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How many glyphs and how many scribes? Digital paleography and the Voynich manuscript
Lisa Fagin Davis, 2020. Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 5(1): 164–180.
Uses digital paleography to compare every instance of the Voynich glyphs, concluding that the script has a small, consistently written inventory and that five scribes wrote the manuscript.
What it's used for here
AnsweredFive, by their letterforms
Davis compares the letterforms page by page and finds five scribes. The site's answer to how many hands wrote the book rests on it, together with the transcription's own scribe labels.
Cited by on this site 10 records
The Voynich Manuscript
MYSThe mystery article
Reading Without a Key
SRCThe book, version 2.0
Toward a Reading of the Voynich Manuscript
SRCThe March 2026 draft
7 methods surveys
SRCSignal processing, mathematics, imagery, linguistics, frameworks of inquiry, inductive methods, encoding procedures
A correction
An earlier draft gave this paper the wrong title and page range. The record now matches the published article. 22 Oct 2026
Cite it
Davis, L. F. (2020). How many glyphs and how many scribes? Digital paleography and the Voynich manuscript. Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, 5(1), 164–180. https://doi.org/10.1353/mns.2020.0011
@article{davis2020,
author = {Davis, Lisa Fagin},
title = {How many glyphs and how many scribes? Digital paleography and the Voynich manuscript},
journal = {Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies},
year = {2020},
volume = {5},
number = {1},
pages = {164--180},
doi = {10.1353/mns.2020.0011}
}TY - JOUR TI - How many glyphs and how many scribes? Digital paleography and the Voynich manuscript AU - Davis, Lisa Fagin PY - 2020 JO - Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies VL - 5 IS - 1 DO - 10.1353/mns.2020.0011 SP - 164 EP - 180 ER -
Davis, Lisa Fagin. “How many glyphs and how many scribes? Digital paleography and the Voynich manuscript.” Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 5, no. 1 (2020): 164–180. https://doi.org/10.1353/mns.2020.0011.