[Talk] Upcoming public lecture on the VM

[LisaFaginDavis]

Thanks for coming! For those who weren't there - Colin Layfield and I are making a strong case that the VM wasn't intended to be bound at all, but was originally a pile of stacked bifolia, not nested.  The argument is supported by data and material evidence, and resolves the problem of illustrations crossing gutters and also the problem of quires in which scribal work varies by bifolia. I won't repeat the argument here, but I'll post the link to the lecture once it's available. The West African example is just to show that such objects exist(ed). In fact, a manuscript that was just a loose pile of bifolia would be very unlikely to survive...I would expect such survivals to be quite small in number. We should all be grateful that someone (likely in the late 15th century) decided to nest the bifolia and bind them in quires between wooden boards, or the VMS probably wouldn't have survived!

I can also tell you all that Yale recently conducted x-ray flourescence analysis on f.1r, and the results suggest 1) that the reagent Voynich used to reveal the Tinapius signature was likely "liver of sulfur," a very common early 20th-c. compound used for this purpose, and 2) the Marci annotations in the outer margin are zinc-gall, not oak-gall (no iron signature), which is perfectly consistent with the 17th-c. date of those notes. The Yale team is working on a formal report about their results, which will made public as soon as it's available (I don't know when that will be).

I'd rather not answer questions here from those of you who didn't watch the lecture - please hold onto your questions until the recording is available. Colin and I have a lengthy article on our analytics currently under peer review, but that, too, will explain all! Once it's published, we will also make our data and code available in a GitHub respository for all to use.