Preregistered Comparator Testing for Ambiguous Historical Manuscripts (F22R-BLIND-1.0): A Protocol Template for Separating Direct Correspondence, Structural Similarity, and Cohort Convergence

This paper presents a preregistration template for comparator methodology designed for the Voynich Manuscript and other underdetermined historical artifacts. Research on ambiguous historical manuscripts faces a recurring methodological problem: once an interpreter proposes a reading, the manuscript can often be searched retrospectively for visual, linguistic, or thematic features that appear to support it. The same flexibility that makes difficult manuscripts interpretable also makes weak hypotheses unusually resistant to falsification.