22-08-2019, 02:17 PM
(22-08-2019, 12:04 AM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VMS looks to me like it was never finished. Initials missing, labels missing, other signs of incompleteness.
Which means it may have sat in someone's household or studio for decades before someone decided to bind it.
It doesn't show the same signs of wear as foldouts that were carried around by doctors for regular use.
Whoever had it bound, whether it was 2 years later or 20 years later may have guessed the intended order of the folios.
What makes you so sure that a large number of pages were not removed from the manuscript, with the order of the remaining pages rearranged, prior to the application of both page numbers and quire numbers?
Has the current binder been subjected to radiocarbon dating? If not, why not? Could the VMS pages have been bound with a wrap-around string until the year 1600 or thereabouts?
On another matter, I've been checking out the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (highly recommended to me by Paris) and, so far, I've been unable to find a single instance of the use of superscript "m9" anywhere in medieval Europe. It seems they could combine the "9" with almost anything except an "m", probably because superscript "m" was itself a commonly used abbreviation, standing for "um", similar to how "9" stands for "us". But they had a different way of abbreviating words like sumus; meanwhile, there is no "um' in decimus or undecimus.
In brief, manipulation of VMS quire numbers for cryptic objectives cannot be ruled out.