The gallows intrusion, the baseline jumps and multipass

[Anton]

... Continuing with my BTT post.

In my first example of shuffling, there is absolutely no need to do the writing in the BTT manner. One can well start from the top of the folio and proceed down, just writing all the lines in reverse order.

However, in my second and especially third example, it is difficult to keep the alignment if proceeding from top to bottom. However, if one begins from the bottom up, he can easily keep the alignment. You just need to write it step by step from bottom up, writing a half-line when you want to write a half-line, and writing a full line when you want to write a full line. (Of course, you must have the original source with its line alignment before your eyes).

For the sake of clarity, it is not that I believe this is exactly the case of what we find in the VMS, this is just a quick example of what the rationale may be behind writing the stuff in the BTT manner.

Now, what behaviour would we observe if all the text is written BTT?

First, the scribe would tend to begin his writing close to the bottom of the folio. Because you can run out of space when carelessly moving bottom up. However, this is not the case with the VMS. On the contrary, the text blocks tend to be shifted upwards rather than downwards. In no folio, except for a few folios in Recipes, the text is too close to the upper margin.

Of course, if you are just shuffling the contents line-by-line, you can estimate in advance how much space does your original sample occupy, and you can plan the plotting in advance, without risking to run out of space. But if you are doubling the lines by plotting the stuff in half-lines, as in my last example, such advance estimate is difficult.

Second, in folios densely populated with text, we would expect the text density to increase from bottom up - because the closer to the upper margin, the less space is left, and the higher the risk of running out of the folio space. However, such behavour, at least, does not manifest itself very clear. The example below is from f83v. The last paragraph is quite sparse. The lower portion of the preceding paragraph is also quite sparse, although not as sparse as the text below it. The higher portion of the paragraph is getting dense, one may suggest that that is because limited space is left underneath the balls figure, and the text has to be fit in that. Above the balls the text is again dense (ok, the verge of the folio is close), but as the top margin approaches even closer the text suddenly gets more sparse. So the variations of text density are not explained very well from the BTT perspective. Nor they are satisfactorily exlained from the top-to-bottom perspective: it's not clear why the text is dense directly below the balls, and then it becomes sparse.

   

All in all, it's far from self-evident that the text is generally written bottom-to-top. However, there are obvious and numerous cases when portions of the text are written bottom-to-top, and this behavior even spans the borders of paragraphs at times, as it is shown in the fragment in one of my preceding posts here. The conclusion that I can derive from this is that there is no unidirectional flow. The text is somehow "plotted" against the folio space, rather than "written" left-to-right, top-to-bottom.