about pages out of order

[LisaFaginDavis]

1) you can see the water stains quite clearly in the upper margins of the first 50 or so folios. 
2) The stain smudged text and illustrations, but the folio numbers are written on top of the stain and are undamaged, meaning that they were written later. And yes, the bifolia are not in the right order anymore. We don't know the correct order, and there is very little evidence to help put the bifolia back in the their original order. 

One kind of material evidence that is often helpful when a medieval manuscript is bound out of order are the "offsets", the mirror-images of part of one page that can be seen on the facing page, the result of the book being closed for centuries and the pigment rubbing off onto the surface that's pressing against it. There's a nice example on f. 25v/26, where the blue berries at the top of 26 are mirrored onto f. 25v. Because this quire is comprised of mixed bifolia written by scribe 1 and scribe 2 (which implies that the bifolia are out of order), this offset is almost certainly not original. In fact, you can see it was caused by the parchment still being damp when the book was rebound: the water smudged the berries on f. 26, the book was rebound, and the damp section was offset onto the new facing page (f. 25v). Lots of people, including myself, have looked carefully for offsets that DON'T match the current sequence, which might help recover the original order. There are a few possibilities where a smudge on one leaf MIGHT match up with an illustration that it no longer faces, but nothing unequivocal. So until we can actually read the manuscript, there is no clear way to sort out the original sequence of leaves.