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Question regarding the original author's birthday - Printable Version

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Question regarding the original author's birthday - crezac - 29-01-2016

VMS has been  dated to sometime in the 15th century, or at least the parchment has.  It has also been noted that there don't appear to corrected errors, i.e. the author made no mistakes he had to correct.  Finally the ink analysis seems to indicated that, while more than one type of ink is used for main text, page numbers and some marginalia, it is all consistent with a 15th century origin.

Page numbers weren't common in early manuscripts.  Their earliest uses appear to be when making a copy of a manuscript to ensure the copy and original were ordered the same.  This would be especially important if one couldn't read the original.  If you wanted to work on understanding what the original meant you would want your own copy.  And your copy would include marginalia from the original.

If the artist were likewise copying images of plants he had never seen from an earlier work that might account for the fact that none of the plants are easily recognizable from the drawings.  
Obviously the only way to prove this would be to find an earlier copy of VMS.  But, purely for purposes of discussion, if VMS is someones workng copy of an earlier manuscript, how much will that impact any attempts at a translation?


RE: Question regarding the original author's birthday - david - 29-01-2016

Hi Crezac and welcome to the forums!
First off, it's a fallacy that there are no corrections to the mss. There are, but they take the form of amendments to glyphs rather than the more traditional striking out of words and writing in a new one.
Secondly you're right about the page numbers not being common. Indeed, they were only just coming in at the time the vellum was produced.
How woulda translation be impacted if this were a copy depends whether the scribe knew the original text. If he were copying blind, I dread to think of the errors.... And this is one theory, that it's a bad copy that destroyed the text.


RE: Question regarding the original author's birthday - crezac - 29-01-2016

Thanks for the response.  One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to make a serious effort to find something in VMS.  Not much exposure to the manuscript, but I have watched a few documentaries and read a book or two.  I've also downloaded the images from Yale and am using them as a screensaver.  So basically just starting to think about an approach.

The page numbers seemed odd to me since they were tucked in around the illustrations in a few places and I didn't see Arabic numbers elsewhere in the text.  The idea of preserving an aging copy of an older manuscript seemed like a solution to the problem of page numbers, although I suppose later rebinding could account for it too.  

With regard to the "lack of errors" I will admit I fell into the trap of repeating a VMS marketing phrase.  I realize that you can't tell if there are errors if you can't tell what it says.  And there could be a glyph that translates as "dang it what I meant to write was" followed by the correction (even if it is a copy of an older document you could still use that glyph.)  In fact one of the additive glyphs could be a "delete this character" markup.  Too soon to say, but something to keep in mind.

My main reason for asking the question had to do with the illustrations as much as how clean the text was.  If it's a copy, the illustrations are copies too.  Copying illustrations seems a much more subjective process to me. So the idea that we can look at the pictures and figure out what the words should be seems very optimistic to me.  In fact if it's actually in code the pictures could be pure misdirection; my opinion is that they just aren't the best illustrations, but again, too soon to say...


RE: Question regarding the original author's birthday - david - 29-01-2016

One theory - I think it was originally advanced by Pelling back in the day - is that the manuscript was first drafted onto wax tablets (or similar) and then copied in ink onto the parchment.
The wax tablets would then be warmed to erase the drawings and a new page could be drafted onto it.
The technique is known to have been used in other MSS's.
Personally I tend towards the theory that the page numbers were added by a later owner of the book. It is generally accepted that some pages of the book are out of order (as evidenced by the drawings), but the numbering of the pages doesn't reflect this. Ergo, someone numbered the pages after they were put into the current order, not at the original time of manufacture.


RE: Question regarding the original author's birthday - VViews - 29-01-2016

Hello Crezac,
regarding corrections in the text, there are several instances where we can see that individual characters in words have been emended/ overwritten/ added.
Over the years, I can't remember what blogs I've seen these on but one example that comes to mind is the often discussed "der mussdel" (or whatever it actually says) label near the lady in f66r, where the characters have been overwritten.
There are other examples where the author(s) or someone else has gone back and made various corrections and emendations to characters. One recent discussion of such an example can be  found here on user JKP's page:
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I really need to go now but will try to find useful links about this later.