Variation of glyph forms within single pages

[pfeaster]

Another possibility is, of course, that these variations are the result of two different scribes working on the manuscript. However, I find this explanation less likely due to the numerous similarities in the script, particularly in the case of EVA-[k]: "For nearly every page it is possible to find instances of <k> written with bowed and with horizontal crossbar, respectively. Additionally, on nearly each page some instances of <k> show an overlap between vertical stroke and crossbar, also indicating two strokes." (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

I searched the forum for the keyword "crossbar" and ran across an You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on this topic which probably warrants a link here.

I'm sympathetic to Lisa's argument that occasional "exceptions" within a page shouldn't be taken as evidence against the broad patterns she identifies with different hands and different scribes.  I also appreciate her reminder that paleography is subjective, and while it's not entirely clear to me which aspect of it is subjective, I imagine it has something to do with taking a step back, absorbing the larger picture, and making a holistic judgment call informed by long experience.

Still, her writings and presentations lay out a methodology based on sets of contrastive features that might have taken a trained paleographer to identify as significant, but that seem as though anyone ought to be able to recognize once they know what to look for.  By the same token, it takes someone who knows at least a little about statistics to recognize the bigram [ed] as a significant tell, but once it's been identified, anyone ought to be able to recognize whether it's present on a given page or not.

With that in mind, I wonder if anyone on the list has managed independently to confirm a scribal attribution working from Lisa's descriptions of the five hands, especially distinctions among scribes 2-5, and would be willing to say something about what was involved in the effort.  To be clear: I'm not so concerned here with whether the "five scribes" hypothesis is right or wrong as I am with better understanding how much the attributions rely on the specific constrastive features Lisa has listed and how much they instead rest on more general impressions based on her decades of experience collating medieval manuscripts.  Her writings and presentations focus on the former, but maybe that's because the latter are difficult to put into words.  For myself, I'd have a hard time explaining how I can tell at a glance whether a French legal document was written closer to 1450, 1550, or 1650 even though I'd be entirely certain in each case that I was right.  I could point to specific letter forms that vary, but that's not what I'd actually be using as the basis for that initial judgment call; it's more a matter of overall appearance, based on having seen lots and lots of examples.  Maybe the five hands are more like that -- I'm not sure.  As it is, I'm frustrated that I can't seem to replicate Lisa's attributions, since based on her writings and presentations I've been under the impression that I should be able to on the basis of her descriptions.  If there's a good reason why I shouldn't be able to, I might feel better about it!

Now, if it were just a matter of knowing how many scribes there were, and what pages they each wrote, then it might be OK to defer to Lisa's clear expertise and move on with that knowledge in hand -- but I'd venture to say there's more to it than that.  Handwriting-related issues are entangled with a lot of other concerns and inquiries, and some of these overlap directly with features Lisa describes as hand-specific, which is in turn something any responsible Voynichero now needs to take into consideration.

Nick Pelling is even suggesting that the length of the flourishes for EVA-[n] transports some meaning: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

I recently broke down and grabbed a used copy of Curse of the Voynich, where I see Nick also covers this idea at pages 164-168.  Not only does he suggest that the form of the [n] flourish carries meaning, but he also argues that the parameter through which that meaning was encoded changed from length (at first) to shape (later on).  I won't weigh in here on the merits of the argument itself -- I just want to point out that if Nick were now to want to revisit his hypothesis to factor in Lisa's work, he wouldn't be able to do so without digging more deeply into the criteria for distinguishing among scribes.  Simply building on the conclusions would be pointless in this context.

And here's a quick thought experiment.  It's the year 2124, and a dozen disbound leaves from the VMS have just turned up in some overlooked corner of Athanasius Kircher's papers.  None of us here on this forum are still alive to greet the discovery, but Lisa's writings about the VMS are still available and well known.  Would a layperson of average abilities be able to take her written "key" to the five hands and use it to identify (correctly and confidently) which scribe had written each of the newly discovered leaves?  If not, what would the main obstacles be?