New Blog post: "Mysterious Steganography"- a Damning Observation

[kckluge]

Lisa, assuming that you are privy to details of the McCrone analysis beyond the summary made public, are you able to comment on:



* Barbara Bennett's claim in _Fortean Times_ that "...McCrone Associates tested the ink and determined...that it had been applied to 'fresh' vellum: i.e. before a patina had built up, meaning within months of the vellum being made if not mere weeks afterwards..." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)



* Rich's reading of the public report as implying that the the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia sampled was contemporary with the main text and drawing ("...Barabe also concluded that certain quire and page numbers were different than the main text inks, telling us that if the f166v (sic) ink were different, we would have been so informed. In effect, the conclusion tells us that the marginalia was applied 'contemporaneously' with the main text ink!....the ink of the main text and the 'pox leber' marginalia are the same, according to the well-respected scholarship of McCrone." -- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).



Hopefully NDAs regarding further details don't prevent clarification on these points.

I don't have access to anything that isn't already public - I'm not affiliated with Yale at the moment, so I wouldn't have access to anything confidential. But I'm not sure what your point is in citing these observations. There's nothing unusual about parchment being used soon after its creation...what do you think that observation implies? And as for 116v, there are other inscriptions in the manuscript that appear to be roughly contemporaneous with the C14 dating: not only 116v, but the months on the zodiac pages and the inscription on f. 17r. None of this seems suspicious to me.

Again, not asking you (or anyone else associated with the testing) to speak out of turn regarding info that contractually shouldn't be disclosed.

With regard to Bennett's claim: "There's nothing unusual about parchment being used soon after its creation...what do you think that observation implies?" -- I think it would imply (if true) that the manuscript unambiguously can't possibly be a 20th (or 19th or 18th or 17th or 16th) century forgery using 15th century vellum in the form of evidence that can't be wished away by appealing to a sufficiently clever forger, as Rich has done with all the points you raised earlier in the thread.

With regard to Rich's interpretation of the report with respect to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. "pox leber" marginalia: His blog post that I linked to explains why *he* thinks that would be problematic; I was mere hoping for a more informed opinion regarding whether he was reading more into the limited information in the summary report than was actually there.