23-06-2026, 05:27 PM
(23-06-2026, 10:56 AM)Koen G wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding the parchment: in recent months, Lisa Fagin Davis has made the point that the VM was not written on choice vellum, but rather on lower-quality parchment. Voynich researchers have long been calling it vellum though, and there is a bit of confusion around the terms. The jury is out on just how poor the parchment is, and how it compares to other manuscripts of the lower tiers. Was the parchment a bit below average, or barely worth the effort of processing it? (We don't know).
As far as I am aware, there is no consensus on the general order of the damages. I think this topic was more often discussed in the past, but hasn't drawn much attention in recent years.
I could see the parchment/vellum quality being hard to evaluate using the scans (although I didn't realize there was that much difference between my copy and the 2004 scan!), although to me this is the most interesting part. Are these off-cuts? Could they be from someone who is preparing or selling or storing parchment for other, more conventional purposes, that is skimming the worst of their stock for this manuscript? Are there differences in the quality between folios? If so, can we conclude that different scribes sourced parchment differently?
I have heard it said that the text is unusual for lacking obvious scrape marks as evidence of correction, could this be because the parchment they used would not have survived scraping? Or was this because they had access to lots of parchment and had some sort of ability to take as much as they wanted, provided it was below a certain quality? (It could also be because they just didn't make mistakes, or the ink they used was easy to wipe off, or whatever writing system they used was flexible enough to accommodate mistakes, or that they simply did not notice mistakes or that mistakes are fine because it's gibberish...)
Still, this is interesting as an unexplored topic - probably unexplored for a reason but I am surprised that any part I notice is not completely old news to you all!