VMs: Quills & Hands A & B...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Could it simply be that Hands A and B are actually the same hand, but using 
different types of bird feathers for their quill? (like goose & crow)

To my eye, it seems as though (for example) some the detail in the 
9-rosette diagram is too fine to have been done with the same implement as, 
say, early herbal pages: so the writer would certainly have thought nothing 
of using different quills for different skills. :-)

Philip Neal mentioned a related idea: what if the production process 
involved a final encoding stage done by a copyist using a verbose 
(expanding) encoding scheme.

ie: have (a) an intelligencer producing intermediate streams of (as an 
example) numbers, astrological symbols, and letters onto paper (or wax 
tablet): and (b) a copyist copying that stream onto vellum *but translating 
it into a verbose cipher* in the process.

Then, the copyist would need to assess which quill to use to fit the 
verbose version onto a page on a page.

Even if the final stage only involves copying from a differently shaped 
medium (for example, from a wax tablet onto vellum), there would still be 
an element of guesswork as to which quill to use.

The statistical differences between the two may then be more to do with the 
type of content of full and sparse pages.

A simple physical test for this would be for a modern scribe to write some 
text using two different size quills, and see if/how this affects the 
size/style of the writing. I certainly write differently using different 
pens, so I wouldn't be too surprised if different quills had this effect.

Does anyone here know anyone from (for example) The Society for Creative 
Anachronism? This might well be the kind of thing they'd be interested to 
have a go at. :-)

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