Fakery?

[oshfdk]

So far on the surface of it, the manuscript appears to be something a trickster fabricated in order to get into the deep pocket of a well heeled customer. I am not surprised. In those times, were not alchemists retained by those who wished to get even richer? Greed is infinite. Put another way, a fool and their money are soon parted. 

I have no hard proof, but it doesn't look like a hoax/fakery to me. The style is quite unique, the images have no clear parallels. Normally I would expect a fake mystic or alchemy book to be in some familiar style of a known book, but with a lot of gibberish on top. Having familiar alchemy symbols, etc. Even as little as a Latin inscription on the first page saying "from the secret diaries of Albertus Magnus" would make it much more valuable, I think.

This reminds me, when I was a child there was a shop, next to where we lived, selling arcane martial arts books. I suppose most of the books were created by some modern "trickster", starting with a couple of frames from a Bruce Lee blockbuster and extrapolating from there, inventing styles and techniques. However, for them to be successful, they needed to conform to some established style and lore. It is much easier to sell a book if you can persuade the buyer that it contains some specific material. VMS doesn't seem to offer much here. There are plants and stars and nymphs, but it's not obvious how all of this is connected. I haven't yet seen a single other manuscript that I could describe as "basically it's the same as VMS, but in Latin".

But again, I'm not a paleographer.