[split] Jorge's Retracer Thread: darker ink, retracing of text and drawings

[Jorge_Stolfi]

At some point in the history of Voynich research, it was fashionable to envisage a parade of successive owners messing with the ink and the paint. (Nick Pelling often argues something along those lines). I think that's pure fantasy. Darker ink may have been from a different batch prepared the same day for all we know.

Indeed, one may easily go overboard with the "splitting".  But it is a consensus that several distinct agents added stuff to the VMS: the quire numbers, the folio numbers, the month names, the marginal "letter" tables, the 116v and other "semi-Roman" text, the penciled "a" and "b" on f70r, the Jacobus signature...  While some of these "agents" may have been the same person, it is very unlikely that they all were the same Scribe who penned all of the text.  So the existence of a Retracer would not be extraordinary.

On the other hand, I tend to agree with that earlier handwriting expert that there was only one original Scribe, who wrote all the text and drew all the figures in the same yellowish brown ink.  I respect Lisa's expertise, but I believe that it does not apply to the VMs -- because its nature and the circumstances of its creation are quite unlike those of most manuscripts that she built her expertise upon.  The variations in glyph shapes that are supposed to indicate different "hands" on different pages is dwarfed by the similarities that indicate the opposite.

All the best, --jorge