Protein analysis from eraser crumbs

[Morten St. George]

Does anyone know if they randomly selected the pages to test upon arrival at the library, or were the pages pre-selected by the Beineke Library?

The samples were taken by a conservator in Yale (Paula Zyats), and sent to York for analysis.
Selection was done based on recommendations from various people with a final decision by someone in Yale.
My interaction was with Paula Zyats, but the coordination of the various forensic tests was with Aniko Bezur of Yale.

Note that Yale University has several libraries, so certain services (like conservation) are not with the Beinecke, but with Yale, serving all libraries.

This is the latest correspondence:

Dear Mr St.George 

Thank you for your email. Back in 2014 we were given the opportunity to analyse 12 folios from the Voynich manuscript using our new non-invasive sampling technique and using peptide mass fingerprinting we were able to identify 11 folios as being made from calf parchment (one sample did not contain sufficient data to give any identification). We do not have marsh deer in our own database, so cannot categorically disprove your theory, however we do have many other examples from the Cervidae family (red deer, roe deer, fallow deer, etc) and they have very different markers to those from bovids (i.e. cow). All the samples we analysed had clear cow markers so we are confident in this identification. 

A recent publication titled The Voynich Manuscript, published in 2016 by Yale University Press, Ray Clemens, Ed..  contains all  the results of all analytical testing completed up to that point. 

I hope this information helps. 

Kind regards, 

Sarah

**

Dear Ms. Fiddyment,

Many thanks for responding to my email inquiry.

After writing to you, it came to my attention that handwriting experts have determined that five or six different people wrote the Voynich MS, which leads me to believe that the current-day manuscript is an exact duplicate of the original marsh-deer manuscript, probably made on alpaca parchment.

But none of that should concern you. I'm sure you do excellent work and I have full confidence in your results.

All the best,

Morten

**

I find it hard to believe that five or six different people could all do flawless original writing (general lack of write-overs, cross-outs or insertions). Our VMS is likely a copy of earlier writings.