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Scribal hands and Currier languages
- Scribal hands and Currier languages
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Scribal hands and Currier languages
Koen G > 14-02-2017, 08:20 PM
While writing my latest blog post, I read on Rene's site You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that Currier concluded that six to eight scribes wrote in the manuscript. That's main text, ignoring marginalia. I have no experience with telling apart different handwritings, so I thought I'd ask here.
Has this been confirmed? Has anyone else studied this in detail?
Of how many hands can we be certain? Again, only considering core text, not marginalia or quire numbers.
And how do the different hands correspond to Currier A and B?
And are we even certain about the clean distinction between these "languages" to begin with? -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
Anton > 14-02-2017, 08:35 PM
When "browsing MS" in Rene's website, you'll find information about the "Currier hand" for each folio.
As I recall from Prescott Currier's presentation, he was not specific anbout the hands, he only claimed that up to 8 are there, but he produced no hand-to-folio mapping.
About the Currier languages, we have a separate thread for that here. -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
Koen G > 14-02-2017, 08:52 PM
I was rather wondering to what extent this is reliable, or if anyone else has come up with a classification of the different hands. -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
-JKP- > 15-02-2017, 12:57 AM
(14-02-2017, 08:20 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While writing my latest blog post, I read on Rene's site You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that Currier concluded that six to eight scribes wrote in the manuscript. That's main text, ignoring marginalia. I have no experience with telling apart different handwritings, so I thought I'd ask here.
Has this been confirmed? Has anyone else studied this in detail?
I have experience in studying and comparing different handwriting, including medieval handwriting and formal calligraphy, and I have made a point of not looking at Currier's designations because I didn't want to be influenced by his opinions.
I'm studying this in detail... so much detail that it's taken me years to collect the data I have so far. It's not enough to just look at the hands and form an opinion, which is why I haven't written this up yet... One needs to justify the choices with samples and other corroboratory information, and to do this, I have studied thousands of manuscripts and selected hundreds of samples for both the marginalia and the main text.
It's a bigger project than I expected but even so, worth doing, I think. Even though Voynichese is a constructed glyph set, quite a few of the glyphs are conventional medieval shapes, so it's possible to study them in that context. -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
ReneZ > 15-02-2017, 08:36 AM
The complete version of Currier's paper, i.e. including all the tables, may be found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
The identification of the various hands and languages are of course his personal work and his opinion. Currier was not a palaeographer, or any other type of handwriting expert.
Other people have come to contrary conclusions, e.g. Panofsky (included in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ), but it is not obvious that he made as thorough a study of the handwriting as Currier did. I also recall one statement from a palaeographer, but can't find the source, who considered it all in a single hand.
The identifications of the hands by Currier derive from one of the tables, and what I have added to my 'MS Browser' and Gabriel Landini/Jorge Stolfi to the interlinear transcription file should be fully consistent. If not, it's a mistake and I would appreciate hearing about it. -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
Helmut Winkler > 15-02-2017, 11:52 AM
ReneZ: Currier was not a palaeographer, or any other type of handwriting expert.
And that is the problem with the Currier hands: Currier never understood what a hand is in a Palaeographical sense. A hand in this sense are the month names of the zodiac, the VMs itself you can compare with something ike clm 14490, the autographs of Otloh von Sankt Emmeram (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), written by one person at different times. -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
Koen G > 15-02-2017, 01:24 PM
But in a script like Voynichese, how can we see if it's different people writing the same script or one person writing it differently? -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
Helmut Winkler > 15-02-2017, 05:38 PM
But in a script like Voynichese ...
You cant. History is not an exact science in the sense of chemistry or computing the balistics or whatever you call it of sattelites (sorry, Rene). It is always a question of likelihood. Is there any reason which forces as to believe there are several persons involved? I dont think so. To me the ms. looks like a pile of notes of some scientist bound together at some time, it is not a book in the sense of a copy of lets say de generatione et corruptione or a copy of Dioscurides. Several persons involved just does not make sense to me and even if several persons were involved, I dont see why it would matter -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
Koen G > 15-02-2017, 06:05 PM
It won't help anyone prove a point, if that is what you mean. If it was a copy, we'd still only expect one or maybe two hands. At least standard practice would have been that one copyist finishes one copy, unless he dies at which point a colleague finishes the job.
So if Currier is actually right, and there are between six and eight hands, wouldn't that be fascinating? We are gathering pieces of the puzzle, and this looks like an important piece. But it looks like there is still quite a bit of uncertainty about whether Currier was right or not. -
RE: Scribal hands and Currier languages
Sam G > 15-02-2017, 06:34 PM
(15-02-2017, 05:38 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But in a script like Voynichese ...
You cant. History is not an exact science in the sense of chemistry or computing the balistics or whatever you call it of sattelites (sorry, Rene). It is always a question of likelihood. Is there any reason which forces as to believe there are several persons involved? I dont think so. To me the ms. looks like a pile of notes of some scientist bound together at some time, it is not a book in the sense of a copy of lets say de generatione et corruptione or a copy of Dioscurides. Several persons involved just does not make sense to me and even if several persons were involved, I dont see why it would matter
It would be nice if we could somehow determine whether or not there were multiple scribes from the handwriting itself, though I admit that it's difficult to do and I certainly don't think we can simply rely on Currier's opinion. Like Koen says, it's a piece of the puzzle. Probably not the most important piece, but it would give us some information about the environment and circumstances in which the VMS was physically created.
I recently posted this in another thread, but I'll repost it here since it's relevant:
(02-01-2017, 01:26 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I recently noticed something potentially interesting on f75r. The line width used to outline the illustrations appears slightly thinner than the line width used to write most of the text, but the text column under the "rainbow" along with the first word on the page (kchedykary) appear to have been written using the same thin line as the illustrations:
The implication seems to be that one person outlined the illustrations and wrote a few bits of the text, and then either another person or the same person at a later time with a different pen came and filled in the rest of the text.
I think the same thing is true for the labels on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (which are part of the same bifolio), but it does not seem to be true of the labels in most cases.
I'm not sure if there were multiple scribes involved here, but there were certainly multiple pens, or perhaps the same pen at different stages of sharpness. We could imagine several different scenarios to explain it, but I think it's at least a weak and indirect indication that there were multiple people involved.