Re: Page/quire order, was RE: VMs: F66r

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rene,

At 06:21 15/06/2004 -0700, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> --- Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > If you print out the (double-sided) balneo bifolios,
> > fold them as they are
> > folded now, but then reorder them to match all the
> > various features
> > together, you'll find that there is only one correct
> > order possible. I
> > described this on-list ages ago, IIRC.
>
> This "one correct order possible" statement is
> interesting enough to test it out. Could you find it
> back?

I couldn't find it trivially (sorry), but will try again later - though, 
actually, it wasn't particularly hard to work out... once you try it out, 
it becomes clear what's going on quite quickly.

> Another interesting statement you made, which
> deserves closer examination, is that there is more
> colour imprinting onto adjacent pages in
> one direction than the other. If true, it is another
> useful piece of the puzzle.

I only noticed this a few days ago, when looking at my marked-up CopyFlo: 
however, I really need to ditch all that and instead go through the 
sid-files looking for bleed-across.

Thinking out loud a second... if anyone industrious (and with a complete 
set of sidfiles) is looking for a useful VMs-related job to do, might I 
suggest volunteering to produce a definitive list of "bleed-across page 
pairs"? If we have multiple volunteers, perhaps they can split the VMs 
between them? (Note that most I found were in the herbal section).

This is what I did: I compared every page in the CopyFlo with its following 
page and its preceding page. The first stage is to eliminate those colours 
that had bled *through* the page: I then compared every unexplained mark / 
stain / blot with the facing page, looking for a symmetrically placed 
feature which might have caused it.

Though this sounds quite straightforward, you can end up with some very 
subtle matches. For example, I marked up a tiny match between f2v and f3r: 
a thin branch springing from the right-hand side of the stem of the 
water-lily-like-plant on f2v, which also appears (reflected) on the facing 
page (f3r). However, when you look at the same feature in the new scans, it 
seems as though this was not done by the heavy painter, but instead by the 
original author (apparently in the original line ink!) - evidence that 
these two pages (at least) are in the originally intended order.

Sometimes you can even see a little bleed-across from missing pages, like 
from the page facing f58v. :-)

Any volunteers for this arduous task?

> > Similarly, quire 20 was signed back to front, and
> > that doesn't even have
> > any fold-out pages to confuse the quire signer.
>
> You can't refold that bifolio to put the quire mark
> in the "right" place.

So what other sensible theories are there for why quire 20's signature is 
in the wrong place?

> > Furthermore, the balneo quire (quire 13) is signed
> > on an out of order page,
>
> No, it's in the "right" place.

Erm... if the pages are out of order, then it's in the wrong place. :-)

> Finally, what are these extra herbal pages doing
> towards the end of the MS? For me, another
> good argument that the current page order in
> the MS is not correct.

On this occasion, my crystal ball is cloudy, sorry. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 

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