Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

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?

Morten, that IS what I'm saying.

I'm saying that we don't know what happened to the manuscript in between the time they stopped working on it and when it was bound. Any number of things might have happened, including sections being missing or folios being rearranged.

Binding was usually done sometime later, by different people. Whoever added the quire and folio numbers might not have known ANYTHING about who created the manuscript or what it contained. Frequently a bookbinder's assistant added the numbers.


Sometimes a particular person was assigned to add the numbers. A large number of Vatican manuscripts are foliated in the same handwriting but the manuscripts are all from different regions and centuries, which means they sat a very long time before those numbers were added (often a couple of centuries).

It was NORMAL and TYPICAL in medieval times for manuscripts to be bound by people other than those who created it or originally owned it, sometimes decades or centuries later. It's also very common to find unfinished manuscripts.



Plus, there was a lot of famine and plague in those days. Many manuscripts have no provenance because their owners died unexpectedly. We know nothing about the history of a great number of manuscripts other than what we can discern by touching, smelling, feeling, tasting, scientific testing, and reading.