Re: VMs: F66r

["GC" <gc-@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rene wrote:
> There's no consistent analysis to my knowledge,
> though Gabriel's dendrogram based on my page
> digraph analysis could be used to look into it.
>
> The correspondence of information or images on
> one bifolio, even if there are other pages in
> between _could_ mean that the pages are currently
> not in the right order. The quire in question
> (quire 8) is an example where things may have gone
> wrong. The Bio quie (nr 13) is anohter one.
> The whole herbal section could also be ab
> example, but all these cases would indicate that
> the quire signatures were written _after_ the
> pages were completed.... I am not sure if that
> would make sense.

Hmm.   I'm interested why it wouldn't make sense - what's your scenario?

The book had to be quirized and bound before the leaves were foliated, at
least that's my view.  But aren't quire signatures for the purpose of
ordering quires, before binding?  Wouldn't this most likely have been done
as the quires were stitched together?  I think that Currier's [b1] bifolios
stuck in with [a1] bifolios is somewhat indicative of a change in the
ordering scheme, which should have been done before the quires were marked,
and couldn't have been done after the quires were stitched together.   And
if this was done before the quires were marked, the pages had to have been
completed before they were reordered.  In any case, an entire bifolio
written in a different statistic (the [b1] bifolio that is labelled
26r/26v - 31r/31v as example) indicates that the writing at least was done
while the bifolio lay flat, before being stitched together into a quire.
Otherwise it would seem that we would be finding the different statistics
mixed on the same bifolio, which is not the case.

In later quires we do see a sense of planned order, as in the zodiac
section.  But in the herbal and pharma sections, where the text is
(presumably) about individual plants and concoctions, order does not appear
to have been that critical to the presentation.

I know this subject is dear to John as well.  Has anybody got any negatives
that would blow these assumptions out of the water?

GC

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