Bifolio as a functional unit?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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It regroups folios by Bifolium side by side. What's remarkable (in some but by no means all cases) is the similarities between colours and shapes in flowers, leaves and roots.

Thanks for that resource!

I haven't looked carefully at the shapes, but I would expect continuity between the two folios of the same bifolio.  I am satisfied that the Scribe penned the book bifolio by bifolio.  

A professional scribe would be aware that the bifolios of a book are meant to be nested into quires. Therefore, the text must be written folio by folio, in a specific order: in each quire, first the left halves of the bifolios, outermost to innermost, then the right halves, in the reverse order.  

I bet that the VMS Scribe was not even conscious of that detail, and just did the two folios of each bifolio in the same sitting.  For the herbal pages, that was not an issue anyway, because the order of the plants was probably arbitrary (as seems to be the case in the Alchemists' Herbal)  

But he seems to have been smart enough to fold the bifolio first, and do the four pages in the proper order.   At least for the bifolio f1+f8.

If this bet is right, then the text of the Bio and Starred Parags sections is all scrambled up.  It is already accepted that some bifolios were nested into quires in the wrong order, and possibly flipped over.  But there may not be a correct nesting order.   The text probably must be read bifolio by bifolio, rather than folio by folio.

As for the colors, on the other hand, I don't see more consistency within the bifolios than between consecutive folios in the bound book.  Thus, to me it still seems more likely that the colored paints are not original, but were applied after the book was bound. 

All the best, --stolfi