The Voynich Ninja

there is 58r between plant pages, but 58r is perhaps written about astronomy.
why? wrong pages order?
or who written on upper right Arabic number wrote it wrong??

and, there is another like wrong.
pages that introduce plants are in preparation pages.
why? it's a wrong? or right?

(18-05-2023, 11:25 PM)februs Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.there is 58r between plant pages, but 58r is perhaps written about astronomy.
why? wrong pages order?

Quire 8 is mixed anyway. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ( the page you picked out ) to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as well as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are all without plant illustrations.

Especially with regard to the illustration at the bottom left of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , one could speculate that some of the plants depicted in Quire 8 might have something to do with the ingredients of a soporific sponge / spongia somnifera. As I said, speculation.

pages that you introduced are as written quire 8.
the page introduce VM is made quire 1 ～　quire20.

is it right? 
why was it divided from 1 to 20?

(21-05-2023, 07:49 AM)februs Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.pages that you introduced are as written quire 8.
the page introduce VM is made quire 1 ～　quire20.

is it right? 

The Voynich Manuscript consists of 20 quires held together in a bookbinding technique.

[attachment=7352]

I see　Σ(･ω･ﾉ)ﾉ！

it's that, in the first, painter draws large paper, to the 2nd, cuts the large paper to bifolio size,
to the 3rd, folds up and stacks. is it how to making quire?

and when was written page numbers?

The individual quires were first laid inside each other (to form "bundles" 1 to 20), then laid side by side, and finally sewn together to form a coherent manuscript.

Quote:From Wikipedia:

In medieval manuscripts, a gathering, or quire, was most often formed of four folded sheets of vellum or parchment, i.e. 8 leaves, 16 sides. The term quaternion (or sometimes quaternum) designates such a unit.

I don't know why the VMS was not designed uniformly to quaternions ( as was common in Western manuscripts ). - Also another sorting should be at least uniform.

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I see, and thank you (∩´∀｀)∩

Is it possible that each section(astronomy・plant introduction・synthesis)
was made by different people?

I've written about the relationship between the scribes, topics, and structure of the VMS here (see Table 1 in particular):
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Also:
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And of course the essays in Clemens, ed. The Voynich Manuscript

Here are my conclusions about the codicological history of the manuscript:

1) manuscript written and bound, exact sequence of bifolia uncertain (the quiremarks are likely original, so we can roughly tell the original order of topics by looking at the bifolia that have quire numbers)
2) catastrophic water damage early on requires the MS to be rebound; at some point in this early period (not clear whether before or after the water damage and rebinding), the month names were added to the Zodiac pages;
3) during rebinding, some of the bifolia are misbound (e.g. 78/81 was almost certainly originally the center of its quire; the foldout 68/69 has been reoriented; and the botanical bifolia by scribes 1, 2, and 3 were mixed);
4) after rebinding, the folio numbers were added (likely 17th c.);
5) rebound slightly later for a second time.

- Lisa

in summary,

the original creators bound VM in order →VM was damaged by water → part of order was wrong during rebinding 

is it right?

then I have two question.

1. why do you think VM was damaged by water?
    can you see by VM states?

2. you say VM's folio numbers was written after rebinding.
   if it is right, could the numbers be different  from the original?
   how did rebinders figure out the correct order?

1) you can see the water stains quite clearly in the upper margins of the first 50 or so folios. 
2) The stain smudged text and illustrations, but the folio numbers are written on top of the stain and are undamaged, meaning that they were written later. And yes, the bifolia are not in the right order anymore. We don't know the correct order, and there is very little evidence to help put the bifolia back in the their original order. 

One kind of material evidence that is often helpful when a medieval manuscript is bound out of order are the "offsets", the mirror-images of part of one page that can be seen on the facing page, the result of the book being closed for centuries and the pigment rubbing off onto the surface that's pressing against it. There's a nice example on f. 25v/26, where the blue berries at the top of 26 are mirrored onto f. 25v. Because this quire is comprised of mixed bifolia written by scribe 1 and scribe 2 (which implies that the bifolia are out of order), this offset is almost certainly not original. In fact, you can see it was caused by the parchment still being damp when the book was rebound: the water smudged the berries on f. 26, the book was rebound, and the damp section was offset onto the new facing page (f. 25v). Lots of people, including myself, have looked carefully for offsets that DON'T match the current sequence, which might help recover the original order. There are a few possibilities where a smudge on one leaf MIGHT match up with an illustration that it no longer faces, but nothing unequivocal. So until we can actually read the manuscript, there is no clear way to sort out the original sequence of leaves.