The Voynich Ninja

That's a cool manuscript, I hadn't seen it before. The pages you show are indeed very Voynich-like in their layout, though as you say they are unfortunately pretty rare.

The thing they often do with overlaying the name list is an elegant solution though.

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Some distinctive layouts.. maybe the last one was ready for the text

I used a simple python/OpenCv script to measure the horizontal position of plant illustrations. These are the result for folios 2-11 in the VMS (20 pages) and the first 17 plants from Padova Ar.26 plus the three illustrations with text I attached in the previous post.  A value of 0 corresponds to the left margin, 100 to the right margin. The top and bottom 10% of images were ignored, so roots only have a moderate impact on the final result.
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It's clear that in the Padova ms plants are always close to mid-page, while VMS illustrations have a strong preference to appear far from the centre, typically being closer to the right margin.

These two pictures show page borders (green) and plant position (purple) for all the pages I processed:


EDIT: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows images on the right-hand side of pages, but this arrangement is more systematic than in the VMS and text usually only appears left of images. Also, this manuscript has more text and less white space than the VMS and of course two plants are illustrated in most of the pages.

The right-shifting tendencies of VM plants are remarkable indeed. This might be our best indication that the inclusion of text was planned.
When I wrote about this five years ago, I apparently noted that very few entire paragraphs are placed right of the plant. And in the rare cases when this happens, the text still remains left aligned:



A similar behavior can be seen on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . A little bit on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . And that's about it. So there is a very strong desire to be able to form a left alignment.

The only place where I see the scribe get into trouble in this regard is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. bottom, where they are forced to start the paragraph in an irregular place between the two plants.

As far as I can see, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. places its plants much more in the middle, but it does also avoid starting a paragraph to the right of the plant. The Vienna Dioscurides (JAC) also has its plants more in the middle. Some pages have the (later) text nicely to the left of the plant though.



Edit: by the way, the VM is more consistent with its layout strategy than many other herbal manuscripts. This consistency along across several scribes should tell us something. But what exactly that something should be, is probably up for discussion.

Another MS,  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Also a copy (1351-1400), with similar illustrations to others MS discussed in this thread. And all kind of text aligments around plants.
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