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APPENDIX A CHAPTER-LENGTHS AND PAGE-DISPOSITIONS OF THE LOST MANUSCRIPT
The following chart displays both the quiring and the chapter-divisions of Thynne's source manuscript as I reconstruct it in the essay. Line-counts (labelled "# of lines in chapter") represent the number of Th-lines (lines of type one column wide on a two-column page) per chapter of Thynne's printing of the Testament. Page-counts, however, represent the number of manuscript pages per chapter (defining the two sides of a leaf each as a manuscript page) in my reconstruction of Thynne's manuscript source. (Appendix B provides further details on the reconstructed quiring, and remarks on alternative arrangements considered in arriving at the description offered here. Appendix C provides amplified description of Thynne's treatment of chapter-initials and chapter-divisions.)
Chapters are not numbered in Thynne's printing, but indicated (sometimes incorrectly) only by their featured initial letters. I have retained the roman chapter numbers of Skeat (Sk) for ease of reference, substituting arabic numbers only at those places in Book III where my reconstruction differs from his: chapter 4 below is a redivision of Skeat's iv; 5 and 6 designate the reconstructed and re-ordered fifth and sixth chapters (corresponding only in part to Skeat's vi and v respectively, since their boundaries as well as sequence differ in my reconstruction). Under "Comments" I correlate my chapter divisions, explained in the essay, with Skeat's division and sequence, and with the six displaced segments of text (DS 1, DS 2, etc.) he posits; I also indicate Thynne's misdivisions of chapters in Book II where they occur, in chapters x and xi. Preceding the reconstructed chapter-numbers in the chart are the corrected chapter-initials; the signatory acrostic may be read vertically; initials falling on the hair-side of a manuscript leaf in this reconstructed quiring are italicized.
To achieve line-counts usable in reconstructing chapter-lengths in the lost manuscript, I have silently added fractional printed lines to create whole lines, and expressed the total to the nearest .5 of a Th-line, at those few chapter-endings that Thynne set in double hanging-indent format (chapters ending in this way are indicated with an asterisk; see Appendix C for details.) I have not, however, similarly adjusted the line-counts of each chapter to allow for the volume of text-space occupied by Thynne's decorative chapter initials, because their manuscript counterparts also consumed an indeterminable proportion of text-block space. Thynne's printed initials at their most ornate (Prologue, II.i) occupy a little less than 3 full lines of text-space; the next largest (at I.i) consumes 1.25 lines; the next (at III.i) one line. Of the remainder, the 3-line-high letters (or the space for them), four in all, occupy about .7 of a line, the 2-line-high initials about .3 of a line (21 are of this size); the rest of the acrostic-initials are represented simply by textface capitals. These encroachments into text-space are so negligible and infrequent that they have simply been excluded from my specifications of chapter lengths: accuracy to three lines or less is unattainable in reconstructing from printed text the volume of prose text spanning several scribal pages, and unnecessary
In the sixth and seventh columns of the chart I indicate the number of pages each chapter occupied in the manuscript, as I reconstruct it, and the way in which the chapter was divided between quires wherever it continued past the end of one. For the latter situation I specify the leaves of the next quire occupied by the chapter- continuation before noting the occurrence of the next chapter-initial.
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