I-VII^^8 (f. 12 missing),

VIII^^4 (leaves foliated 59 through 64 missing from center of quire),

 IX^^2 (double and triple fold-out leaves),

X^^2 (1 triple fold-out),

XI^^2 (1 quadruple fold-out),

XII^^2 (f. 74 missing, followed by stubs of conjugate leaves),

XIII^^10, XIV^^1 (sextuple fold-out),

XV^^4 (1 triple and 1 double fold-out),

XVI^^4 (1 double fold-out; ff. 91, 92, 97, 98 missing, 2 stubs between 94 and 95),

XVII^^4 (2 double fold-outs),

XVIII^^12 (ff. 109-110, central bifolium, missing).

This extended glossary was developed from a conference paper which its author  (J.P. Gumbert) had delivered at the  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität,  in Munich in 2004.

• [pdf] ‘[Words for…] Sheets and Leaves’ from Chapter 31: ‘quires’  in Words for Codices..(2010).  Other sections of the book are also available as downloadable pdfs.

A  formal codicological assessment, today, is expected to consider, and to include where relevant, the wider perspectives of comparative codicology.

Codicology is a science. Comparative codicology is a highly specialised branch of that science and, like any other active science, is evolving.

Some curators and scholars were accustomed to consider a manuscript in the broader context and one sees such comment made long before the 1990s but as a formal discipline, comparative codicology’s growth followed the publication of Beit-Arié’s landmark paper in 1993:

• Malachi Beit-Arié, ‘Why comparative codicology?’ Gazette du livre médiéval, n°23. Automne 1993. pp. 1-5

The last twenty-five years has seen a parallel and mutually-enhancing revolution in laboratory studies and techniques, and in the quality of comparative codicological studies.   Some idea of the range and depth now informing the latter can be gained by considering these abstracts – for papers delivered at the University of Hamburg’s Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in 2017.

• [pdf]  “Manuscripts East and West – Towards Comparative and General Codicology” 17 – 19 October 2017

Before going further, I want newcomers to realise  that the study of this manuscript’s codicology is fairly said to begin with research done by Nick Pelling.

He raised the matter in conversations to the first mailing list, and then in his book (2006) and later in his ciphermysteries blog.

Interested chiefly in possible consequences for those working on the written part of the text  of disruption and loss from the quires,  Pelling attempted to reconstruct what he believed was the contents’  original order while advocating such cutting-edge techniques such as multispectral scans –  well  before the Beinecke library undertook such work.

It was not until about six years had passed with little response – not until about 2013 or so – that others added to the usual reproduction of the Shailor description (with or without illustrations) some few of Pelling’s observations, but nothing followed of any substance, despite the vital information embodied in y a manuscript’s form, composition and materials.  Such comments as do appear, today, seem chiefly aimed at reassuring us – against the obvious  – that the manuscript is no more than a ‘little unusual for its time’. The question is rather just how unusual it is for the place.

Acting on instructions from the persons commissioning the study, the technicians were obliged to abandon the practice of randomising samples. This is why the sampling seems skewed, three of the  four samples taken from that minority group –  specifically from Quire 1 ( f.8 ); Quire 4 (f.26); and Quire 7 (f. 47).

For further details and comment see:

• Nick Pelling, ‘Radiocarbon Dating and the Voynich Manuscript‘, ciphermysteries, May 14th., 2015.

One is often obliged to quote Pelling, whose training as an historian and personal inclination to cryptology kept him able and willing to comment intelligently on new ideas and information about the manuscript, regardless of whether or not it seemed compatible with his own historical theory.  He is not always capable of appreciating insights or researchers frankly denying his theoretical history or his ideas about e.g. iconography or linguistics,  but his technical comments have often proven so valuable that they have been constantly, if selectively, taken up and re-presented on numerous other blogs and websites – with, or without, correct attribution.

Carelessness in attributing such contributions to the study to their original source means that what were in fact sharply original insights about e.g. the written text, or the radiocarbon range may later  appear to newcomers as no more than ‘what everyone says’, a state of affairs I find regrettable  not only in Pelling’s case but in the many others where original insights (of sufficient worth to be taken up) have been similarly cannibalised by individuals ignorant of how things are done, or too eager to gain a reputation they cannot acquire by their own ability.

Jorge Stolfi wrote to the first mailing list in 1998:

INTERLN17.EVT is based on the files: voynich.now, FSG.NEW and tiltman.txt with some small corrections. The Currier version was originally coded in Currier’s alphabet. I translated it to FSG “enhanced” alphabet using Jacques Guy’s BITRANS program and a set of rules CUR2FSG2 based on a message by Jim Reeds to the Voynich mailing list. The FSG alphabet does not contain the Currier characters 6 and 7. To preserve these, characters 6 and 7 were kept unchanged in the resulting FSG version. Currier 6 usually corresponds to K in FSG, while 7 was transcribed as K or 8 by the FSG team.
I added a few “end of line” – and “end of paragraph” = marks where missing to keep line lengths equal between versions. …

According to the website voynich.nu, it uses the form of a transcription issued by “Jacques Guy and Jim Reeds .. in January 1992”..

Modern writers tend to associate it chiefly with Islamic manuscripts – e.g.

the overwhelming majority of parchment quires in Arabic manuscripts consist of quinions (i.e. five bifolia, ten leaves).

• Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (2009) p.212.
• François Déroche, Islamic Codicology: An Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in Arabic Script (2006) – the standard reference.
• Élise Franssen, ‘What was there in a Mamlūk amīr’s library? Evidence from a 15th-century manuscript ’,  Ch.15 in  Yuval Ben-Bassat (ed.), Developing Perspectives in Mamluk History. Essays in Honor of Amalia Levanoni, Leiden, Brill, p. 311-332.

However, they are also characteristic of Irish manuscripts.

The standard for Irish medieval manuscripts was the quinion, or five sheets of parchment folded to make a gathering of ten leaves or twenty pages.

• T M Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (2000).
• Robert K. Ritner, Egyptians in Ireland: a question of Coptic Peregrinations’. (pamphlet) Rice University Studies, 62, no. 2 (1976).[pdf]
• Gregory Telepneff, The Egyptian Desert in the Irish Bogs: The Byzantine Character of Early Celtic Monasticism (2003)
• C.M., ‘Coptic influence in the Early British Church’, StGeorge Orthodox Ministry, (20th. January 2018)
• In an English manuscript (Brit.Lib. Harley MS 80) the fourth quire, of paper, is a quinion.

Codicologists who have no involvement in the study of Beinecke MS 408 rarely so much as mention the quinion if their subject is the Latin codex. It doesn’t appear at at all (for example) in  Mathisen’s chapter on Palaeography and Codicology, though when summarising the codex’ historical development, he says in connection with the last centuries bc:

By the first century bce, parchment codex notebooks were being used, like codices made from wax tablets, for rough drafts, keeping accounts, and so on. In the following century, the codex came into increasing use as a means of copying literary works. Each group of folded pages with a common internal fold is known as a ‘quire’ or ‘gathering’. Early codices were of a single-quire format, but the bigger the book, the more clumsy this method was; fatter books were liable to crack at the spine, and the outer pages had to be much wider than the inner ones. Thus, it was eventually found more practical to bind several quires into books of whatever length one desired. The sixteen-page length, the ‘quaternion’ (tetrad¯es in Greek), made from four folded sheets, became standard; although one also encounters quires of other sizes, ranging from binions (two sheets) and ternions (three sheets) on up. Beginning in late antiquity, the bottom of the last page of each quire was often marked with a sequential quire number, or ‘signature’, for example, ‘Q III’, or ‘the third quaternion’. These numbers facilitated binding, and also are very helpful in reassembling books that have come apart or survive only in a fragmentary state. (pp.133-134.)

• Ralph W. Mathisen, ‘Palaeography and Codicology’, Part II, Ch.7 of  Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (2008)  (pp. 140-168).
• review by : Kenneth B. Steinhauser for Church History and Religious Culture, Vol.90 Nos 2-13 (2010) pp.345-493

The information from the sources above are reinforced by an important palimpsest from Mount Sinai, which shows that quinions were still employed in Syriac manuscripts shortly before the time of the Islamic conquests.  This codex is known as the ‘Syriac Galen Palimpsest or SGP.  Beneath its tenth-century Christian text lies a  sixth-century copy of Galen’s work on drugs.    Kessel and Smelova write:

It was established that the original manuscript must have consisted of at least 22 quinions, 14 of which have survived in full or in part. The parchment is folded flesh side in, and thus each quire begins and ends with the hair side. As it was possible to recognise two quire signatures in Syriac numerals – waw for quire six (see illustration 1) and tēt for quire nine, it could be deduced that three quires were missing from the beginning of the manuscript and that the preserved text starts with quire four.

• [pdf] Grigory Kessel and Natalia Smelova, ‘Sinai Syriac manuscripts in exile’

This is another telling point, for (as Beit-Arié has noted), the standard Latin practice was to have the flesh side outermost – though an exception is offered by quires in  Brit.Lib. Harley MS 80′.

Beit-Arié’s comments on the quinion provide more detail and more nuance than  other sources:

The quinion composition was the standard composition in the Middle East (in all Semitic manuscripts) and in Italy in all the dated [Jewish] manuscripts, which comprise around a third of all the dated Hebrew manuscripts. Nor are the several sizes of senion composition, which was the secondary composition used in Hebrew manuscripts in zones of Sefardic book culture (and was common among Latin parchment manuscripts in the 13th and 14th centuries, see below n. 48) consistent with the assumption that quires were created by folding the sheet. Collette Sirat proposes that the odd (quinion – five folios) composition of the early non-Hebrew codex quires written in the Orient were suitable for papyrus, which was rolled into a scroll after its manufacture, and then cut into any number of sheets,.“

to which he adds (note 48)

48 For examples of manuscripts localised in the Orient and Italy and inscribed by immigrants who continued to employ the script of their country of origin for many years but whose book craft reflects – entirely or at least partially – the practices of the region in which they were active, see Beit-Arié, Hebrew Codicology, pp. 104-109.  MS Oxford, Corpus Christi College 133 is to my mind the most instructive illustration of the problematic and complicated nature of Hebrew codicology and palaeography, due to the unique mobility of the Jewish people. This manuscript, inscribed in the early, square and semi-cursive Ashkenazic script, is a copy of a prayer book whose unique text version is presumably descended from the custom of French Jewry, used by the Jews of England before their expulsion in the twelfth century. On two pages which were left blank (fols. 349v and 350r) numerous records were added attesting to payments received from prominent Christians from all over England (be it Bath, Norwich, Exeter or Winchester), half of which had been identified as having been active at the end of the twelfth century. Most unexpectedly, the records — inscribed no doubt by a moneylender who was manuscript’s owners at around 1200 C.E. — were in Judaeo-Arabic in a Sefardic (Andalusian) cursive script! The Sefardic owner of the prayer book noted that his records included מא כאין לי מן די אנא הונא פי אנגלטירה (‘all that I own since being here in England’. See Beit-Arié, Makings, p. 138 (translation and transliteration of the document by Ephraim Wust), pp. 147-148 (plates of the records); Beit-Arié, English appendix (identification of the local English notables by Zefira Anton-Rokéah).

• M. Beit-Arié, Hebrew Codicology: Historical and Comparative Typology of Hebrew Medieval Codices based on the Documentation of the Extant Dated Manuscripts Using a Quantitative Approach (Preprint internet English version 0.1)  [link includes pdf for the English summary and Hebrew text. Another pdf link here]

There seems little doubt that use of the quinion and larger gatherings originated in the eastern Mediterranean and became part of the western Mediterranean and insular traditions only by direct connection to the eastern side, occurring in Irish manuscripts and in Jewish and Arabic works.

Here, one is again reminded of the extraordinary precision of Erwin Panofsky’s evaluation of the manuscript in 1932.  He not only dated it accurately (1410-1420-1430), but identified Jewish and Islamic influences in it.  Since he was apparently never asked to write a paper, or to elaborate, we cannot know what exactly informed his judgement, but the presence of quinions and larger gatherings may have been a factor.

• Javier del Barco, The Late Medieval Hebrew Book in the Western Mediterranean: Hebrew Manuscripts and Incunabula in Context (Brill. 2015). Explores “the production, circulation, transmission, and consumption of Hebrew texts in the western Mediterranean (mainly Iberia, Provence, and Italy) between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries”

• Brit.Lib. Egerton MS 747,  Dated to c.1280-1350 Made in southern Italy (possibly Salerno), its first nine senions (ff.. 1-108) contain a copy of the Tractatis de herbis believed an autograph by the author ofthat work, Bartholomæus Mini de Senis (ff.1-106r) and three folios showing images of plants, these continuing into the first side of the following quire, a quaternion (ff. 106v-109r), the remainder being occupied by a lunar calendar (f. 111r) and text in a mid-14thC Gothic cursive hand. Then follow three more senions (quires xi-xiii; ff. 112-147) containing practical medicinal-pharmaceutical texts including the Antidotarium Nicolai ( ff. 112r-124v) and a Synonyma (ff. 128v-146r:).

This recalls Beit-Arié’s comment that:

” senion composition … was the secondary composition used in Hebrew manuscripts in zones of Sefardic book culture (and was common among Latin parchment manuscripts in the 13th and 14th centuries)”.

The table above shows the senion  also characteristic of Armenian works from that time.

But there are no senions in the Voynich manuscript.

Codicology can not only lend weight to a proposed provence; it can also argue against it.

Elsewhere, Beit-Arié defines more exactly what he means by  “Sefardic book culture” (see ‘details’ following) saying, among other things,

Thus, all the surviving dated códices iocalised in Siciiy, which was under the rule of the Crown of Aragón since 1282, show Sefardic physiognomy and should be regarded as an offshoot of the Spanish entity. Likewise, the Iberian type of book spread beyond the Peninsula and across the Pyrenees.

• M. Beit-Arié, ‘Colophoned Hebrew Manuscripts Produced in Spain and the Distribution of the Localised Codices’, Signo 6 (1999) pp.161-178, [pdf]

The structure of the The Missal of Cardinal Angelo Acciaiuoli (1402-1405) Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 30 offers an example in proof of Beit-Arié’s comment about Italian manuscripts (quoted above, under Quinions):

The codicological structure is highly regular. Most quires consist of five bifolios (quinions). The exceptions are quire 1 (six bifolios [a senion] common in Calendars), and quires 15 and 30, each comprising a single bifolio (fols. 131-132 and fols. 273-274 respectively).

One example of a senion in a late fifteenth-century German manuscript is provided by Codex Germanicus 6,  described as “a personal notebook, in Middle High German, dated to 1450. Codicologists have noted that  its “25th quire is very likely to have initially been a senion, but appears in the bound manuscript as a 7-bifolium quire” (p.128) – in other words, a septenion(!)

• Ira Rabin, Oliver Hahn, and Mirjam Geissbühler, ‘Combining Codicology and X-Ray Spectrometry to Unveil the History of Production of Codex germanicus 6’ [pdf]

• e.g.  illustration in ‘A Chinese-Tibetan bilingual Buddhist manuscript‘, International Dunhuang Project (blogpost Nov. 20th., 2015).
• Peter Francis Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Brill: 1998) p.43.

It might also be as well to recall  Sirat’s comment (quoted earlier), though it was made in a different context, because  Georg Baresch evidently believed the manuscript  a copy of matter which was – in some sense –  ancient and ‘Egyptian’.

Another possibility is that the fold-outs are copies to vellum of content from rolls or scrolls.

• Harvard Medieval Scrolls Archive. – includes recommended readings and comprehensive bibliography.