Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

I didn't say it was unfinished. I believe there are signs that it was never finished, like missing initials (with space left for them), missing labels (in places where there were labels for similar objects). Small indications. It's my feeling that it wasn't quite finished (and who knows how many additional sections were intended that maybe never got started).

These sorts of works—I like to think of them as medieval books of knowledge—were often created by fathers for their sons, or for professors for their students, or for students for their own research and professional references, and so many things can happen to interrupt their creation (which can take months or years)... death, illness, war, theft, change of location, change of profession...

Thanks JP. I didn't notice all those nuances. But I did notice that many pages appear to have been removed from the manuscript even prior to the numbering. For example, it seems that ten pages of clothed zodiacs and two pages of nude zodiacs are nowhere to be found. On the other hand, the numbering suggests that two folios are missing from quire 20 but I think it is complete: 162 red stars mark out 161 ranges of script, corresponding to 39 prophecies of four verses each and one Incantation with four verses plus one title line.

If the numbering was really meant to signal that two more folios belong in quire 20, I would take them to be folio 57 (the Sigillum Dei) and folio 58 (two pages of starred text). Thus, in the Gift of Tongues passage, folio 58 could be the "Letter" (introduction) and quire 20 would be the "Booke". The script on some pages of quire 20 looks more compressed than on other pages. Do you think they may have been starting to run low on parchment?



Curiously, the subtitle of the cited was "A Work Unfinished" and that is probably what led me astray.