The Voynich Ninja

So Lisa Fagin Davis's article will be available to read as of tomorrow (I'm looking forward to seeing it), so I thought I would start a thread for specifically discussing ideas about different scribes that she proposes because it may be relevant to shifts in the token-composition as well (if so, it will be very interesting to see).

And since we won't know how the VMS is divided up into scribes until tomorrow, I thought I'd toss in something to hold us over until May 7th...


I haven't studied the scribes other than noticing changes of handwriting in a few places when I was working on my transcripts and I was too busy concentrating on the transcript to record anything about scribes. But there are some things that simply stand out...

... like this example. In my mind, I call this "the careful scribe". It's the same person who wrote the tidy roundish glyphs in the center of 57v. Whoever this is, the person wrote the first phrase at the top-left of this folio and the script directly below it is by another scribe. I don't think this is just a matter of a different quill. The actual shapes are different.

So here is a sample from f75r , something to look at until we get a chance to read Lisa's article:

[attachment=4303]

What about the text directly to the left of the nymphs? The same hand, ain't it? - And the same quill. I think it's the person who did the drawing. Kind of labels, and kchedykary is also a label, or may be it sets forth some memento for the scribe who was to put down the main content.

Anton, yes, I think it might be. Which is interesting. Was the "careful scribe" text written before or after the other text???

Was it someone beginning the process and leaving it to someone else to finish? Or was this the finisher or toucher-upper? Or ???


And yes... it might be the same person who did the drawings. I hadn't even thought it through that far, good point, but it does appear to be the same ink and line thickness, and also less variation in thick and thin than one usually sees for the more calligraphic scripts.