Scribal hands and Currier languages

[Sam G]

But in a script like Voynichese ...

You cant.  History is not an exact science in the sense of chemistry or computing the balistics or whatever you call it of sattelites (sorry, Rene). It is always a question of likelihood. Is there any reason which forces as to believe there are several persons involved? I dont think so. To me the ms. looks like a pile of notes of some scientist bound together at some time, it is not a book in the sense of a copy of lets say de generatione et corruptione or a copy of Dioscurides. Several persons involved just does not make sense to me and even if several persons were involved, I dont see why it would matter

It would be nice if we could somehow determine whether or not there were multiple scribes from the handwriting itself, though I admit that it's difficult to do and I certainly don't think we can simply rely on Currier's opinion.  Like Koen says, it's a piece of the puzzle.  Probably not the most important piece, but it would give us some information about the environment and circumstances in which the VMS was physically created.

I recently posted this in another thread, but I'll repost it here since it's relevant:

I recently noticed something potentially interesting on f75r.  The line width used to outline the illustrations appears slightly thinner than the line width used to write most of the text, but the text column under the "rainbow" along with the first word on the page (kchedykary) appear to have been written using the same thin line as the illustrations:



The implication seems to be that one person outlined the illustrations and wrote a few bits of the text, and then either another person or the same person at a later time with a different pen came and filled in the rest of the text.

I think the same thing is true for the labels on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (which are part of the same bifolio), but it does not seem to be true of the labels in most cases.

I'm not sure if there were multiple scribes involved here, but there were certainly multiple pens, or perhaps the same pen at different stages of sharpness.  We could imagine several different scenarios to explain it, but I think it's at least a weak and indirect indication that there were multiple people involved.