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At 11:49 AM 12/12/2009, Doug McIlroy wrote:
This is a rather odd argument, that someone trying to forge
a medieval document would not be expected to imitate medieval
practices:
> And even before he could have lifted a pen, the forger
> had to sit down and dope out the Latin cryptograms he was going to
> incorporate into the inscriptions, an art not practiced since the
> middle ages. And to what end nowadays?
> Jim Enterline
I apologize for a poor choice of wording. I should have written, "an
art FORGOTTEN since the middle ages," and only rediscovered some
years after the Yale VM book was published. For background on this,
see my article in Terrae Incognitae, Vol 23 (1991) Part 2, 13-27 plus
printer's errata the following year.
And so, I think, is the following. Tracing a final fair copy in
ink is a time-honored drafting-room practice.
> McCrone's tale of a forger sitting down and painfully
> retracing, almost perfectly, a map he had just painfully fabricated
> is too much to swallow.
But I admit to lacking context on exactly what properties are
peculiarly explained by tracing, or about what indicia of long,
painful fabrication might have been observed in the physical
document.
To clarify, McCrone was talking not about tracing a copy from an
original draft, but re-laying new ink out over the very same ink line
on the original physical document almost without even microscopic
wavering. The indicia of painful initial fabrication are not in the
physical document, but its contents. It is agreed that the
fabricator specifically picked out parts of the Speculum to
illustrate with his map (its very title and purpose). He did an
honestly good job of this, better than a forger would have had to.
Jim
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