? I don't know. 

*Laminate layer =  the surface of the parchment after it has been soaked, scraped and smoothed - it is extremely thin and slightly glossy, a bit like the polished surface of a wooden table or floor. If you rub one particular spot too much, or don't prepare it correctly then it will not take ink properly. Parchments made from sheep and goat skin have particularly strong laminate layers, but they are also damaged much more easily, and damage/corrections are usually much more visible than on calf parchment.