Quire and bifolio patterns for strangely-aligned text

[LisaFaginDavis]

This is an interesting observation, Patrick, although I'm not entirely sure what the implications might be. Such variations in alignment are not unheard of in late-medieval European manuscripts, and often signal the end of a section. Formatting of a page as a scribal practice can be inconsistent, especially in manuscripts like the VMS that aren't high-end, professional products. Everything about the VMS points to it being a low-end production - the sloppy illustrations, the inconsistent writing quality, the poor-quality parchment - and so we probably shouldn't expect that the formatting of pages would necessarily be careful and consistent. So while it is certainly possible that these patterns have meaning, they might also just be the result of scribal whim.

I think it likely that the herbal quires, at least, were originally each restricted to the work of a single scribe, and that the mix-ups happened during an early rebinding (perhaps after the catastrophic water damage occurred).