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About the binding(s?) and missing folios
- About the binding(s?) and missing folios
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RE: About the binding(s?) and missing folios
kckluge > 11-12-2025, 09:50 PM
(11-12-2025, 02:25 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That leaves the Rose, bound as is, and quires 15, 17, and 19 - the herbal bifolia in this section are almost certainly out of place and, as Stolfi noted, the pharma bifolia are likely singulions as well.
The Scribe 1 herbal bifolia in quire 15, f93/f96 bifolio in quire 17, and pharma bifolia in quires 15 and 19 are in a "dialect" of the Currier A language distinct from the Currier A dialect(s) of the Scribe 1 bifolia in the earlier herbal quires (with possibly a small number of exceptions). That's how they cluster in bigram frequency space in the tests I've run; looking at Rene's site (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., etc) this corresponds to his RZ language Ae (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)). In that sense they do belong together, and the fact that they ended up in physical proximity in the binding as well as statistical proximity in "dialect" may say something about the route they took from the original scribes to the binding.
I'm curious what your thinking about the f57/f66 bifolio is:
* It seems odd that it wasn't folded the other way for the binding, swapping You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and making the current You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. face the start of the quire 9 circular diagrams.
* The two sides sort of fit in with the concept that "each bifolium was written as an independent unit, meant to be read as four pages in a row" in the sense that one side (f57v/f66r) has the concentric circle diagram on the left half and an all-text page on the right half, while the other side (f57r/f66v) has a pair of large plant drawing herbal pages. I'm struggling to picture the order in which the pages were written. Did Scribe 1 do the left side of one side of a blank bifolio with a non-herbal circular diagram, then Scribe 5 did the text-only right side and decided to put a pair of herbal pages on the otherwise blank back? Whatever the order, it seems unlikely You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was written before You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (doing the right half of that side before the left half). -
RE: About the binding(s?) and missing folios
ReneZ > 11-12-2025, 11:53 PM
(11-12-2025, 01:09 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Could these quire numbers have been written just prior to the binding, to instruct the first Binder about the desired order of the quires in the book? Or even by the Binder himself?
This is the normal scenario. In times of early printing (and perhaps also before), it would be common not to write a number, but the first word on the next page.
(11-12-2025, 01:09 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the bifolios had been kept unbound by the Author, with no folio numbers, why would he number the quires? he would not need them to keep the sections in whatever order he wanted, and on the other hand he did not seem to care about the order of the Herbal folios.
'Why' is always a tricky question. We know that this was done.
We must assume that the MS author/scribes cared about the order of the pages.
Also, just the quire numbers are not sufficient in case the whole book is dropped (*), so I can only guess that there was another way in which the sheet order within the quires was preserved. I'm just thinking of a temporary thread for that.
(*): Did you ever use punch cards? It is (was) a known and serious risk. -
RE: About the binding(s?) and missing folios
Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 01:50 AM
(11-12-2025, 11:53 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Did you ever use punch cards? It is (was) a known and serious risk.
Yes of course! Starting 1969, when I got into college. And that is why FORTRAN used only 72 columns of the 80-column cards: so that the cards could have sequence numbers punched in columns 73-80. Then the ubiquitous card sorters could save the day after that kind of disaster.
A friend of mine used to say that the only good programs were those that were unnumbered and got dropped when they were almost ready to deliver, and thus had to be re-coded from scratch...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: About the binding(s?) and missing folios
MarcoP > Yesterday, 08:07 AM
(11-12-2025, 02:25 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... That leaves the Rose, bound as is, and quires 15, 17, and 19 - the herbal bifolia in this section are almost certainly out of place and, as Stolfi noted, the pharma bifolia are likely singulions as well.
About Quire 15, it seems interesting that the four folios 87 (Botanical), 88 (Pharma), 89 (Pharma), 90 (Botanical) are so close in terms of bigram frequencies (as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., PCA plot from the previous post in that thread). I am looking forward to seeing if Colin’s analysis confirms that those two bifolios are closely related….