(17-05-2021, 03:26 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Rich wrote:
(16-05-2021, 09:08 PM)proto57 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Wilfrid Voynich- late 13th century
Romaine Newbold- late 13th century
Theodore C. Peterson- 13th to 14th centuries
John H. Tiltman- 13th century
Hugh O’Neill- late 15th century (on)
Helmut Lehmann-Haupt- Early 15th century
Erwin Panofsky- Late 15th century, changed to early 16th century (1510-1520)
Elizebeth Friedman- late 15th, early 16th century (1480-1520)
A.H. Carter- “far later” than 13th or 14th century
Dr. Charles Singer- early 16th century (1520 or later)
Leonell Strong- 16th century (1525 or later)
Robert Brumbaugh- 16th century (1500)
Professor Giles Constable- 16th century
Professor Rodney Dennis- 16th century
Dr. Franklin aLudden- late 15th to mid 16th century (1475-1550)
Sergio Toresella- late 15th century (1460-1480)
The summary of all this is that the best guess at the time that the C-14 experiment was prepared was: 1460-1470-ish. This was heavily biased by the most recent views of Sergio Toresella, and represents what was communicated to Greg Hodgins of Arizona at the time.
Indeed, there have also been earlier views that better match the result, which only became obvious after the fact. They (all three of them) are not in the above list.
Well we can go back and forth on this, but it is part of the record. The idea that the "best guess" was 1460-1470, and therefore the C14 dating was close, came some time after the original impression... which was that the dating was way off the majority opinion, i.e., that the C14 results were counter to the popular expert opinions, not in agreement with them.
This issue is to me very, very, important. It is one of the difference between a manuscript whose contact matches the dating, and one which does not. This is a document whose dating does not match the dating which was generally assumed by the mass of expert opinion. We can argue about this, but the internet is forever as they say, and by searching for articles and opinions close to when the test results were released, we can read what was said. Since you mention UofA as an opinion, I'll start with this page, from their own site, and from 2011:
https://news.arizona.edu/story/ua-experts-determine-age-of-book-nobody-can-read
"The UA's team was able to push back the presumed age of the Voynich manuscript by 100 years, a discovery that killed some of the previously held hypotheses about its origins and history."
So right there it is clear that the C14 did not match previous opinion, and by using 100 years, that opinion was assumed from the early 16th century, not 1460 to 1470. But it is not just the official press release of the U of A, this was also reflected in the documentary and associated literature, made by ORF, who paid for the tests. It is in dozens of articles and papers. And as I have long pointed out, it is in the literature pre-C14 testing.
As you say, "... there have also been earlier views that better match the result, which only became obvious after the fact." After the fact... after the C14 testing, those "better matches" came to the top like cream on milk. They "became obvious" because they needed to be cherry picked from the mass of opinions. As they say, "Hindsight it 20/20". Rather, the real questions which should be asked, and which I have long asked, are:
1) Why do the results span 50 to 60 years or more?
2) Why did the majority of experts "get it wrong", and so many think the Voynich was either from far earlier, or far later, than the vellum turned out to be from?
There are many good answers, not just my own, which can be derived from realizing the above points, and damage is done by ignoring them.
I came across another example just this morning, when I looked at the Wikipedia page on the Voynich, again. I was surprised by a special section titled, You are not allowed to view links.
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"Eamon Duffy says that the radiocarbon dating of the parchment (or, more accurately, vellum) "effectively rules out any possibility that the manuscript is a post-medieval forgery", as the consistency of the pages indicates origin from a single source, and "it is inconceivable" that a quantity of unused parchment comprising "at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins" could have survived from the early 15th century."
Clearly Mr. Duffy does not realize that the pages are NOT at all consistent. It is yet another example, of probably hundreds, in which some source has based their opinion on the incorrect belief that all the page dates are grouped in a short time frame. I looked up the article. Mr. Duffy wrote,
"The book’s pages, whose consistency suggests that they derived from a single source, would have required at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins."
I can't blame Mr. Duffy for the error... I blame the averaging of very different results. And so it goes... Like a great many of the anomalies and anachronisms of the Voynich, they are most often not addressed, but misused and misstated to fit a desired preconception. My two "beefs" with the radiocarbon interpretations are only a couple of a great many such examples.