Variation of glyph forms within single pages

[ReneZ]

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?

From my perspective, it is not obvious that a layperson should be capable of doing this. I'm not saying that it is out of the question, but I am very skeptical. It may require knowledge and experience that the average person simply does not have.

Let me give an example. This really aims at demonstrating something else, but it is not completely off the point here.

The following image will be very familiar to people who have seen German TV and shows two cartoon animals. What are they?

   

I think that almost everyone will immediately recognise an elephant and a mouse. We don't need to think or analyse. This is what our brain returns immediately. Yet, if we were to analyse, lots of things would seem contradict this. An elephant is never smaller than a mouse. A mouse rarely stands on its hind legs, and has very different feet. Elephants are not purple.

The recognition of the mouse and the elephant is based on 'the whole', not on a collection of details.
I think that this is the same process whereby art experts recognise artists (also more obscure ones than Caravaggio or Vermeer) from their works, and medievalists can quickly place a rough date and region on an illustrated MS. Now in these cases it would be possible to some extent to point out details confirming the identification, but these would only be completely convicing to people with at least some background in the matter.

In the above case of the mouse and the elephant, one could continue to argue that the identification of the mouse and the elephant has to be wrong based on the above objections (size, colour, stance).