The gallows intrusion, the baseline jumps and multipass

[-JKP-]

Columns were usually respected and kept simple in medieval manuscripts. There are a few examples of rambling columns (e.g., some of the northern Carthusian manuscripts).

There are also some less common examples with staircased columns (they go partway down the folio then move over to the right and continue). Since it would take months or years of hunting to find one of these if you were explicitly searching for it, I thought I would post an example that I have in my files, for the record:

   

I know, it's not the same as multipass, but it doesn't hurt to know that less conventional columns did exist in the Middle Ages.