Swallowtail merlons... or provenance

[EllieV]

An undeveloped idea, and I only summarise the two arguments here below.

Nick Pelling has suggested that the castle merlons on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are in the Northern Italian medieval "swallow-tail" style -  ie, instead of being in the traditional |-| shape, they're in a V shape.

This has helped to shift the production area for the manuscript away from northern Europe to northern Italy instead.

However, the zodiac influence has once again shifted attention back to northern Europe, in particular the French / German border, based on identification of artistic influences from regional calendar and printing in the Voynich (a brief overview You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

So - leaving aside the question of the humanistic cursive script, which in any case appears to have been used all over Europe - how do we reconcile the contradictions?

Well, it strikes me the swallow-tail identification isn't really 100%. For a start, every merlon on that page is swallow-tail - see this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., or this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Surely the simplest explanation here is that, due to the small size of the script, the scribe simply drew the merlons in this fashion without paying any attention to real architecture. After all, why should he have paid any attention to this real life detail, unless it was something important? Far more likely the author wanted to display the merlons to show he was drawing a castle, and simply drew it in this style without even being aware of the difference.

Which means - we can shift the provenance back to northern Europe again.

The swallowtail merlons point to N. Italy only if one believes that the VMs is created in the first half of the 15th century.
 By the end of the 15th century they were more wide-spread. The fact that the VMs is in cipher points to the end of 15th century when Trithemius was writing his ciphers. The anatomy points to somebody who spent time in the Universities of Ferrara or Padua (not necessary an Italian - German and Swiss physicians also were educated and lectured there) in the late 15th or early 16th century. The women's hairdos point to 1490s court of Maximilian I.
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