[Conference] Voynich Zoom CFP

[LisaFaginDavis]

This has always been understood.

Except when people claim that the VMS has "period appropriate" ink, which is technically true, it can end up being slightly misleading.

As a non-expert, hearing that term makes me think "appropriate to the 15th century specifically", not "appropriate to every century" or "appropriate to every century before the 20th". Maybe experts in this field have always known this, but I definitely didn't, and i'm sure many others don't either. 

In that sense, calling the ink period appropriate is meaningless. We should be calling it "not inappropriate", which sounds like hair splitting, but really has different implications in discourse and debate on the subject.

You're correct: the most accurate way to describe the McCrone results is "the inks and pigments are not inconsistent with a pre-modern origin." It is not possible to definitively date inks and pigments (at least not yet). All you can do is look at their elemental composition and see if there's anything out of place. For example, the Vinland Map was determined to be a modern forgery because of the high amount of titanium in the ink (MUCH more than the small traces found in some of the VMS samples). The Spanish Forger's work was proven to be fake because of the high amount of arsenic in the green pigment (as was mentioned in the Voynich Zoom lecture). The McCrone report found nothing that directly pointed to a modern origin for the VMS. There are some "unexplained" results, but nothing truly problematic.

In response to the argument that Voynich (or someone else) could have made inks and pigments using medieval recipes and ingredients: sure, but why would they? There would not have been any way to determine the elemental composition of the inks and pigments before about 1970, so why would anyone go to that trouble? Why not do what the Spanish Forger did, and use contemporary store-bought inks and pigments that LOOK correct, which is all a forger would need?