[Article] Cheshire at it again: "Palaeographic Instruction for the Ischia Manuscript"

[-JKP-]

"Even with instruction, the palaeographic process is necessarily protracted and requires a good deal of self-education, intuition and patience to master. 
...
Figure 1 shows the entire page, whilst Figure 3 shows only the first line to be palaeographized. The species of plant is the Small-Flowered Lupin (Lupinus micranthus), which has characteristic radially symmetrical palmate leaves and relatively small and hairy inflorescence cones, with blue flowers that emerge in sequence from the bottom upwards, so that the cones initially appear blue around the edges and green at their centres, as shown."

I doubt that this is a drawing of Small-Flowered Lupin. They knew how to draw lupin in the Middle Ages and the VMS drawings are actually better than many from the same time period. Lupin has a very distinctive feature, the finger-like up-facing pods. The VMS drawing has nothing like this.
Cheshire is interpreting seed pod shapes as badly-drawn flowers, and there are other plants for which the leaves match more closely (plants commonly found in medieval plant books).

• He's still referring to the transliterated text in a basic san serif font as "modern Italics". He is clearly ignorant of basic typography terms.
  
• He's using the word "enclitic" incorrectly.
  
• He's still using a basic substitution system (ch = é, y = a, r = s), BUT since this doesn't work for VMS text... he inserts letters to suit his purposes any time his transliteration doesn't make linguistic sense.
  
• He breaks the tokens in whatever way he chooses to turn it into words.
  
• If the word doesn't make sense in his chosen language, he looks for a similar word in another language. In doing so, he's claiming that it's semi-random polyglot
  
• He is still ignoring letter frequency and position for the languages he claims to be represented by VMS text.
  

If someone else followed his exact 'method', they would come up with different results since there are so many degrees of freedom and subjective choice points. Choose the word breaks, choose a language, choose a version of the word used in any period of history (not those in use at a specific time). Even with all those degrees of freedom, it's still highly questionable in terms of vocabulary and grammar.