Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

On the dipping of the ink, you again resort to something of low probability to defend a popular belief which, in this case, is that the marginalia is meaningless scribble.

What????? What are you talking about?

They used quill pens. Have you ever tried to write with a quill pen? It's HARD. First you have to learn to cut it properly, and it has to be trimmed with a knife every few folios because the tip wears down. Then you have to learn to dip it exactly right, or the amount of the ink flows too little or too much. It's VERY easy to dip slightly too far and get too much ink and if you don't dab it or wipe it, the ink flows in and fills the curves. Parchment is a difficult writing medium. No matter how carefully it's prepared, there are slight bumps and oily spots. The medium resists the ink in those places.

It has NOTHING to do with the marginalia being meaningless or being scribble. It has to do with the art of using a very difficult writing instrument.

It reminds me of how you resorted to the pangolin to negate the armadillo, without providing any evidence at all that the pangolin was known somewhere in Europe at some point during the Middle Ages. I do not have to do the same for authorship in the Americas because at that time the armadillos, with more than a dozen species of it roaming about, were seen everywhere.

Now you're twisting my argument. I did not argue that it was a pangolin. I said that the drawing resembles a pangolin more than an armadillo. Those are two different kinds of statements.

On the marginalia, other points of contention include whether "mich" means milk (and don't know how you connect that to plants) or is simply short for michel. Michel, of course, would be consistent with other marginalia pointers to a prophecy attributed to Michel Nostradamus.

Milk is not my interpretation. It is someone else's. It is a rational interpretation based on the way some dialects dropped consonants (I have seen it in manuscripts) and based on a saying that actually existed about "goose's milk" (goose's milk is a tongue in cheek reference in Germanic cultures to something that doesn't exist). Even though it's not the first thing I would interpret for that text (I've proposed about three different interpretations for the phrase at the bottom), I will support whoever suggested it because it can be defended on rational and cultural grounds.

Your technical capabilities are very valuable and much needed on this project. I only wish that you could take a more neutral stance on the interpretation of the data. You say you do, but many of your posts reveal little openness to new ideas.

I am very significantly more neutral than you are. You can't get away from the idea that it has to be Cathars and it has to be Nostradmus prophecies even though there's no evidence to support either suggestion. Your "evidence" is that you you pick only the interpretation that suits your theory and you don't look at other possibilities.