The first palaeographers to assert the Ms is in a humanist script?

[-JKP-]

There's another reason to be careful about categorizing Voynich text...

Note how the stem of the "a", "r" and "i" shapes all lean back. This may be deliberate, they may have been designed this way rather than being the scribe's natural direction, and makes the shapes difficult to compare to regular texts.

When I search "a" shapes that are similar, the dates range from the 10th century to the 16th century and are in manuscripts from many different regions, some of which are are in Gothic scripts, some in Caroline or early humanistic scripts.


Tails that indicate abbreviations, whose shapes are mimicked in the VMS text, are very common in Gothic texts, but are also found, to some extent, in humanistic texts (but are more prevalent in Gothic texts)

Here are two examples. One set is from Basel, Switzerland (c. 1400). The other is from southern Italy (c. 1440). I have similar examples from Germany and Austria. Notice how they use the same scribal conventions:

   

FYI, the 9 abbreviation is not always superscripted, often it is written in line with the rest of the text, as in the VMS.