I am familiar with it, but thank you for bringing it up nevertheless. There may be readers who haven’t seen it and your comment inspired me to add a link so everyone can take a look:

https://bibliophilly.library.upenn.edu/viewer.php?id=10a%20131#page/30/mode/2up

I’m sure you’re familiar with the MS already, JKP! 🙂 The name alone is so tempting, Secreti Medici. The more I look it at, the more Voynich-ian elements I see. The naïf way the hands are drawn in the margins in the second volume, the drawing of the alembic vessel on 16r in volume 1, and of course different letters from both volume 1 and 2! That must mean I have my late-night Voynich eyes on, and it is time to go to bed, because they are not similar hands. The description claims both volumes are by the same scribe, but doesn’t explain why, and I don’t see why that would be the case. They were produced a long time apart according to the description so it seems an odd claim to make.

Sorry to rant. Just wanted to bring up the odd little “close brackets” in Secreti Medici.

Is there consistency in the composition of the skin in the different sections, in the insect trails, the pigments, the trimming, or the stains?

Questions like this might help us understand whether the VMS was conceived as a book or as a series of booklets. It might also offer clues as to whether the VMS creation time was short or long. I’m sure it must have taken at least a few months.

Unfortunately, the VMS is becoming so fragile that access is severely restricted. Otherwise I could see a PhD student delving into some of these questions.

When I looked at the amendments in the VMS, I wasn’t sure what I would find. I was aware that darker ink had been used in a number of places but I hadn’t looked closely enough or thought about it enough to note if there were patterns.

Now that I’m more familiar with it, i have the sense that a number of the touchups were probably by the original creators, but I honestly can’t tell if someone was touching up a project that was put aside and then revisited or if it was done simultaneously with its creation.

There are a few textual additions that are suspicious. They are not drawn like the other VMS glyphs and they tend to be at the beginnings of lines, as though they were added to straighten out the justification, but they appear to be added with a quill, so it’s hard to say when they might have been added. Quills were used up until the 19th century and sometimes even in the early 20th century.

It’s certainly possible that the VMS was created over a period of years, especially if it was a part-time project. A subsequent owner could have added some details but, if so… I suspect it was someone familiar with the original intention. I would be surprised if anything significant were altered after the 15th century, except maybe the over-inking of the light descenders—thin black lines are out of character with the main text, so perhaps it happened later.

It might be nothing more than the writing style, but the point you make about flourishes is interesting.

We do tend to put less attention to details that are not as crucial to comprehension. It’s an unknown writing system, and we don’t know yet whether part of a glyph or the whole glyph carries information.

There’s a certain carelessness to it, maybe because he just saw them as flourishes? Although it could be just due to writing style and nothing more.