Quire 20, order from chaos… (Part 3: Microtheories)

In Part 1, I looked at lots of different types of evidence that each may (or indeed may not) say something about what happened to Quire 20’s bifolios to leave them in their final nesting order. So, what are the different microtheories these suggest? (What I call “microtheories” are attempts to reconstruct microhistories (e.g. about a specific feature), rather than an overarching macrohistory.)

Microtheory #1: “f116v is Q20’s final page”

It’s easy to conclude from f116v’s strange (and I suspect heavily emended) “michitonese” and doodly shapes that it must always have been Q20’s final page. Certainly, the presence of wormholes on f114/f115/f116 implies that the bifolio nesting/ordering we see now for Q20 was probably still in place back in the days when the Voynich Manuscript had a wooden cover.

However, Wladimir’s wormholes tell a rather more complicated story: because there is a substantial set of wormholes between f114 and f115 (smaller on f114, larger on f115) that doesn’t appear on f116, it strongly seems as though the present state was preceded by a different ordering (though probably also with a wooden cover) where f115 was Q20’s rearmost folio, with f114 nested immediately inside f115.

So it seems that while this particular microtheory was true for the final ordering, it was very probably not true for the ordering that preceded it. However, it doesn’t help us determine whether f116 was originally the final folio. True, it looks like it could have been: but there’s no obvious supporting evidence.

Microtheory #2: “f105r was originally Q20’s first page”

The ornate gallows at the top left of f105r certainly feels as though it ought to have been marking a visual statement of some kind, certainly more so than the rather less whizzy f103r. The fact that f105r has more ‘titles’ seems to back up the idea that this is an important page: and we might reasonably wonder whether the bottom edge of f105 was heavily trimmed (as Anton noted) to remove some kind of ownership mark in the bottom margin.

However, the suggestion that this was excised to remove the ownership mark is (unless someone can dig up any indentations on a different recto page, which – though a little unlikely – might prove possible with some kind of fancy modern scan) just plain speculation. Hence we only really have the ornate gallows and the presence of ‘titles’ to suggest that this was the case. Which is not to say that they’re bad evidence: rather, they’re both just a little weak.

Microtheory #3: “Contact transfers confirm the current ordering”

It’s entirely true that contact transfers (particularly paint contact transfers) seem to support Q20’s current nesting/ordering. I’m thinking here of the contacts between f115v and f116r; between f104v and f105r; and between f113v and f115r (via the vellum gap in the outside edge of f114).

And yet, I suspect that because the paint contact specifically between f115v and f116r is inconsistent with the wormholes highlighted by Wladimir Dulov, this would seem to imply either that much of the painting was done late in the manuscript’s binding state, or that even though the earlier bifolio nesting/ordering state was lost for an intermediate binding, it was magically restored for the final binding.

Similarly, many years ago I went through (pretty much all) the paint contact transfers: only a single instance (on f2v/f3r, see Curse Chapter 4) convinced me that contact between pages had transferred paint from the original binding. Everywhere else, it seemed that paint had transferred when the manuscript was in a later bound state.

So I don’t really believe that the (very few) paint contact transfers we see in Q20 can help us draw conclusions about Q20’s earliest nesting / ordering state, alas.

Microtheory #4: “f58r and f58v are the real start of Q20″

This microtheory gets mentioned only rarely, and yet there’s a great deal to be said for it. If you reverse the f58-f65 bifolio (i.e. turn it upside down, as VViews suggested here), f65 would appear to be the final folio of a Herbal-B section, making f58r likely the original start of the recipe section.

There’s a lot to commend this microtheory. For a start, f58 is the only page outside Q20 that has paragraph stars (though admittedly quite different-looking ones from what we see in Q20 ‘proper’). And Lisa Fagin Davis categorises f58 as “Scribe 3”, the same scribe who wrote ~95% of Q20.

f58r also has a space for an ornate capital at the top left of the page (presumably duplicated from a source page’s layout?), which makes it look as though it ought to be the start of a section / chapter / book (MarcoP mentioned this in 2018, but I’m pretty sure this was noted long before):

Incidentally, even though Lisa Fagin Davis categorises both f58 and f65 as having been done by Scribe 3, there seems to be a visual discontinuity between the two writings, to my eye making the text on f65v look more like Scribe 5’s work on f66 (though perhaps it was using a different quill & ink?):

Furthermore, in Julian Bunn’s folio similarity map, f58r and f58v are clustered closely together (so are probably content-continuous and/or structure-continuous): and they’re not too far away on his map from (say) f105r and f115r. Hence there seems to be no obvious technical reason blocking this general idea.

There are also some aspects of f58r that make it appear a little bit special. For example, f58r and the top half of f58v are made up of chunky paragraphs; f58v has a ‘title’ conspicuously at the end of the first paragraph; while f58r has more words starting with “chol-” than any other page by quite some margin (though what this means I have no idea, I just thought you’d like to know):

It also has more words starting with “chal-” than any other page (a lot of the rest are in Q20):

f58v also has an odd-looking sequence of single-leg gallows on its top line, if you’re into that kind of thing:

So, might f58r have actually originally been Q20’s start page? Personally, I think it’s not a bad microtheory at all, really not bad at all.

Having said all that, I would note that, unlike Q13 and Q20, f58r and f58v contain only a single word beginning with “l-” each. Similarly, while f58r and f58v have more instances of “ed” than is usual for Currier A, they have far fewer “ed” instances than Currier B. Compare this with f66r (in Q8), a Scribe 5 page which is simply stuffed with words that start with “l-” (particularly at the bottom), as well as many more words containing “ed”:

Hence this might well be one of the ‘intermediate’ Currier-language folios that Rene Zandbergen has mentioned at various times, e.g. we might be able to see aspects of Currier-A ‘evolving’ into Currier-B here.

Microtheory #5: “Q20 was originally made up of Q20A and Q20B”

Though I’ve blogged numerous times about this microtheory, it’s still not definitively proven. While it does (from the wormholes) now seem likely that f115v (rather than f116v) was the end folio for much of the Voynich Manuscript’s physical history, we can’t yet prove that f116v was not also the original end folio. And even if the microtheory that f105r was the first page of Q20 now seems less likely than the microtheory that f58r was Q20’s original first page, we can’t use either to prove or disprove this.

Perhaps, though, this will necessarily be more of a culmination / accumulation / combination of other codicological arguments than a supporting argument for them. The jury is still out here.