An interesting observation on Quire 13

[david]

Furthermore, even in the scenario you describe, there must be a first bifolio to the "balneo section", and therefore ordering is not moot at all. 

I did not meant that the original ordering is not moot - our proposed reordering may be.
If you accept that all of these bifolios work as standalone sheets, then unfortunately the argument that 78-81 "must" be the centrefold because of the connecting baths no longer holds water (ah hem), because all of the bifolios are like that.
There may very well be an original order the bifolios are supposed to go in, but it is no longer apparant from the visual clues, which actually lead down a different trail.

I don't know whether that was a normal practice for medieval books or not.  I imagine that it would be more difficult to bind such a book, which is probably the main reason why the VMS pages are not bound in the correct order.

No it isn't. Scribes were aware of how bifolios fitted together and would write accordingly, in the same way today's newspaper editors are.

Rene: Yes, there is at first glance (haven't really looked that hard at it) a logical progression of folios as you mention. But that logical procession is lacking in Q13.

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Which bifolio was placed first?  76-83 makes the most sense to me, because 76r is the only text-only page. It would appear as a good intro to the section, whichever way we believe the rest of it is organized.
Or are you suggesting that these were never meant to be bound together with the rest of the manuscript, but that each bifolio was meant as an entirely standalone sort of pamphlet?

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Or, we swop the bifolio around the 76r becomes the final page with all the notes. We just can't tell, we can only guess.
Frankly, I'm almost at the point where I would suggest that the folios were "standalone". They're like a collection of... I don't know, wall charts on the same topic that someone has gathered up and bound together. Imagine an Englishman had a collection of classic car posters, and an African tribesman found them, not understanding them but liking them, bound them together into a book.......