31-12-2018, 04:52 PM
I thought I ought to mention that there's a big difference between "humanist" hands and "humanistic" hands which nobody ever seems to state here.
As should be well known by now, "humanist" hands were the formal styles of writing that emerged (as Rene says) around 1410-1420 (and which consciously aped the formal Carolingian writing of earlier centuries). By way of contrast, "humanistic" hands were hybrid hands that emerged in the mid-fifteenth century, courtesy of scribes who had been trained to write formal humanist documents, but where the shapes of those humanist letters had started to leech out into the rest of their writing: so a "humanistic" hand is a hand that has humanist elements leeching into it, but which isn't actually a formal humanist hand. When Sergio Toresella dates the Voynich hand to 1460-1470 (and I believe he is talking more about Currier A than Currier B for that), I'm certain that this kind of hybrid humanistic hand is what he is talking about.
In the Voynich Manuscript, we clearly don't see a humanist hand: but the 'raw' radiocarbon dating range would - as Sergio's dating implies - be I think a little too early for a humanistic hand. And this is a palaeographical paradox that isn't easy to shift. Oh, and feel free to go through all the palaeography source books you like (I went through more than fifty at the British Library), but I'll be surprised if you find anything matching well earlier than 1450.
As far as continuity between Currier A and Currier B goes, my position really isn't as polarized as selective quoting of Cipher Mysteries posts might make it seem. Yes, I do believe that at the heart of A and B lies a core change in the Voynichese 'container' rules: but I would be entirely unsurprised if those container rules had been changed for reasons to do with changes in the content. And such a change need not have been as brutal as a switch between Italian and Latin, it might be a variety of things, e.g. Roman numbers vs Arabic digits, Tuscan vs Venetian, etc.
Perhaps a more useful diagram to construct would be something that tries to capture not just clusters of pages, but what the differences in behaviours between those clusters are. That is, something more like a state machine, where the states are mutually stable clusters of pages or bifolios, and the transitions are the changes in behaviours. If we had been able to reconstruct (almost all of) the original codicological state of the manuscript, most of this task would probably be trivial: but alas, that remains work that has not even been attempted. (Oh well!)
As should be well known by now, "humanist" hands were the formal styles of writing that emerged (as Rene says) around 1410-1420 (and which consciously aped the formal Carolingian writing of earlier centuries). By way of contrast, "humanistic" hands were hybrid hands that emerged in the mid-fifteenth century, courtesy of scribes who had been trained to write formal humanist documents, but where the shapes of those humanist letters had started to leech out into the rest of their writing: so a "humanistic" hand is a hand that has humanist elements leeching into it, but which isn't actually a formal humanist hand. When Sergio Toresella dates the Voynich hand to 1460-1470 (and I believe he is talking more about Currier A than Currier B for that), I'm certain that this kind of hybrid humanistic hand is what he is talking about.
In the Voynich Manuscript, we clearly don't see a humanist hand: but the 'raw' radiocarbon dating range would - as Sergio's dating implies - be I think a little too early for a humanistic hand. And this is a palaeographical paradox that isn't easy to shift. Oh, and feel free to go through all the palaeography source books you like (I went through more than fifty at the British Library), but I'll be surprised if you find anything matching well earlier than 1450.
As far as continuity between Currier A and Currier B goes, my position really isn't as polarized as selective quoting of Cipher Mysteries posts might make it seem. Yes, I do believe that at the heart of A and B lies a core change in the Voynichese 'container' rules: but I would be entirely unsurprised if those container rules had been changed for reasons to do with changes in the content. And such a change need not have been as brutal as a switch between Italian and Latin, it might be a variety of things, e.g. Roman numbers vs Arabic digits, Tuscan vs Venetian, etc.
Perhaps a more useful diagram to construct would be something that tries to capture not just clusters of pages, but what the differences in behaviours between those clusters are. That is, something more like a state machine, where the states are mutually stable clusters of pages or bifolios, and the transitions are the changes in behaviours. If we had been able to reconstruct (almost all of) the original codicological state of the manuscript, most of this task would probably be trivial: but alas, that remains work that has not even been attempted. (Oh well!)