[Panel Session] Voynich Paleography lecture

[LisaFaginDavis]

Looking to see whether distinct hands worked on the same leafs would be a good indication of whether it is a collaborative or individual effort - does one single sheet have two scribes on it?

On a different note, I remember mucking around with DigiPal ages ago with the vague intention of putting it onto the forum for exactly this sort of paleographical effort. Never did, mainly due to the lack of user permissions making unsuitable for public accesible websites IIRC. Should do it on a password protected site at some point.....

My forthcoming article will address that very question - the relationship between scribal corpora and codicological structure, and the implications of those relationships. There are a few bifolia that have different hands on different pages (57/66, for example, where Scribe 1 writes f. 57r and my Scribe 5 writes 57v, 66r, and 66v). Folio 215r has scribe 2 on lines 1-12 and then my Scribe 3 takes over. And as we all know, Scribe 1 bifolia are mixed in with Scribe 2 bifolia in several quires of the botanical section, but I am fairly certain that that's the result of an early misbinding.

The new version of DigiPal ("Archetype") is much more do-it-yourself than was the original DigiPal. It's fairly simple to set up and customize an offline instance on your own computer, but if you want something publicly served it's more complicated. My "VoynichPal" instance lives on my laptop. For more, see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

---

Apart from the fact that there are five hands, I also find it interesting that one is in Currier A and the others in Currier B. That is, to the extent that Currier A and B are clearly separated entities. Is it possible that some of the "B" hands also correspond to their own sub-dialect?

Definitely! Rene observed that there's a group of leaves that rarely use the "40" combination - that group corresponds to the work of my Scribe 4. So it may be that those of you working on linguistic matters will be able to find other such patterns by analyzing my scribal corpora.