Post scriptum: these work badly in firefox. Thing with the "medieval" fonts is, they are not designed to look like the actual writing, but to convey the graphemes..

[font=Verdana]⁞[/font]
₀


The editor here is somewhat old, so it cannot do super- & subscript [font=Andron Scriptor Web] no indentation. But the "stone" could be transcribed as a "subscript zero" (and in the end probably reads "40").[/font]

I know I keep repeating this (both here and on my blog), and perhaps people are tired of hearing it, but there are 5 dots, not 4.

It looks more like this than any of the examples posted so far except that the VMS 5th dot looks like it's veering away, rather than creating a triangle (the resemblance to this is quite possibly coincidental, but I'll post it in case it might be relevant):

   

I know I keep repeating this, but JKP, please give some references for the documents you include in your posts.
Library, number, page, and when possible, date, place?
Thanks.

I'm sorry, I can't.

When I started studying the Voynich Manuscript, I had no idea whatsoever that I would be communicating with others about it or that I would be blogging about it. I had no ambitions to write about it. My only goal was to solve the puzzle.

For years, I collected screensnaps for which I didn't need references—they were simply to help me understand it. I still do that sometimes. I see something... I have only a few free moments, I grab it not knowing whether it will be relevant or not, and I don't record it. If I were writing for academic journals, I would record everything, but I'm not.


So I have two choices. I can keep all the unrecorded bits and pieces i have on my hard drive, or I can share what I have without the links.

If you want to trust my memory, which is far from perfect, it *might* be from one of the manuscripts digitized by the Polonsky foundation. About three years ago, I looked at many newly digitized kabbalah references on the Web, so this might have turned up on that foray.

The last page marginalia from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I haven't found a date, it might be later than the VM. I just found it funny to see a flying stone and critters together in marginalia. The MS also contains a pretty section with comet drawings.

   


   

Koen the handwriting with the marginalia could be 16th or 17th century. Paleography is a very broad and deep discipline, it's necessary to specialize, so I don't know handwritings later than about 1540 well enough to pinpoint the dates. I can usually give a reasonable estimate, however (not all the time, but about 75% of the time), if it's later, after Gothic cursive died out. Around 1820 I start recognizing them again, but I am less familiar with those between c. 1540 and 1820.




I hadn't thought about the flying stone maybe being a comet, but it did occur to me that it might be illustrating gravity, a topic common to many medieval manuscripts.


My two favorite depictions of medieval gravitational forces concepts are the four giant men standing on the Earth on four different sides, with their feet firmly anchored on the ground, but a better one, I think, and possibly my favorite so far, is the one where stones are being dropped from four different sides and plummeting into the center of the Earth.