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2.There is no corresponding stub to provide a clue as to how stub (c) fitted into the structure. Its function could have been to help reinforce the join between folios 1 and 2 and/or to hold folios 1 and 2 in place.

3.The strip of paper which forms stub (a) and its mate is made up of two shorter strips pasted together end to end: the join occurs about two thirds of the way down. The chain-lines of both strips are horizontal in stub (a), but vertical in stubs (c) and (d).

The front endleaves before the seventeenth-century rebinding: hypothetical reconstruction

The front pastedown has no visible watermark, but is probably of the same paper as folios i-ii and could be conjoint with folio ii. The prominent vertical pleats at the center of the pastedown exactly match those of folios i-ii, showing that, like them, it was once a free-standing flyleaf before it was used as the pastedown in the seventeenth-century binding. Although the texture of stub (b) is thickened and coarsened by deposits of paste on both sides, it still seems to be conjoined at the top with folio i. Since the pastedown carries the signature of André Thevet (d. 1592), these three leaves and stub must date, at the latest, from the manuscript’s period in France during the sixteenth century and before the manuscript’s voyage to London in 1587, as implied by the dated inscription on folio ii verso.