09-04-2020, 10:28 PM
I've seen a lot of text that is traced, including examples by people who had quite a bit of training in lettering. There is almost always a certain hesitancy to it. The basic forms may be similar, but the dynamics of motion are frequently different. These characteristics are subtle but they are discernible. Pens leave different kinds of marks depending on the speed of the hand.
Also, the smaller the original writing, the harder it is to reproduce by tracing. The smoother the curves, the harder it is to reproduce (some people cannot draw smooth curves no matter how hard they try).
The best forgers often do not trace. They learn the text to be written by copying it many times, so the flow of the ink and speed of the hand is closer to the original and then, when they get good at it, they reproduce the text. People who can do this are like skilled musicians, they have talent honed by much practice, and there aren't very many of them.
I think we can confidently say that Voynich's wife would find it difficult to forge text. She wrote cursive in a largish, somewhat clumsy, scrawling style (and I don't mean any offense to the memory of Ethel Voynich, but we have evidence that she didn't have the fine-motor skill to do forgeries). Anne Nill could write slightly smaller and neater, but her writing wasn't of the skill level needed to do forgery. Wilfrid's writing is slightly more florid and he handles curves better, but it's still debatable that he had the skills to do forgery.
It takes years to learn all the different 15th-century script styles and to reproduce them well. Not counting the main text, there are at least 5 distinctively different styles of handwriting in the VMS (column text, Jacobi text, 116v/17r notes, color annotations, "ven mus mel", and zodiac-symbol labels). It would require significant knowledge of palaeography to reproduce these so convincingly. The text in the Marci letters is also fairly small and thus harder to forge.
Also, the smaller the original writing, the harder it is to reproduce by tracing. The smoother the curves, the harder it is to reproduce (some people cannot draw smooth curves no matter how hard they try).
The best forgers often do not trace. They learn the text to be written by copying it many times, so the flow of the ink and speed of the hand is closer to the original and then, when they get good at it, they reproduce the text. People who can do this are like skilled musicians, they have talent honed by much practice, and there aren't very many of them.
I think we can confidently say that Voynich's wife would find it difficult to forge text. She wrote cursive in a largish, somewhat clumsy, scrawling style (and I don't mean any offense to the memory of Ethel Voynich, but we have evidence that she didn't have the fine-motor skill to do forgeries). Anne Nill could write slightly smaller and neater, but her writing wasn't of the skill level needed to do forgery. Wilfrid's writing is slightly more florid and he handles curves better, but it's still debatable that he had the skills to do forgery.
It takes years to learn all the different 15th-century script styles and to reproduce them well. Not counting the main text, there are at least 5 distinctively different styles of handwriting in the VMS (column text, Jacobi text, 116v/17r notes, color annotations, "ven mus mel", and zodiac-symbol labels). It would require significant knowledge of palaeography to reproduce these so convincingly. The text in the Marci letters is also fairly small and thus harder to forge.
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