[Talk] Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019

[-JKP-]

I'm also surprised so much lip-service was given to forgery. It makes it sound like Touwaide is leaning in that direction.

But I find it surprising that anyone would suggest that Voynich himself sat there for several months drawing medieval plant illustrations to create this manuscript. He was a book-seller, not a calligrapher.

If someone forged the VMS, they would have to:

• know how to convincingly write seven different styles of 15th and 16th-century writing (de Tepenecz, column text, foliation, quire numbers, 116v, color annotations, and VMS main text),
  
• have an in-depth knowledge of Latin scribal conventions,
  
• have an in-depth knowledge of numeral styles (which changed in this specific time-period),
  
• have an in-depth knowledge of a small subset of medieval Zodiac traditions,
  
• have an in-depth knowledge of medieval plant-drawing traditions,
  
• have an in-depth knowledge of early 15th-century fashion,
  
• have skill at using a quill pen (this is not easy, it is basically calligraphy on a material that tends to resist ink, and the quill sometimes has to be sharpened numerous times per page),
  
• have an in-depth knowledge of how to make medieval inks and pigments AND the raw materials with which to make them,
  
• have 100 sheets of clean 500-year-old vellum on hand, including sheets large enough to create several foldouts.
  

And a lot more.

How many years does it take a Voynich researcher to acquire the knowledge to understand all these things? Wilfrid Voynich did not have access to the Internet.