About the binding(s?) and missing folios

[LisaFaginDavis]

           
I'm happy to clarify some of my own thinking in response to these questions.

The evidence suggests that each bifolium was written as an independent unit, meant to be read as four pages in a row. The illustrations that cross the gutter support this interpretation, as does the Latent Semantic Analytics that Colin Layfield has conducted (as explained in my lecture). The fact that the cosmological and zodiac sections (and even the rose, topographically) are intentional singulions adds more evidence.

As much as I would love to find a fifteenth-century analogue of a manuscript comprised of unbound stacked singulions, such assemblages are extremely unlikely to have survived. Manuscripts that aren't bound are fragile and at great risk of damage or loss. I think it likely that whomever nested and bound the manuscript (sometime in the fifteenth century, based on the style of the sewing) didn't know how to read it but wanted to preserve it, so they bound it as they would have any other manuscript, in quires of nested bifolia between wooden boards, with quire numbers to help the binder keep it in some kind of order. The herbal bifolia were bound in quires of four, as is typical. The other text-heavy sections (quires 13 and 20) were bound with all of the similar bifolia nested. The cosmological and zodiac sections were not nested, since the zodiac was clearly already in the right order. That leaves the Rose, bound as is, and quires 15, 17, and 19 - the herbal bifolia in this section are almost certainly out of place and, as Stolfi noted, the pharma bifolia are likely singulions as well.

As for bifolium 33|40, in this case you have both an illustration that crosses the gutter from 33v to 40r AND an offset of pigment from 33v to 34r. There's nothing contradictory about that, especially since the Gothic sewing suggests that the manuscript has been in its current mis-ordering for centuries. 

It is worth noting that all of the missing leaves are bifolia from the center of a quire, except for 12 and 74 which are singletons that left stubs behind: 59|64, 60|63, 61|62, 91|92, 97|98, 109|110. Because they came from the center of their quires, they could easily be removed without disrupting the sewing. Note that 91|92 and 97|98 were singulions!