Recipes Folios: Are the margin stars bullet points?

[-JKP-]

I'm trying to decide whether the text in the Recipes folios is a list of bulleted descriptions, each bullet marked by a star. The trouble is that in many cases the stars don't "line up" with the lines of text.

What are the opinions on this - were the stars drawn in, higgledy-piggledy, after the text, with no relation to the text? Or are they indeed like bullet marks?

By my count this is the number of margin stars on each Recipe folio:


StarCounts = {
'103r':19,
[list deleted for brevity]
}

The variation in number of stars does suggest that they relate to the text, otherwise wouldn't it be more likely that there are the same number on each folio, if they are simply decoration?

(The average number of stars per folio is 14. Thus there are an estimated 56 stars missing due to the two missing folios f109 and f110. This would bring the original total number of stars in the Recipes to 380, by my count.)

Julian, FYI it was a custom in central Europe to use flowers (or plant shapes) to mark off paragraphs or noteworthy sections (similar to the way manicules are used but a little lower in the hierarchy than a manicule). They were usually placed in the left margins.

These stemmed flower-points often resemble stars on strings, so if someone were doing a star-themed manuscript it would be a natural substitution to use stars to mark paragraphs in the same way.

Here are some examples (note how the green flower lower right resembles a star):