At long last, Barbara Barrett’s Fortean Times article, “Voynich Under the Microscope“, has been published – and (for now, at least) it seems to be freely available on the web, which is very nice – read it quickly and buy a copy of FT anyway. 🙂
Ostensibly, it’s an update following the ORF TV documentary’s radiocarbon dating and microscopic analysis: but actually, Barbara seizes the opportunity to right a whole bunch of perceived Voynichological wrongs. For instance, she dismisses the whole “humanist hand” notion as a palaeographical misconception stemming from a 1976 comment by Rodney Dennis (a Harvard librarian) that has somehow hardened into a mistaken orthodoxy. She also dismisses all late-15th century theories (she’s doubtless far too polite to say *cough* “Leonardo”) based on the radiocarbon dating range, though whether she also intended to include 1465 (*cough* “Averlino”) I’m not sure – radiocarbon is good stuff, but is it really that good?
She has a little bit of a dig at unnamed bloggers’ casting doubts on the whole “written on fresh vellum” thing, keeping things fallaciously open in order to maintain otherwise untenable dating hypotheses. Well… I at least am still waiting for the data to turn up before I jump. As an exercise in historical reasoning, all the varied kinds of evidence we get have to dovetail with each other: and in this case, the evidence train may have left the station, but it most definitely has not yet arrived at its destination. The VMs’ patina formation, calcination, vellum gelatinization, etc – these are things I would really love to read about, but will that paper ever get written? Barbara seems to imply that she suspects it won’t, caught in a kind of research ownership turf war… but can that really be true? If true, what an abysmal waste! 🙁
Enjoy! 🙂
PS: though I liked Barbara’s mixed metaphor of “deflating a sacred cow”, it did also make me wonder what manner of holy flatus it was inflated with in the first place…