Bifolio as a functional unit?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I would like to present the results of my own investigation which gives further evidence for the hypothesis that the manuscript was written sheet-by-sheet at not in book page order.

Another possible circumstantial clue is pages 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. of the Starred Parags section.  

Those pages are now at the center of the quire, but the folio numbers indicate that a whole bifolio f109r-f110v was removed after the book was bound.  

Yet starting in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the Scribe stopped breaking the text into parags and instead wrote continuously from left rail to right rail.  And he continued with the same pattern on f111r, from line 6 until about half-page; at which point he returned to the normal pattern of short parags.  There is a large number of stars in the margin of those two solid text blocks (11 on each page), suggesting that there are 11 parags melded into those blocks.

There are no other similar cases in that section.  

It is possible that the Scribe used that compressed format throughout the four intervening missing pages.  It is also possible that he used that format on 118v, reverted to the normal format for the next four pages, then returned to the compressed format for another half-page on f111r, by coincidence on the same bifolio as f108v. 

Or, what I think is more likely, he wrote that section bifolio by bifolio, as you say -- when 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. were consecutive and facing each other.

(I can imagine the Author nervously counting parags and bifolios, and telling the scribe in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. "try to write more compactly, will you? All this draft has to fit in those sheets, it is all the vellum I have for now!".  And then coming back a few hours later, "what?!? no, no, that is not what I meant -- you can't join parags like that!")

All the best, --stolfi

[Rafal]

If you want to know how the correlations were generated then it was like this:
For each page within a quire I calculated the frequencies for a range of parameters. Then for each page pair I summed the absolute values of the differences between all their frequencies to get a score

.

A technical comment.
You are calling these values "correlations" in a very colloquial, imprecise way. 
Proper statistical correlations are Pearson correlation or Spearman correlation which are values 0-1 and decribe similarity of two datasets.

Your values are the opposite - they describe a difference between two datasets which seems not to have any top limit. The bigger value means the bigger difference.

[dashstofsk]

"correlations" in a very colloquial, imprecise way.

That's right. I am using the common dictionary meaning of that word. 'Mutial relation between two or more things. Interdependence of variable quantities.' I was attempting just to show which page pairs have the best mutial relationship.

[DG97EEB]

I thought this might be helpful You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

View it on big screen rather than phone...

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. 

I'm sure this isn't new but i hadn't seen a way to simply show this in this way, so if it's helpful..... it certainly gives me a much better feeling for the Manuscript rather than just looking per Quire.

Thanks

Ed

[JoJo_Jost]

very interesting...

[Koen G]

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. 

Very handy! I wish this existed when Cary and I were sorting plant properties (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ). We ended up resorting to printed bifolios, which is still the best way to get a feel for them, but this site comes close and is of course more convenient.

Sometimes plant properties appear to be bifolio based, but in my recollection this was most often a recto-verso kind of thing. But a lot of features have "buddies" spread separately over different bifolios. For example the very salient "root platforms" or "root tables" as they are sometimes called. It's almost as if these are spread out as much as possible. I agree that there are some cases where (bi)folio based groupings seem relevant, though not clear to me if it even beats chance.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I thought this might be helpful You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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

[DG97EEB]

   
I'd say that 1 and 3 are similar and 2 and 4

   
The flowers here are all very similar 

   
The right hand of the first root is almost identical to the right hand of the second root .  Making me think it's possibly Centaurae Minor and Major 

   
3rd and 4th

   
Each pair 

   
Roots on 1st and 3rd

   
"Jars" on 1st and 2nd

[Jorge_Stolfi]

"Jars" on 1st and 2nd

Rene had already noted that the shapes of the jars show a fairly continuous evolution if the Pharma bifolios are taken in a specific order.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the gallery in the current (bound) order and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is it rearranged as proposed by Rene. 

All the best, --stolfi

[DG97EEB]

"Jars" on 1st and 2nd

Rene had already noted that the shapes of the jars show a fairly continuous evolution if the Pharma bifolios are taken in a specific order.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the gallery in the current (bound) order and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is it rearranged as proposed by Rene. 

All the best, --stolfi

Thanks Jorge.. that's really cool and helpful actually...