VMs: Re: Some michiton oladabas notes...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

> > Appending a Christian dedication/invocation to a book which may be
> > construed as pagan/heretical appears to be a standard safety practice
> > in those times; witness Dee's "angelical" diaries. I would think that
> > a dedication to Mary (instead of Jesus or God) would hint to a woman
> > author. (But this is defintely not a hard rule!)
>
> I think there is a danger of making far too much of this page. It is
> a very common thing to find semi-legible writing on the first and
> last pages of a manuscript: it marks where the scribe was trying out
> his pen.

It may sound like a kind of Blairite "Third Way", but I agree with both of 
you, I really do. :-)

My guess is that the main two lines ("+ michiton...", and "fix +...") 
probably were intended to carry some meaning [and a dedication to Mary is 
as good a theory as any]: but the other two quite possibly weren't, and may 
well have been, as Philip suggests, purely scribal scratching posts.

This is because of the repetitions of the "+" in those middle two lines 
(but not in the other two), and that most of the Voynichese is in the 
bottom line.

Either way, they do point to this page as being contemporaneous with the 
rest of the document, which - at the very least - is interesting (as well 
as possibly testable).

I just wish I had a really well magnified image of the very top of f17r, 
which has the other example of this same kind of script...

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