Folio 66r marginalia

[-JKP-]

I think it's "muß"

The VMS is a bit too early to feature the Eszett, is not it?

I have many examples from  12th- to 14th-century documents. The shape was certainly in use.

But when it came to mean a double-ess is hard to tell because there were no hard-and-fast spelling rules in those days. It's very difficult to tell if they meant one ess or two because they would often spell almost any word in several different ways in the same document and sometimes even in the same sentence. It frequently represented one ess (perhaps descended from Greek sigma with the top loop rounded), and sometimes two.

Here are some samples I grabbed from my library (most of them from the 13th and 14th centuries). These are mostly proto-Gothic and Gothic cursive scripts, most of them in germanic documents written in German or Latin: