VMs: Re: Introduction

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Philip,

> > (5) the ciphertext (and rough layout) was originally done (at speed) by an
> > intelligencer on a wax tablet - the single-stroke (wax) alphabet requires
> > many substrokes to render (in ink) on paper.
>
> Nick, you have said this before and I meant to take you up on it.
> To the best of my knowledge it was not normal practice to draft a
> mediaeval or Renaissance manuscript on wax tablets (true that the
> Romans did this).

This is what I too thought - until I did further research on diptyches (or 
pugillaria, as they were sometimes called - in France, they were made by 
guilds of tabletiers). There's mention of them in Chaucer (14th century), 
for example, in the Somonour's Tale.

Here's a link to an excellent page on them by Caroline Priest-Dorman:

http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/tablets.html

        Tablets can be seen on red- and black-figure Attic vases from
        the Classical period in Greece, and their use as everyday writing
        implements was continuous all over Europe until at least the late
        fifteenth century. The waxed tablet was used in correspondence,
        in teaching, as official or legal records, as a workspace for drafting
        speeches or other writings, as a platform for working mathematical
        proofs, and no doubt for all sorts of more ephemeral purposes.

This *just* overlaps with the VMS' dates - so would appear to be a further 
example of how the VMS is possibly a product of the Middle Ages (but within 
an early modern culture).

>  Are you referring to cipher manuscripts only?

By 1500, it's hard to know what diptyches were still in use for - though 
tricky ciphers (as examples of things that it would be easy to make 
mistakes with) would seem to be a good candidate for drafting on them.

> > (6) that text was copied by at least one (probably two) separate
> > (semi-)professional copyists
>
> As I have said before, it is my strong impression that the manuscript
> is a copy of a lost original.

If (as I think) the original was written onto wax tablets, then there was 
an exemplar - it was merely transitory, that's all. :-)

> In connection with 1., I note that the illustration on f. 78v forms
> a continuous unit with f. 81r: this tends to indicate that the
> exemplar consisted of loose bifolios when it was copied (the
> association of hands with bifolios, noted by Currier, also bears
> this out).

Surely this could just as much have indicated two copyists working in 
parallel on separate sections?

> But there is some indication in the outer bifolio of
> the last quire, the recipes section, that the bifolios were copied
> with a view to having them bound later: f 103r on the right hand
> side of its sheet sits opposite a blank page on the left which
> contains only the 'oladabas' sequence. It only makes sense to
> leave the left half of the sheet blank and cover the right hand
> side with writing if there was always an intention to fold the sheet
> over in the process of binding.

It is also possible that the quiration of the VMS was intended to mirror 
the quiration of an original set of documents.

I should say that I'm a little uncomfortable about drawing inferences about 
quire 20 (of which f103r is the first page) until I have some idea of why 
the quire mark is on the first page, not the last. :-/

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....