Not sure if anyone has suggested this before, but I was musing on Locard’s exchange principle (which proposes that “with contact between two items, there will be an exchange”) and how that relates to the quills used to write the VMs. Marxists are fond of pointing out how both people and machines are consumed by industrial processes (not just raw materials, the notional “consumables”), and so surely the same should be true of writing with a quill pen?

That is, because the process of writing with a quill pen blunts (i.e. consumes) the quill, Locard’s exchange principle suggests that we should in theory be able to find tiny fragments of quill pen embedded in or around the stream of Voynichese ink. All you’d need is an idea of what you’re looking for, a microscope, access to the VMs, and a fair bit of patience. 🙂

How might that help us? Well… a quill is a feather, and feathers are organic, so feathers have DNA. We might therefore be able to use the quill fragment DNA in conjunction with the vellum DNA to try to physically locate where the writing was done.

Of course, if you wanted to get a full genome from a feather (as per this paper), you’d need more than microscopic fragments to work with. But I’d guess a determined investigator would be able to identify the species even from a tiny piece. And if it turned out to be a dodo feather, we might be able to prove that the VMs was a spectacularly knowing hoax courtesy of insiders at Rudolph II’s court. 😉

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