Variation of glyph forms within single pages

[pfeaster]

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?

It's a good thought experiment. I think another trained paleographer would need to be brought in.

Maybe so, but I feel that's skipping a step.  What would the main obstacles be in the way of the layperson being able to do this?  What would a layperson be most likely to get wrong by trying to apply Lisa's "key" as written, and why?

Let's imagine a similar scenario in a different field, one further removed from our personal sphere of interest. A sealed 16th century crypt is discovered, containing a dozen unknown paintings in the style of various masters. To determine the authorship of the paintings, would you even consider asking for the opinion of an amateur, or would you go straight to professional specialist?

The difference in that case, I think, is that "masters" in the sense you mean belong to a specific tradition that has been exhaustively studied and hotly debated by many people for many years.  It would be easy to find relevant specialists.  For an analogous scenario, I think we might instead need to imagine a crypt containing paintings from some mostly unknown civilization.  Which isn't to say we might not still want to call in a trained generalist art historian, but the situation would be a little less straightforward.

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.

My thought experiment involved a layperson trying to apply the "key," but if the assignment were instead given to a trained paleographer or forensic handwriting analyst, I think the main question I meant to pose would remain.  Could that future paleographer or handwriting analyst -- drawing on their general disciplinary training and experience -- use Lisa's "key" to make scribal attributions?  Or would the attributions need to be based primarily on other, hard-to-articulate factors that the expert would need to (re)discover?

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.

This is a nice example.  To follow up on the analogy: the "key" to the five hands would, I guess, correspond to a list of set criteria for distinguishing a mouse from an elephant.  Does it have a trunk?  Does it have whiskers?  What shape are the ears, and how do they connect to the head?  What color is it?  How big is it?  How is it standing?  If we look for ourselves, we can see "mice" that are bigger than "elephants" and that aren't the expected color.  But the evidence of trunks, whiskers, and ears is, in this case, more definitive.  So we need either to weigh these criteria intelligently against each other (a process we could probably at least describe) or to rely on a gestalt impression (which we might not be able to put into words easily or at all).  But either way, this would be an important part of the process to acknowledge and reflect on.