f17r multispectral images

[MarcoP]

Is the marginalia largely written using a subset of characters or am I reading in too much? I know the amount of marginalia text is laughably small to make any reliable inferences, but I see a lot of initial m's and p's and final x's and r's.

The observation is certainly correct for final -x. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. transcriptions by four different researchers are discussed (Elmar Vogt, Sean B. Palmer, Jorge Stolfi, Johannes Albus); they all agree that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 3 includes four consecutive words ending -x.

   

‘X’ is relatively rare in European languages. In written medieval Latin, it is of course frequent in numbers, but only about 1-2% of non-number word tokens end in -x. The fact that the four occurrences are consecutive is particularly noteworthy. I doubt that four consecutive final Xs can occur in a grammatical Latin text: lines 2 and 3 do look vaguely Latin, at least, "vix" is a legit Latin word (meaning "hardly").

Something comparable can be seen in a charm in Buitzruss's notebook (first half of the 15th century) Clm 671 f.72v (mid-page): compare 
"rex pax fax ++++ in christo +" 
with 
"six + marix + morix + vix + abia + maria +".
But rex, pax, fax are three actual Latin words (king, peace, torch).