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

[Koen G]

I'm pulling this over here to avoid the Irish thread going too far off-topic. You write (emphasis mine):

Actually we do not know what the inks are. We only know that they are iron-based (except the quire numbers, that are probably lampblack, and the red ink of f67r2, which AFAIK has not been analyzed yet), but apparently not iron-gall.

The McCrone report writes (p.3):

   


I just... find this very difficult to look at. Has expertise really lost all meaning? 

It's good to be critical. O'Neill was specialized in sedges and aerial photography of vegetation. When he makes a claim about a medieval document without much argumentation, we should probably not regard that statement as very authoritative.

But McCrone specializes in exactly this kind of analysis. We have a lot of newcomers on the forum. If you just proclaim that it is not iron gall ink while our best, most specialized and expert resource says that it is iron gall ink, then that will cause confusion.

I'm not saying that making such claims is against forum rules or something (just to clearly separate this from the other discussion), but as a researcher I regret this kind of undermining of what should be a rare foothold in the misinformation free-for-all that is the study of this manuscript.