RE: Scribal penmanship
voynichbombe > 27-01-2020, 06:03 PM
As for the "o"s and "a"s and actually anything resembling something close to circular, I can contribute my experience in trying to script myself. I bought a few quill pens, a batch of leftover parchment and vellum (leftover cut pieces, but large enough), and three types of iron gall ink, which differed largely in it's qualities (originally I wanted to brew my own ink, but was not successful). Of course the quill tips were cut too large for the small scale of the VMS scripting, so until I honed my quill tip cutting skills (it's a hell), I settled for a larger scale. My target was to find a way to get up to speed, so as not to spend a whole evening finishing _one sentence.. But, even in the larger scale, the same thing happened. The ink takes some time to settle, so I could not write an, let's say "o" in one go, or it would run in (with the stroke direction in mind as not to "splotch"). So I came up with a kind of "fragmentary" scripting, leaving all "loopy" parts of glyphs half finished, while scripting the next ones. Later I would come back to them to finish the other half. Of course this happened more dramatically as I learned to cut finer quill tips and even kallipos ones, trying to lower the scale.
I cannot tell if the scribe(s) of the VMS used this technique, but for me it was the only way to script faster. Anyways, as in my harm opinion there are very few examples of these errors, splotching and running in, and as said by others before, the scribe(s) must have been very skilled.