Speculative fraud hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

a travelling snake oil salesman could use such an artifact to bolster their credibility among marks, as a prop. After creation of such a prop, it could be reused, making for a much better return on investment.

It is a serious possibility.  IIRC Sergio Toresella, which Rene cited above, describes a cottage industry of such manuscripts that flourished somewhere in Northern Italy.  That was before the VMS carbon dating, though; I don't know whether the timeline would still work out.

But this is a variant of the "hoax" hypothesis, and thus shares its objections.  The main one being that while "impress someone" could be a plausible motivation for creating a fake book, it does not seem adequate to explain the creation of this book.  It looks like too much work spent on details that would not impress anyone.

The VMS is not actually a single book.  It is at least six separate books - Herbal, Pharma, Cosmo, Zodiac, Biological, and Starred Parags (StarPs) -- that have in common only the script, the "encoding", and the general handwriting and drafting style (nymphs, stars, scalloped fringes etc), but have very different contents and textual structure.  They even seem to have two different languages.  AFAIK no one has managed ti point out any strong link between the contents of these six books, except that some drawings in Pharma are almost identical to some details of Herbal. 

But while Herbal, Pharma, Biological, and Zodiac might have impressed the clients of a quack doctor, the patron of a pretend alchemist, or a generous buyer of exotic books, the StarPS section seems pure wasted work.  Even the Cosmo section would have left those marks nonplussed.  What was their point?

Moreover, only the Herbal section has acceptable quality to pass for a serious treatise. The other books look rather sloppy and skimpy.  I haven't seen any of Toresella's "achemical herbals"; are they like that?  Would you trust a doctor who gets his recipes and therapies from such a sloppy-looking book?

And then there is the question of why -- not how, but why -- would the author bother to invent a gibberish generator  whose output is so like a natural language by many statistics (which were not known at the time) and yet so unlike the languages that the marks might have known.

All the best, --jorge