A name to attach to the origins of the manuscript

[Mark Knowles]

I am not a linguist or a cryptologist, so I have no opinion about the nature of the script. No one knows what the literacy rate was, but we do know that literacy was expanding during the fifteenth century, which means that the group of people who could have created the manuscript is larger and more demographically diverse than it would have been if the manuscript had been produced in, say, the twelfth century.

But how can you be confident about your theory about who produced the manuscript and why when you have no opinion on the most significant and distinguishing feature of the manuscript namely its unreadable script? Any theory surely has to provide some explanation for that.