Ideas from a newbie

[Koen G]

Also then the question arises; how did Tepenecz get it? His name is on the manuscript so if Rudolf wasn't the owner, how did he get it?

First of all, I'm not saying that Rudolph did not own the MS. But I would rate the odds of him having really owned it lower than Rene does (we've had a discussion about that in some thread here before). 

It all comes down to whether or not Marci's tale was exaggerated. Rene argues that he was likely telling the truth, since he hasn't been known to lie about other things. On the other hand, I think that the whole Rudolph twist may have been an exaggeration on Marci's part, because his letter clearly had a persuasive intent. He wanted the great Kircher to study this book seriously and unravel its mysteries.

The fact that it has indeed been owned by de Tepenecz might actually explain how a possible exaggeration happened. Maybe the book was obtained by de Tepenecz for his own collection (which he had). People had other ways of obtaining books those days than inheriting them from Rudolph

But do you think it was a direct copy of other work or the authors did have other herbals/astronomical books and were inspired by those? Because that seems to make more sense to me. A direct copy of a larger lost set could be, but the code and "irrecognisable" plants do not seem to point to a direct copy?

I think it's a direct copy, and possibly the copyists didn't even know what they were copying, just like a human copy machine. That is a point most people find very hard to grasp: that it is possible that this book was manufactured without any intellectual input in the 15th century.  (As always, I add, with some minor exceptions.)

This happened all the time, and the Aratus manuscripts are a beautiful example of that. If the copyists knew  exactly what it was they were copying, they wouldn't give Eridanus a pair of breasts. You can even see the misconceptions evolve, for example in Hercules imagery. The constellation of Hercules was sometimes depicted fighting a serpent. He would then hold his lion cloth like a shield, the lion's face towards the serpent. In some cases, the copyist would draw the lion's face a bit too human-like, and in the next copy, you would see Hercules holding a human head.

Which, after a number of copies, by 1450, resulted in this beauty: Hercules bringing his own hostage as a shield to fight the serpent.

   

Now imagine that this picture is the only thing you have without any context, and without having access to other Hercules imagery. Something like that is the Voynich - in my opinion. It requires a lot of digging to get to its roots.