About the binding(s?) and missing folios

[Cuagga]

Then, for which reason would the first preparator prepare uneven quires (I can see two of them, but none can apply to q8 : either a clear semantic/stylistic link, which explains q20 but q8's remaining bifoliae aren't clearly semantically tied, or the physical unwieldyness of long quires with foldouts, which explains q14 through 19 but can't explain LONGER than usual quires) ? q8 is longer than all other quires (except q20, with its very different text layout than the rest), and as long as q13, which is stylistically coherent, but f57, 58, 65 and 66 are quite different to each other, and they aren't even consistent recto to verso (f57r and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can be in the same section, but they are clearly different from the pair f57v-f66r). Currier finds both Language A and Language B in this quire, and the images look to belong in different sections, which indicates one of the following :

• There is a hidden semantic connection justifying to join together bifoliae like that, and the quirer understood the language (very unlikely, as Lisa Fagin Davis' work tends to suggest that quiring itself was a misunderstanding of the book, which should have stayed as a collection of loose leaves, or should have been quired as a thick pile of singulions)
  
• The missing bifoliae contain drawings and text bridging the gap (possible, but unhelpful)
  
• Q8 was from the start a patchwork quire, gathering everything that doesn't fit (this indicates that q16 and q18 were bigger than a sigular bifolio without foldouts each, as else they could have been joined into q8 and the resulting quire would still not have been thicker than q20, which by its existence, shows that quires this big are practical ; it doesn't explain, though, why it would have been numbered this low, rather than being put at the end)
  
• All quires were initially this big and we shouldn't read into 8's length (not really realistic, as it means 7 bifoliae are missing, one in each of the first 7 quires; the most probable outcome would have been to have unequal quires at the start)
  

The most probable outcome, for me and for now, is the proposition 3 : q16 and q18 were longer than one standard bifolio each, but all the unnumbered ones were lost between quiring and foliating. I still don't have a good idea of why the quirer would create distinct-length quires in the middle of the book rather than counting the extra leaves at the end of the quiring process, but that might be tied to the process itself, in which case I'd love an idea

I'm not very familiar with all these topics, but I have one question: given you find that the present arrangement requires some explanation, is there an alternative arrangement of the existing folios that you would call definitely more logical?

I am not familiar with all the scholarship, but at least since Currier in the 70s, scholarship has recognised that the VMS seems to be written in two different "languages" (Currier's term, I think I would prefer "styles" while we don't have more info but I'm a newbie myself so for now I just follow the established vocabulary) with distinct character usage statistics, blended together, some bifolia with one language and some other with the other one, languages rarely varying across the same bifolio. Meanwhile, in the current day, paleograph Lisa Fagin Davis seems to recognise the hand of five different scribes in the manuscript, all interspersed in the same quires but each scribe seems to have worked on complete bifoliae. Then, her current research looks to use some machine learning techniques (Latent Semantic Analysis) to make stats on the words used in each page to compute similarity between pages, and from there, the original order of the pages (using the assumption that consecutive pages are most similar to each other, which is most reasonable). And her preliminary results seem to indicate that at least for q20, the intended reading order should have been to unbind all bifoliae and read one completely, front (both halves) and back, before starting another one. If the whole manuscript follows this formula (and it looks like it does), then binding is a mistake that someone understanding the text wouldn't have done