Re: Manuscript format

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Mark Hagerman wrote:
> 
> Yesterday, I watched a rerun of a PBS documentary on the Lewis & Clark
> expedition ...(exploring the Louisiana Purchase territory); I was struck by
> the similarity between one of their journal pages and some of the VM
> pages (folios?).
> 
> The center of the page was a rendering of some bird, possibly a prairie
> hen; the written material flowed around the image. I suppose this has
> already been proposed, but...is it possible the VM is, or contains as
> one section, a journal of this sort?

	That's possible, but there are a lot of alternatives
here.  The medieval mystic Joachim de Fiore wrote
material that flowed around surreal images.  I've seen
modern journals of hikers of the Appalachian Trail (in
the eastern United States) who made drawings and wrote
around them, although they would usually put the
drawing in one of the corners.  In Georges Jean's 
*Writing : The Story of Alphabets and Scripts
(Discoveries Series)*, he shows images composed out of
writing and gives them a name, perhaps calligrams, I'm
not sure. Even the Bayeux Tapestry might fit here. (I
read sometime ago that someone's doing an Overlord
Embroidery for the recent invasion in the other
direction!)   In sum, it's a very common thing.

Dennis