(29-12-2024, 12:01 PM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There really are not many people who can reliably estimate the age of an old manuscript just by looking at it. Also in this respect the Voynich MS has seen its fair share of unqualified opinions.
Just as a fun (or not) exercise: Toresella obviously was very familiar with old herbal manuscripts when he personally studied the Voynich MS. He said it is definitely authentic, and it dates from around 1450-1460.
Should that date be considered wrong? (Now that we have 1404-1438 with 95% probability?)
I think he should be congratulated for coming so close, and who knows?, there’s still a chance he could be right (though that chance becomes slimmer as more analyses such as Koen’s are produced). What I got from the Panofsky quote, coloured as it was by the sunflower fallacy, was that one milestone in the dating speculation was whether it showed features of Renaissances style. And the VMS does not. However, the “Renaissance” began in different places at different times, sometimes only separated by whether a place was rural or metropolitan. Without that provenance, the scholars would of course have to do a fair degree of knowledgeable guessing, based on extant manuscripts they had studied, to pinpoint an exact decade or two. Toresella’s dating might not have been exact, but it was still a brilliant bit of speculation based on what he had available to him.
With respect to the C14 dates: I suppose because I studied archeology a hundred years ago, I’ve never liked to rely on C14 dating except as a baseline. It needs to be supported and cross checked with other methods. That’s why I love what Koen has done with his video.