Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

"Isn't Maria a religious name in Italian? I sure hope you're not reverting back to authorship by the northern monks?

I think you handwriting experts are suffering from optical illusions. Let's try an experiment. Let's remove the word mature from all its surroundings and show it to people. I'm pretty sure many or most people would identify that central plus sign (+) as the letter t. Your judgment is being distorted by the surrounding plus signs and you don't realize it."

There's no way a contemporary viewer can accurately read medieval text unless they've had practice reading (or at least studying) old manuscripts. My judgment is tempered by many years study and practice, so I'll trust my judgment over a bunch of random people who probably can't read even read 16th-century script, much less the more difficult 15th-century script.

That is not a "t". It's a cross that's been inserted. If the text on the last page is an incantation or prayer, the cross symbol means you genuflect at those points while reading it out loud.


I don't know how you can say my judgment is being distorted when I've paged through thousands of medieval texts and have read many medieval manuscripts that are in Middle English, French, German, Nordic, and Latin. I can even kind of get the gist of some of the Russian, Italian, and Spanish texts, not much, but enough to get a sense of what they are about. Unfortunately, I don't know any Czech or Turkish (except for a few words) and my Greek is limited to reading titles, mythical names and names of plants, but Greek is a different character set anyway and doesn't apply to the style of script on 116v.