The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Mauro]

If you can reference me to McCrone's paper, thanks 

Hi Mauro: You can download the McCrone report from here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Rich

Thanks for the link Rich (I remember now I read it some time ago, but never bookmarked). I have read the report and I can comment on it. I will surely read also your blog post (I don't agree with MFT, but what you write is always inetresting and full of interesting facts).

I don't think (as also noted by @Stolfi) the report supports the proposition "the 'poxleber' marginalia ink is so similar to the main text that we can infer marginalia and main text were written by the same author". Moreover, it actually contains some evidence against the MFT.

These are the actual conclusions of the report relevant to text inks:

   

The sample from f116v, sample 16, is not even mentioned. It's just mentioned once in the whole report:

   

So, there were differences from Sample 16 and the rest.


Beyond a weirdness already noted by @Stolfi (Sample 16 is the only one we do not have a photograph of) I also notice the sample is so described:
   

I made a rough measurement after scaling the manuscript on my screen to about 23cm height, and it looks to me there is no text at all 6.9cm from the top and 2.9cm from the left border, so we can't even say with certainty where Sample 16 came from (I'd rather bet on a mislabelling error or some other mess up in the lab).

So it seems to me the McCrone report gives no evidence at all the 'poxleber' marginalia was written by the author(s).


Does the report contain instead evidence against the MFT? I think so, ie. because the conclusions say clearly the inks used for page numbers, quire markers and the latin alphabet on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are different from the text ink and from one another. This would require a forger who knew marginalia should typically be in a different ink from the text and indeed was so careful he mixed and used at least four different ink types (for the text, page number, quire numbers and the latin alphabet on page f1r), which imho is already 'too much' for a forgery, and blundered by re-using the text ink for 'poxleber'. Possible, but weird.