What happened to Voynich Q8 and Q14?

In a recent post, I started trying to list out Q20 order-related microtheories, but got somewhat sidetracked by the microtheory that f58 (with its ‘Scribe 3’ starred paragraphs) may have preceded Q20 (which, for the most part, is also made up of ‘Scribe 3’ starred paragraphs). However, this whole idea is closely linked to the whole issue of what happened to Q8 (which f58 is part of) and Q14: and even though I had covered this issue before, I thought it was well worth revisiting.

The “ij” Marginalia

Back in 2009, I floated the idea that the mark at the bottom of f57v might have been an “ij”, probably ineptly added by an early Voynich owner who believed (from the nesting order of the bifolios back then) that this marked the start of the second ‘book’ (or chapter). (“ij” is an entirely conventional early modern Latin way of handwriting “2”).

This was actually part of a larger discussion of Q8 which I tried to put together to make sense of Q8’s curious foliation – essentially, why was there such a large folio numbering gap between f58 and f65? My suggestion was that not only had Q8’s bifolios been flipped around (i.e. the original folio order was f65-f66-x-x-x-x-x-x-f57-f58), but the large wodge of pages missing from the middle could well have been the nine-rosette folio (but folded down).

And before you start complaining that the nine-rosette page doesn’t have folio numbers matching this, my idea was that the foldout page had already been pulled out and rebound along a different fold, leaving a damaged vellum residue at the centre of Q8 that the foliator numbered around (just in case it later got bound back into its correct place).

However, I now suspect that even that binding was an ‘imposition’ (in the literal sense of the word), and that the original nesting order had been (say) f65-f66-f57-f58, before the bifolios were reversed and the nine-rosette page (Scribes 2 & 4) was inserted into their centre. So I would date the “ij” marginalia to the mid-fifteenth century, prior to the bifolios being reversed, and also to before the nine-rosette foldout was (mis-)bound into Quire 8.

But because f57r (the flip side of f57v) is a Herbal-B page, and f57v still faces f58r (with the paragraph stars), it seems very likely to me that these two folios faced each other in Quire 8’s original (unbound) gathering.

This would make the first few pages of Q20:

• f57v (with the circular diagram [possibly a nocturnal, e.g. here, here and here])
  • (oh, plus the “ij” marginalia at the bottom)
• f58r (big paragraph stars, plus a missing initial capital)
• f58v (more starred paragraphs)
• Quire 20 (though in an as-yet unknown bifolio ordering).

Chicken Scratches (Again)

Intriguingly, if you insert the nine-rosette page into the centre of Q8 in its original folding style, you end up putting the two pages with “chicken scratches” on right next to each other, which would seem to strongly support this whole idea. Yet because the chicken scratches line up horizontally but not vertically, I think we can reasonably infer that the nine-rosette page was only loosely bound in at this stage. Finally, because the Q14 quire number is on the correct page relative to Q14’s rebinding (i.e. not its original binding), it would seem to imply (as I described for Q13 in Curse, 2006) that these quire numbers were added after several binding iterations.

Hence the Q8 timeline would appear to be something like this:

• f65-f66-f57-f58 (original order)
• “ij” marginalia added
• Q8 Bifolios reversed, nine-rosette foldout inserted but only loosely bound in
• Chicken scratch marginalia added
• Nine-rosette foldout ripped along original fold, removed from Q8, but vellum residue left in place
• Nine-rosette foldout refolded along different fold, quire 14 number added, bound further along
• Foliation added, folio numbers 59-64 skipped to work around the nine-rosette vellum residue

f85r2 Contact Transfer (?)

There is also the matter of what seems to be a paint contact transfer on f85r2.

Given what seems to be the connections between Q8 and Q14, you’d loosely expect this to have come from a Q8 herbal page: but this doesn’t seem to be the case. I then wondered whether this had been transferred across from the red-brown paint at the bottom of f87r (a close neighbour in the final binding order, codicologically speaking). However, unless the bottom edge of f87r has been extremely heavily trimmed, the curve isn’t really right:

Looking elsewhere in the manuscript, this could possibly have instead come from the bottom outside corner of f43r (but, to be honest, this curve doesn’t seem to match either):

Or from the bottom outside corner of f39r (but, again, the curve doesn’t seem to quite match):

So… where did it come from? This remains a bit of a mystery to me (and I’ve marched through all the pages of my Yale facsimile several times), but perhaps someone else will have a better insight into what happened here. I hope so!

f86v6 Contact Transfer (?)

There’s also a curious mark (that looks like a contact transfer) near the top right of f86v6 which I also currently have no explanation for:

Has anybody got any idea about this?