A name to attach to the origins of the manuscript

[LisaFaginDavis]

On the question of the level of the author's education. What can we really say about this? Given the variety of sources and materials the manuscript draws on I have said they would have been very educated. If my literacy figure is roughly accurate that seems to be a given.

As you can imagine, I disagree. All of the illustrative content falls squarely into the realm of folk knowledge, not at all limited to someone "educated"  - understanding plants and herbal remedies, reading the stars, knowledge of how women's reproductive systems work, and so on. That is knowledge firmly rooted in women's traditional wisdom. In fact, I would argue that the use of such a unique set of symbols - whether encoded or lost language or nonsense or phonetic transcription - is also consistent with this idea, as there are other examples, even today, of women living in community with their own invented languages (such as the modern Nüshu). 

At any rate, my real point in all of this is that the more we learn about the manuscript, the broader the possibilities become, not narrower. I truly believe that we will not be able to zero in on a point or community of origin until we can actually read it. I am hopeful that the work Colin and I are doing will be helpful in that regard, once we can digitally put the bifolia back in their original intended sequence, at least hypothetically.