On purpose

[Mark Knowles]

Writing 200 pages on parchment, with gall ink, with a quill pen, is hard work. Scribes were paid for their work because it's not the sort of thing most people do for pleasure.

Doing calligraphy for fun is quite different from writing page after page in the same script. Doing it for fun usually involves experimenting with styles and layout, but this doesn't happen in the VMS. It's the same style throughout and the layout is fairly pedestrian.

Returning again to Newton as an example he wrote a lot without having his own scribe. I think it is reasonable to assert that he wrote for pleasure. Well, what if someone didn't want to employ a scribe, but they wanted to write a manuscript? I don't enjoy typing, but it is a means to an end. If I don't type ever then I can't express myself. I am not going to employ a typist to dictate my thoughts to. It may be hard work writing a manuscript, but people do much harder things.

I was not suggesting for a moment that the author was "doing calligraphy for fun", which should be obvious from what I have written. The pleasure that the author was getting from it was not the pleasure of practising calligraphy just as when Newton wrote his Principia he didn't do it, because he wanted to practice his calligraphy. I have never read the Principia, but I wouldn't be surprised if the layout was fairly pedestrian as that wasn't the focus of the author.

Again if Newton is too late for your liking then I think I have demonstrated that at the time if the Voynich the same mindset applied.