Categorizing the text-only pages

[RenegadeHealer]

The idea is that there are good reasons to assume that "r" and "v" were written consecutively and they often appear to share similar illustrations, dialects and the same scribe. Of course there is no guarantee that this measure is meaningful: I used it just because it seems to make sense to me and it is simple to check.

You know much more about the history of medieval writing than I do, so I could be way off base with this, but for some reason this is not how I imagined bifolios being written. Imagine I was writing on all 4 surfaces of a greeting card. We'll call the front of the card "1r", the inside left surface "1v", the inside right surface "2r", and the back of the card "2v". I'm a right-handed writer, writing in ink that takes time to dry. What makes the most sense to me is to write on 1v, then 2r, then wait for the ink to dry and flip, then 2v, and last 1r. Or vice versa: 2v --> 1r --> pause --> 1v --> 2r. Again, this is just what seems to make sense, with what little I know, if I wanted to minimize the chance of ink smudging, or damage from repeated flipping. If there is a historical factor I'm not considering which meant that 1v would typically be written immediately after finishing 1r, please correct me.

The only reason I bring this up is because in the VMs, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. occupy the left and right halves, respectively, of the same side of a single sheet of vellum. What this means is that the scribe would have been looking at a finished You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. while writing f66r. Or vice versa, depending which was written first. This, to me, greatly increases the chances that these two high-interest folios had something to do with each other thematically. Especially in light of the fact that counts of 17 — a relatively unusual number — are a prominent feature of both.

@Linda, I do think it's important to ask ourselves whether the plant pages on this bifolio were the inside or the outside of the metaphorical greeting card. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. being thematically connected isn't ruled out by either arrangement, since the arrangement doesn't change the fact that one was almost certainly written while looking at the other. But it does change the potential nature of this thematic connection. If this bifolio were the innermost one of a quire, such that f57v and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. faced each other at a center fold, then what immediately comes to mind is that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. could be annotations for points on the wheel(s) in f57v. Your post, on the other hand, tentatively favors the idea that this was in fact the outermost bifolio of the original quire, such that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was the front cover and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the back cover. (Which I agree with you, is equally or more resonable.) With this arrangement, it seems likely to me that both You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f66r are summaries of the information in the original quire, in different forms: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as a table of contents, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as a schematic diagram.