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+--- Thread: Scribal penmanship (/thread-3049.html)
Scribal penmanship - -JKP- - 18-01-2020
Here's a quick example of what happens when you push against the direction of the quill.
One of the reason the tails (connected macrons) in medieval scripts are generally added in a separate stroke is because the scribe re-aligns the quill to pull it in the correct direction for dispensing the ink.
If you don't do that, the tip jitters and the ink splats.
This scribe apparently didn't want to lift the pen to add the tails in a separate stroke. He reversed direction and drew upwards and back and the ink feathered out and splashed. I don't see this very often in manuscripts so I thought I'd post it for general information of something that is unconventional:
RE: Scribal penmanship - Koen G - 18-01-2020
Interesting, I have no experience with this. So this also means that you can't simply draw an O in one motion?
RE: Scribal penmanship - -JKP- - 18-01-2020
Normally "o" is written in two strokes... top to bottom on the left, then top to bottom on the right.
There might be a few people who can do it in a single stroke by turning the hand as they go so the angle of the nib is changing with the circle but you'd have writer's cramp after 3 folios of doing it that way and it would still sometimes spatter.
Plus, the thick and thin qualities that are emphasized in some of the more elegant book hands are partly due to doing it in two strokes (the VMS scribes do NOT do this very well).
Here's an example of a bookhand from a French manuscript (they had some good scribes, the Italians were also good). I picked this one because it demonstrates the thick and thin capabilities of a single (moderately wide) quill nib if you hold and pull it correctly:
Note the "o" and the "d". You start at the top, go down and left and come around and stop. Now lift the pen, go back to the top, drop the pen and pull across to the right, and down and around to complete the circle. Each letter is done this way, so you learn a sequence of strokes for each letter.
Pulling toward the side of the nib that holds the ink avoids spatters. That's why you typically start at the top.
This motion gives you thin strokes in the horizontal direction and thick strokes in the verticalish direction except that the hand naturally moves slightly at an angle when drawing arcs, so the thin strokes (of a right-hander) will angle down to the left—you can see this in the thin stroke on the "e".
I don't think of the VMS scribes as professional scribes because they obviously didn't exploit the basic physics of the pen (in terms of using the thick-thin properties) as was done by the best scribes, and they were pretty inconsistent in terms of width, slant, height, etc. (although we don't know if any of these properties change the meaning of the glyph).
They did know enough to avoid splatters, but not enough to avoid fill-in in some of the loops (which is difficult to avoid when the text is very small, but some scribes could do it). There was probably some basic formal training (maybe by a writing tutor?), but not enough to write as well as John Dee, for example. His note-hand was a total scrawl, but his calligraphy hand was pretty good, better than the VMS script.
RE: Scribal penmanship - Koen G - 18-01-2020
Interesting. Makes one wonder what kind of persons scribed the VM. Maybe they were in training and the VM script is good for exercise
This makes me wonder if penmanship can be seen improving as they work their way through thousands of words. But this question is complicated by the fact that there are two-or-more scribes and the pages are out of order...
RE: Scribal penmanship - -JKP- - 27-01-2020
Folio 85r (the dense-text folio) looks like the ink has settled.
What happens is the ink at the top of the inkpot will be slightly lighter and more watery, but if you dip the pen deeper, you get darker slightly thicker ink. It increases the contrast and the watery parts will sometimes spread out very slightly.
Ink needs to be shaken once in a while.
So... the zodiac folios didn't get turned quite as often as they should for the text to be clear and vertical... the ink sometimes wasn't shaken as often as it would be by a professional scribe.
I've often wondered if the VMS was done for a patron, for personal use, or for the designer's heir (it was apparently not uncommon for men to write books of knowledge to pass on to their sons).
Given the style of the manuscript and the many shortcuts, it doesn't seem as though the VMS was done for a patron, unless it was a patron on a budget.
RE: Scribal penmanship - Aga Tentakulus - 27-01-2020
About the ink:
Page 73r + v, Dragon and Sagittarius. Here the drawings are already badly visible. The ink is already very thin because of the refill with (water).
In my opinion he was forced to put on a new ink.
It also looks like he has finished the text now and made some rework on the drawings.
The new ink does not seem to tile properly. It seems to be very dark and a bit sticky, which makes it a bit sluggish to tile the ink over the tip of the pen.
RE: Scribal penmanship - voynichbombe - 27-01-2020
As for the "o"s and "a"s and actually anything resembling something close to circular, I can contribute my experience in trying to script myself. I bought a few quill pens, a batch of leftover parchment and vellum (leftover cut pieces, but large enough), and three types of iron gall ink, which differed largely in it's qualities (originally I wanted to brew my own ink, but was not successful). Of course the quill tips were cut too large for the small scale of the VMS scripting, so until I honed my quill tip cutting skills (it's a hell), I settled for a larger scale. My target was to find a way to get up to speed, so as not to spend a whole evening finishing _one sentence.. But, even in the larger scale, the same thing happened. The ink takes some time to settle, so I could not write an, let's say "o" in one go, or it would run in (with the stroke direction in mind as not to "splotch"). So I came up with a kind of "fragmentary" scripting, leaving all "loopy" parts of glyphs half finished, while scripting the next ones. Later I would come back to them to finish the other half. Of course this happened more dramatically as I learned to cut finer quill tips and even kallipos ones, trying to lower the scale.
I cannot tell if the scribe(s) of the VMS used this technique, but for me it was the only way to script faster. Anyways, as in my harm opinion there are very few examples of these errors, splotching and running in, and as said by others before, the scribe(s) must have been very skilled.
RE: Scribal penmanship - Koen G - 27-01-2020
Some half baked theory I once came up with was that the VM text was added to existing, textless images by novice scribes practicing their penmanship before moving on to more expensive commissions. But a scenario like this doesn't explain a lot. Especially if the scribes were apparently skilled? But I'm hearing everything from inexperienced to "very skilled"...
RE: Scribal penmanship - -JKP- - 28-01-2020
They knew how to use a pen. You can't write that small or fluently unless you can do that.
But... there is a distinction between those who can use a pen in a competent way and those who can do calligraphy. That distinction still exists. It's about how you hold the pen and how artistic an eye you have and how CONSISTENTLY you can make strokes in each direction and how you BALANCE the lines and spaces.
The VMS scribes knew the basic mechanics of using a pen, and there are lots of small signs that they knew scribal conventions, as well.
But they were not top-quality calligraphers. The artistry and the consistency is not there. It's like the difference between a hobby painter (who learns to mix the colors correctly and to create brushstrokes without muddying the image), and a good professional artist who has ALSO mastered form and composition, light and shadow, etc.
There are many examples of good calligraphy in Italian and French texts of the 15th century. Also some good calligraphy in later 16th-century German manuscripts. The VMS doesn't look anything like these. It's not because some of the glyph shapes are different, Voynich glyphs can be written calligraphically like any other, it's a lack of consistency, thick-and-thin balance, and relative spacing of letters/words/lines. It's not bad, but it's not super good either.
The attention to detail is good in the VMS, considering its small size. It scores points for originality, as well. It has a certain charm. But the text is more functional than beautiful.
RE: Scribal penmanship - Helmut Winkler - 28-01-2020
Basically, the Voynich script is a Gebrauchsschrift, not a Buchschrift, a script for every day use, not for a long time in use book as a few years later the fonts of printers (which at first were copying written books, seeGutenberg)