[Conference] Voynich Zoom CFP

[Fabrizio Salani]

5) We also know there have been very good inks, by very good forgers, created in the span of literary history. Some of the best probably remain undetected, to this day... we wouldn't know.

This is an incredibly important point. You can say that forgeries include clear markers that make them stand out, but this is textbook survivorship bias. The forgeries in this sample are forgeries that were found (partly of fully) because of the markers. On the reverse, there are few or no examples of forgeries with none of these markers, because people don't know they are fake, and so are not categorised as forgeries. 

The McCrone report found nothing that directly pointed to a modern origin for the VMS. There are some "unexplained" results, but nothing truly problematic.

I agree to this. It doesn't explicitly point at a modern origin, unless these unexplained results cannot be explained at some point in any way other than a modern context. The due diligence and theorising for the sources of these elements is probably worth doing. It very well could be that there is a pre-modern explanation for each, which I would equally welcome. 

I will note that a very interesting set of spectra was not explained during the talk which looked quite different to the others. It was only shown on screen for 13 seconds at 2:17:11, and was not addressed at any point other than for one of the elements during the black ink summary at 2:24:06, which I quote:

"The silver in the text is very unusual. I have no idea where that came from"

I don't know if this is problematic or not. His statement of having no idea about its source doesn't provide an opinion one way or the other. You can see in the graph that the Ag spike is not a trace reading, though.

Forgive me for butting in, but just out of curiosity about silver: when I spoke with the professors who analyzed my parchment (the copy of folio 14v of the Voynich manuscript), they hypothesized that the lines on the back, drawn to follow the linearity of a previous text, might have been drawn with a silver point, a practice used since the Middle Ages to allow "rubricators" to write letters in a straight line. Pure silver oxidizes over time, and so its age can be determined by the oxidation of the particles, which in this case should be pure silver (in the case of my parchment, calcium, potassium, and iron appear in the lines of the fillet, but there is no trace of silver).