Quire 13. Text first. Pictures after.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

f79r and f79v. The text margin is straight and does not flow around the contours of the pictures.

What about this explanation:

When the Scribe started the Bio section, presumably with folio f75 (or the bifolio f75-f84), he followed the same method (or lack thereof) that he had used in the Herbal: draw the illustration first, spread all overt the page, then write the text around it.  But he found that it did not work well, because here there was a lot of text to be written on each page, and writing across a water slide and a pond was harder than writing across a narrow plant stem or a couple of branches.  

So he was forced to do some planning.  He decided to squeeze the drawings along the margins were possible.   In those cases, he drew the figures first, then wrote the text  in the remaining space. When breaking a line, he would start the new one sometimes flush against the marginal drawing, sometimes aligned with the start of the previous line.

When he had to draw something across the whole page, in the middle of it -- as in f78v, f80r, f82r, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. he probably wrote a few complete paragraphs until he reached the right place, then drew that item, then continued writing the text just below it.  

Alternatively, in those cases he calculated the amount of space he would need for the text above and below (still a whole number of parags), then drew the wide figure, then wrote the text, adjusting the line spacing according to the space available.  But somehow I think that this alternative scheme would be too much planning for that scribe...

All the best, --stolfi