[Movie] Is the Voynich Manuscript an Elaborate Medieval Hoax?

[pfeaster]

So there you have another problem: if it is meant to look exotic ("Coptic", otherwise Egyptian or just exotic in general), then why the blond nymphs, European castle, European zodiac, references to familiar traditions...?

The blond nymphs, castle, and so forth may look distinctly European to us, but they might not have seemed that way to someone trying to contrive an "exotic" manuscript in the fifteenth century.  I suppose this would have depended on the person's range of experience with cultural materials from other parts of the world.  Someone who had only ever seen European manuscripts might have had a difficult time creating something that didn't look European simply by default.

Here's a puzzle that might be analogous: if you or I wanted to create a manuscript that we could pass off as the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, what distinctively Earthling cultural details would we consciously avoid so as not to give the deception away?