Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

David,


It is apparent that the author of the marginalia had no intention whatsoever of making himself easily understood and probably for the same reason that the VMS was written in code in the first place.

There's no way to know if the marginalia writer had any connection to the VMS main text. At least I haven't yet seen a convincing argument yet to substantiate the link. The two VMS tokens and the drawing may have been there long before the rest was added and if it is a charm (as just one possibility out of several), then invented words were often included and did not have to have meaning, as they were "power" words that just needed to sound right. Mixing languages was also common in charms, some of the power words were medieval interpretations of old Semitic names or kabbalah words or old Latin.

It was extremely common for those who owned a manuscript after it was written to add notes, especially at the end. I'm HOPING there's a connection (I think the 17v marginalia is in the same hand, so I have my fingers crossed that the marginalia writer was contemporary with the VMS) but it's definitely not proven yet that the marginalia writer knew what was in the text.


Being deliberately obtuse and being obtuse perhaps due to using a less familiar language (or who knows, maybe due to having a hearing impairment) might look the same on the surface, but exist for different reasons. I have seen many manuscripts (especially herbal manuscripts) where the spelling is so far off, possibly due to the writers mis-hearing a word from a lecture and trying to write it in sounds familiar to them, that only the accompanying picture makes it clear what they were trying to write.