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Re: VMs: dating the VMs
At 22:09 23/02/2004 +0000, Nick Pelling wrote:
Hi Maurizio,
At 18:53 23/02/2004 +0100, Maurizio Gavioli wrote:
1) Normally you don't write a *book* from scratch. Either you copy it
from an exemplar (if it is somebody else's work) or you assemble it from
notes, minutes, etc.
It seems likely to me that the chancery practice around normal
(letter-sized) ciphertexts would be to have a clerk encode or decode them
on a wax tablet (circa 1400-1500), before making a more permanent copy for
the diplomatic archives. It also seems likely to me that the production of
the VMs may have involved a scaled-up version of this same kind of process.
Yes, yes. I was only expanding on the fact that not only as a cypher text,
but also as a codex (not huge, but not very small either), this ms.
(presumably) implies a previous text which, theoretically at least, can be
of any author and of any epoch.
The absence of ruling surprised me. I have to confess that I cannot
correlate this with a date (mainly because of my ignorance); I would have
assumed that vellum ruling was the norm (with possible, rare, exceptions).
Don't forget there are some apparent rulings on f67r2: as Philip Neal
points out, the bottom line appears to be more constrained by the *top* of
the rulings (look at the top of the gallows) than kept in line with the
bottom, which seems (to me) to be an unusual feature for European mss.
http://www.voynichinfo.com/microfilm/f67r2.jpg
I have seen several lines here and there in the ms. but I have generally
assumed they were reproduction artifacts or 'accidents'. Those in f67r2 are
quite interesting, though.
Maurizio
Maurizio M. Gavioli - VistaMare Software
via San Bernardo 5, I-16030 Pieve Ligure, ITALY
http://www.vistamaresoft.com/
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