A random rant about the VMS

[Jorge_Stolfi]

[...] a n00b scribe with n00b illustration skills could not, in my opinion, have written so incredibly consistently, i.e., without a single mistake on any pages. There are no strikethroughs, no erasures whatsoever.

Who said that there are no mistakes?  There are tons of odd details that can be the result of mistakes: many malformed and bizarre glyphs that occur only once in the whole book, words that have uncommon combinations of glyphs, lines that are mis-aligned across plants, and more...

On page f105r, line 10 is only half-line long but right-justified.  It has often been interpreted as one of the "titles".  However, it was definitely written after line 11 was complete.  A more likely explanation is that those words belonged to line 11 or latter, but the scribe skipped those words at first and noticed the mistake only after line 11 was complete; and he tried to fix the mistake by inserting those words in the space between lines 9 (the end of a parag) and line 11. 

By coincidence, line 13 ends with what looks like an incomplete word (ot), and starting at line 14 the handwriting is quite different.   I wonder...

As for the lack of erasures and insertions: the Scribe himself is unlikely to make either, since he will not notice his own mistakes.   The examples I have seen, on the few manuscripts I have looked at, were apparently done by a separate Proofreader who went through the work of the Scribe.  In the example below, it seems that the Red Scribe who wrote the explicit did not know Latin, and thus made many mistakes, including a bizarre word "raaonem"; and those were corrected by the Proofreader in brown ink.
   

Furthermore, following Lisa Fagin Davis' study, it appears that there were many scribes involved in the process.

I can believe that there were several Scribes.  However, another handwriting expert once stated that there was only one...

So what you're saying, is that we have a bunch of n00bs writing a highly complex manuscript without any mistakes, errors or strikethroughs, yet they achieve a level of consistency and mastery that one would expect from scribes wiith years of calligraphic experience (even though, like you say, they're not fully on par with professional scribes).

For the "no errors", see above.  For the "mastery", the only thing that not everyone could have done is writing minimally consistent letters of that size.  But the shapes of the letters are all over the place, even on the same line or same word; and many are so badly written that we can only guess at which letter the Author meant -- a or o, r or s, e or i, m or g,  Ch or Ih or ee...

Also, what's up with the lack of training material? If a scribe (or scribes) is to write 200 pages of unknown script, there must be a trace of their practice.

Yes, if the Scribe was not the Author (as I believe), he had to be taught the alphabet by the Author, and train writing it until the Author was satisfied with the results. 

But, obviously, those exercises would have been mostly on paper. Even if the final tests were on vellum, they would be on separate scraps.  They all would be discarded soon after completed.