Re: VMs: f112r-f112v

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Nick Pelling wrote:
> At 00:06 03/05/2005 -0600, John E Koontz wrote:
> >I notice that the upper outer margin of the f112r-f112v leaf is a bit odd.

> Why then would the same gap appear on both sides of the folio in the same
> place?

Yes, that's a good point.  That does seem to suggest that there is no
missing illustration.  I was concentrating on the different nature of the
two gaps (front and back) and missed the obvious.  It struck me as
interesting that there should be a possible sign of something omitted.
It did occur to me that there are really no parallels for illustrations in
this part of the text.

Another of the pages in this section - I don't have the number handy - has
a stray fragment of a line above the right end of the first line in a
paragraph.  Although I couldn't certainly detect any sort of insertion
mark, it looked like it might be a case of an omission being added after
the fact.

> The argument has been made a number of times (both by me and (IIRC) by
> others) that (a) the VMs is a copy (perhaps enciphered, perhaps not) of
> another document; and that (b) what you're looking at in that top corner is
> a copy of writing going around a vellum flaw (probably a vertical tear) in
> the original document - that is, it's a copy of a gap.

> While I think this is completely convincing, GC's counter-argument /
> suggestion was that there might in fact be a vellum fault on the VMs in
> that same place which we can't actually see (but which is nonetheless
> there): however, there seems to be no sign of that on the sidfiles, so I'm

Hmm.  I searched for 112r without turning up your comments!  Maybe I
should have tried f112r or 112?

But why would a person copying a text copy a gap in it?  An archivist or
student of the text as historical object would do that sort of thing, but
anyone conversant with the text and interested in it per se would simply
fill the full breadth of the line even if it resulted in a shorter page.
They might even squeeze more text from the next page onto the current
page, taking advantage of the additional space.

Because of considerations like this, I'm inclined to see the gap as a
product of this version of the manuscript, even supposing it to be a copy
or collection of extracts.  There is a visible collop of page missing, but
the text avoids a far larger area.   Maybe the explanation is as GC
suggested - there is something wrong with the material here.  Perhaps the
surface wouldn't take ink?  The same underlying problem with the material
might explain the visibly missing collop.

> Any other possible explanations you can think of for this?

Apart from my reading of GC's remark above, my only explanation was the
possibility of a missing illustration.

> If anything, I'd say it points to a strong codicological argument against
> the hoax hypothesis.

Well, even a hoax - in the loose sense we are using that in the context of
the VMs - might have to avoid a bad spot of vellum.  I doubt it would
immitate a bad spot on good vellum.  And I suspect that even a hoax or
fraud would probably get most of its versimilitude from standard
production issues with handwriting on the materials, and not from what one
might call "art" (in the sense of artfulness).  I was just wondering if
such spots are a known problem with old manuscripts and have parallels in
things we can actually read.

At least the problems are not the problems of writing in ballpoint on
lined notepaper.  (Or ballpoint on vellum, etc.)

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