5 hours ago
(This post was last modified: 4 hours ago by npcompl33t.)
I wanted to share some recent findings and get others thoughts. These involve easily observable physical damage to sheets and should not require AI to view or understand. AI did not help create this theory, it did help me create some of the charts.
Damage at the top/head edge of the VMS is ubiquitous, particularly the stain that occurs throughout most of the herbal section of the MS. However, damage at the tail/bottom end is comparatively rare.
I would like to bring your attention to f5, which has an observable crease, along with a wider distorted fan, at the tail/bottom end of the page. f5 is already quite odd compared to its surrounding folio. It is cut much shorter than the others in quire 1, and it is the only folio showing extensive warping at the bottom of the page like this.
This damage is severe, the vellum actually folds back onto itself, creating a crease. If we look at f21, you will notice a similar depression in the same location.
How do I know these are the exact same location? I've been working on a much higher fidelity model of this damage, based on the photgraphs of the closed manuscript. If we look at the photos of the tail edge, which i have colored according to quire below, f5 and f21 are immediately identifiable.
We can see that when the MS is closed, the crease on f5 is perfectly aligned with the depression on f21, and they are the exact same size and depth.
Lets expand our search, and look for any herbal with visible creasing , warping or damage at the bottom of the page. Here are the ones that I was able to find, let me know if you are aware of any others. They are f5, f15, f21, f29, f32, f37, f30, f52, and possibly f9.
This is quite remarkable, because while these are spread throughout the manuscript, my proposed manuscript chronology, which uses glyph transitions alone, places nearly all of these into a single consecutive block, with all of the damaged pages sitting on the B side of the bifolium. This implies that when the damage occurred, these were either loose bifolia sitting on top of each other, or they were bound and the damage was done while the book was open or the A/B faces were otherwise split.
what's more, if we actually examine the illustrations of this group, we can see there are many that are extremely similar.
This is not the only such grouping. For instance, another set of folios have creases at the same spot on the fore-edge. Here are all the ones i was able to spot.
Remarkably, these are all Herbal B , and again they are adjacent bifolia in my golf chronology. However, the damage in this case seems to occur on both the A and B faces of the bifolia.
And again, if you actually compare all of the illustrations on these, they are all extremely similar. Note that the flower shapes are entirely different in this batch vs the previous.
In conclusion, i have identified two sets of folios with similar creases or damage patterns. At least one pair, f5 and f21, has evidence of being directly adjacent to one another due to matching crease depressions.
Each of these sets consist of folios that are not ordered next to each other in the current binding order, but that my glyph transition chronology places in consecutive batches.
The illustrations in each set also seem to contain similar overall plant shapes and flowers. It may be worth attempting some sort of broader seriation on the illustrations.
I feel this is very strong evidence that these were folio were adjacent to each other at some point, where they sustained similar damage, before ultimately being rearranged into the current MS sequence.
Hopefully this was both easy to understand and also easy to verify!
Damage at the top/head edge of the VMS is ubiquitous, particularly the stain that occurs throughout most of the herbal section of the MS. However, damage at the tail/bottom end is comparatively rare.
I would like to bring your attention to f5, which has an observable crease, along with a wider distorted fan, at the tail/bottom end of the page. f5 is already quite odd compared to its surrounding folio. It is cut much shorter than the others in quire 1, and it is the only folio showing extensive warping at the bottom of the page like this.
This damage is severe, the vellum actually folds back onto itself, creating a crease. If we look at f21, you will notice a similar depression in the same location.
How do I know these are the exact same location? I've been working on a much higher fidelity model of this damage, based on the photgraphs of the closed manuscript. If we look at the photos of the tail edge, which i have colored according to quire below, f5 and f21 are immediately identifiable.
We can see that when the MS is closed, the crease on f5 is perfectly aligned with the depression on f21, and they are the exact same size and depth.
Lets expand our search, and look for any herbal with visible creasing , warping or damage at the bottom of the page. Here are the ones that I was able to find, let me know if you are aware of any others. They are f5, f15, f21, f29, f32, f37, f30, f52, and possibly f9.
This is quite remarkable, because while these are spread throughout the manuscript, my proposed manuscript chronology, which uses glyph transitions alone, places nearly all of these into a single consecutive block, with all of the damaged pages sitting on the B side of the bifolium. This implies that when the damage occurred, these were either loose bifolia sitting on top of each other, or they were bound and the damage was done while the book was open or the A/B faces were otherwise split.
what's more, if we actually examine the illustrations of this group, we can see there are many that are extremely similar.
This is not the only such grouping. For instance, another set of folios have creases at the same spot on the fore-edge. Here are all the ones i was able to spot.
Remarkably, these are all Herbal B , and again they are adjacent bifolia in my golf chronology. However, the damage in this case seems to occur on both the A and B faces of the bifolia.
And again, if you actually compare all of the illustrations on these, they are all extremely similar. Note that the flower shapes are entirely different in this batch vs the previous.
In conclusion, i have identified two sets of folios with similar creases or damage patterns. At least one pair, f5 and f21, has evidence of being directly adjacent to one another due to matching crease depressions.
Each of these sets consist of folios that are not ordered next to each other in the current binding order, but that my glyph transition chronology places in consecutive batches.
The illustrations in each set also seem to contain similar overall plant shapes and flowers. It may be worth attempting some sort of broader seriation on the illustrations.
I feel this is very strong evidence that these were folio were adjacent to each other at some point, where they sustained similar damage, before ultimately being rearranged into the current MS sequence.
Hopefully this was both easy to understand and also easy to verify!
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