Recipes Folios: Are the margin stars bullet points?

[Diane]

Julian,
There might be a link with the number of days in the year, just as a link between the stars and days of the year, but I'd be wary of assuming the link any more direct. Pelling's distinguishing between use of star-flowers in the calendar's tiers and those in the end-lists seems a fair point to me.

As example only - the end-lists could be the liturgical roster, or the series of which stars rise or set, or a form of the Yemeni star-calendars, or .. any number of other things.

I notice that in Persian texts, too, there is found a custom of separating sentences with flower-like asterisks. Here's the illustration I used last year, from the Kitab al-Diryaq. I don't know if the point had been made before - I did read everything I could find before making that post - but it seemed no-one had noticed this earlier.

So  the end-lists might even be sentences of a single text, separated out.. among the wealth of other possibilities.