Ascender fantasies

[-JKP-]

 I'm not sure if you're talking about the ascenders as such or dating the content by similar ornament, so I'll address both issues as I covered them in 2015.  For this subject, the most relevant of my posts s probably 'Who wrote the Gallows' , voynichimagery.com (7th October 2015)....

You mean the article that is closed off and no one can read? Are you planning to make them accessible again so we can verify your claims?

Jim Reeds' first noticed ascenders in connection with 'gallows' and  meticulously acknowledged his source (of course).  See first mailing list rather than secondary reports.

I think some common sense needs to prevail in terms of crediting real discoveries and "crediting" that which is obvious. I don't think it's necessary to acknowledge those things that are so obvious a ten-year can see them without prompting, such as the existence of "gallows" style ascenders in the VMS.

I took his brief excursus and researched it in more depth.  It was soon  clear that the 'elongated ascender' as such is to be associated primarily with religio- legal documents as e.g. establishment documents for religious orders; land-grants for religious orders, and for universities and other items having legal force as well as (e.g.) books about the rules of law or 'laws' of grammar.  Highly educated religious scribes were most likely to have been assigned duty in writing out documents of such a sort. ( "Law and scribe"  proved a fascinating ancillary research topic, by the way)

I have gone through thousands of manuscripts, and embellished and elongated ascenders are found in many kinds of documents. The ones in legal documents were not accessible or viewable by the average person. While there are numerous documents related to the affairs of religious orders, many are contracts for land, inheritance, etc.—legal arrangements of the upper classes, that are not necessarily religious in nature.

The gallows-style ascenders in other kinds of documents were more accessible to the average person than those in charters and other forms of contracts, so... even though litterae elongatae were common in legal documents, they were more available to be seen in the myriad other forms of manuscripts like chronicles, biblical interpretations, books of hours, etc. It's difficult to know which ones might have influenced the VMS.