Variation of glyph forms within single pages

[pfeaster]

One thing I wonder is if the hypothesis holds that the first bifolio was for practice. Would a later herbal A bifolio give more consistent results?

Interesting question!  Here's a similar set of displays for the next bifolio in (f2+f7):

   

Caveat: I'm not a trained paleographer.  But I'd say the forms of [k] in this bifolio look marginally more consistent here than they did in f1+f8.  There seems to be less variation in the shape of the loop in particular, with fewer pinched ovals and more roundness overall.  However, there's still significant variation in the form of the cross-bar.  As before, it would be hard to assess this quantitatively because the "types" seem to span a spectrum rather than falling into easily distinguishable clusters.  But there are certainly multiple tokens with horizontal cross-bars and multiple tokens with bowed cross-bars.  There are also tokens where the cross-bar follows at a sharp angle from the top of the first vertical and tokens where it appears to have been drawn in a second noncontinuous stroke (or at least there's no perceptible widening of the vertical to suggest it was "retraced" on the way to the start of the cross-bar).

Surprisingly (?), the forms of [n] seem to be a bit less consistent here than on f1+f8.  There are still plenty of Hand 1 type flourishes, but they're now accompanied by a higher proportion of shorter types, including one particularly extreme Hand 3 type (f2r, 3rd row, token 4).

If f2+f7 was written by the same person who wrote f1+f8, but a little later, then the main change in habits in between would seem to have been in the direction of:

(1) Round [k] loops, but still with sporadic ovals
(2) Shorter [n] flourishes on average, but still with plenty of long ones thrown into the mix

In other words, it looks like the writer retained the wide repertoire of glyph forms we see in f1+f8 but is now using some of them in different proportions.  Specifically, they've settled on a comfortable default motion for drawing a [k] loop, and they've become more economical (so to speak) with the lengths of their [n] flourishes.

If it hadn't been for Lisa's paper, I doubt it would have occurred to me to focus on these particular telltale features, and I absolutely defer to her expertise in applying the disciplinary tools of paleography.  That said, I don't think we should be so hasty to dismiss the possibility that the different "hands" could represent the evolution of a single writer's habits while learning and internalizing a new script (a scenario that I sense just doesn't come up much in paleographic studies).  If we were in fact dealing with such a case, I believe we'd expect not to see sharp, clear, absolute, unambiguous divisions between "hands," but gradual transitions in which the relative proportions of different features would vary -- something like the "transitions" between Currier A and Currier B.  This would, I'll admit, be a fiendishly difficult thing to track on a large scale.  But armed with Lisa's descriptions of the different hands, and her You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as a "cheat sheet," I have to say I'd be hard-pressed to identify either f1+f8 or f2+f7 unambiguously with Hand 1.  That could be because I'm misinterpreting what the distinguishing features are or because I lack the specialized training needed to recognize them properly.  But as far as I can tell as an interested layperson, both bifolios seem to mix forms associated with multiple hands.  Even Lisa's Figure 7 contains what look to me like counterexamples alongside the ones she's circled:

   

Here, the [aiin] I've highlighted on the left seems like a better fit for Hand 5, while the [aiin] I've highlighted on the right seems like a better fit for Hand 2, 3, or 4.  Again, I may be misinterpreting what the definitive characteristics are, or how consistent we should expect them to be, and if so, I'd welcome clarification.

But if an evolutionary interpretation of handwriting differences were to be borne out by further investigation (which is, of course, a big "if"), it seems to me there would be some significant implications for the status of Voynichese as a writing system.  In the "five scribes" hypothesis, there should have been at least five people who had already been using Voynichese extensively enough before writing the text we have today to have developed stable, personally distinctive habits around its use, comparable to the mature "hands" of professional scribes.  But in this alternative hypothesis, there might have been nothing at all written in Voynichese prior to f1r.  We may instead be faced with one person's initial and ongoing experiments with an entirely new and untried writing system.  Rather than identifying different scribes, differences in handwriting might then instead provide valuable insight into chronology -- but with all the same investigative tools and methods (e.g., use of Lightbox) still being applicable.