Variation of glyph forms within single pages

[LisaFaginDavis]

I feel like a broken record - scribes are humans, not machines. This is a handwritten object, not printed. There will always be variation. It is possible to convince yourself (as some have argued) that the scribe changes witih each new line or page. It is possible to convince yourself (as some have argued) that the entire manuscript is written by a single scribe. My own experience and expertise after studying and cataloguing more than a thousand medieval manuscripts and fragments led me to my conclusions about how many scribes there are in the VMS and which leaves they wrote. Hundreds of scribes, five scribes, one scribe...all are possible, but they are not EQUALLY possible. I think I will not participate in these conversations going forward, as I have explained my methods and methodology on numerous occasions, and there are still those who insist that because there is variation I must be wrong. Variation is always present. The question is how different do two samples have to be before they represent two different hands, and how similar do two samples have to be before they represent a single hand. Paleographers disgree on where to make those distinctions. Should two scribal samples be considered different until they can be proven to be identical, or should they be considered identical until they can be proven to be different? These are the kind of theoretical discussions that paleographers have, and different paleographers come down on different sides of the question. In the end, all you can do is make your case and explain your methods. As I've said on multiple threads, paleography is subjective. Any and all are welcome to disagree with me, but I stand by my work, supported by thirty years of extensive experience with medieval manuscripts and acknowledged expertise.