[split] f28v

[Mark Knowles]

They didn't write 4 with the loop so small that it looks like a hook. They wrote it with a loop (the loop could be sharp or rounded). All you have to do is look at the 4 shapes on the same VMS folio to see that the little stroke with a hook is proportioned and written differently:




If one were to interpret the scribble as 4157, then I have to point out that they didn't write 5 or 7 like modern numbers either (it was uncommon to see the modern 5 or 7 in the early 15th century). Here are examples from the early 15th century and the late 15th century so you can see the transition to modern numerals (note that if you look at actual manuscripts, modern numerals for foliation or indexes were usually added at the time of binding, which was often a century or two after the creation of the manuscript).

Note how the numeral 1 often has a hook:

Note that the 7 was not written with curves, this came later (when fountain pens were introduced, which gave more control over the pen). It was usually two rather severe lines. Occasionally the top curved, but they didn't add an "s" curve to the stem as we sometimes do now.

As I have already written here before it is not my opinion that it is 7.

Mark, it's more than a decade since Nick wrote Curse and I get the impression that he's always reading, always learning, so whatever he thought about this subject in the past might not be what he thinks about it now.

Nick might have changed his mind, I have no idea, but that doesn't matter as my point was that identifying that symbol as a "4" is not as ridiculous as you suggest as more than one person has been of that opinion, though in truth I think I saw the identification first in Nick's book.

If you consider how tiny the text is (the Beinecke scans enlarge the image quite a bit), then whatever creates a lighter spot within a line might just be a bump in the vellum where less ink took hold. If we went through the whole manuscript with a magnifying glass, we could probably find bits of numbers and letters in many of the tokens that are nothing more than artifacts of the substrate.

That is what a higher resolution scan would make clearer.

I am reluctant to try to interpret something so small.

This is the difficulty, of course, with this particular piece of text. My point, as I have stated, was to push back on the idea that it says IHS, which did not and still does not seem very plausible to me.