Speculative fraud hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The Voynich is in the anti-goldilocks zone where it's not really that quality and wouldn't fetch a price worth the upfront effort, but it also has some care, time, resources and knowledge put into it.

Indeed, but there may be a third hypothesis: it may have been made to order from a Patron, and fully or partially made up because the Author could not otherwise provide what was expected.

If I can bore you again with my Chinese theory, here is what I think could have happened.  

The general premise of the theory is that the Author was a merchant or explorer who lived for several years in some East Asian land; long enough to learn the local language, but not enough to learn the local script.  He wanted to take back home some of the books he saw there, which were supposedly full of stuff unknown in Europe.  But copies in the local script would be useless, and he could not translate them into Latin or other European language because of many technical words that he could not understand or translate.  So he paid a local to read the books aloud while he took dictation in a script which he had invented for the purpose. He hoped that, back home, he could use his knowledge of the language to figure out the words he did not know.

He also made quick sketches of some illustrations from those books, having that same local helper read the labels aloud. In particular, he copied the main details of the Cosmo diagrams, the organs of Bio, the plant parts of Pharma; but he could not copy the full drawings of the Herbal, only the texts.

Back home he hired one or more Scribes to copy his notes to vel parchment and flesh out the illustrations, resulting in the VMS as we know it.

One problem with this theory is why would he want to make a vel parchment copy of his notes in the first place, and why would he go to the trouble of making up the plant drawings in the Herbal.  One possible explanation is that he had hoped to monetize his copying effort by selling the VMS to some scholar.  He may have thought that it would be easier to find a buyer if the book looked more like the herbals and Zodiac maps that Europeans were used to.  

Another possibility is that the Author, before or after returning to Europe, had promised to some Patron scholar that he would bring back books from that distant land -- and had described by mail the books, like  "a Herbal with 120 plants, mostly unknown in Europe; an Astronomical and Astrological treatise, a Pharmacological treatise with over 300 recipes, and a Medical treatise with internal organs etc.".  But his rough sketches and scribbled dictation notes would not satisfy the Patron, so he had to make a clean copy on vel parchment, flesh out the diagrams, and make up drawings for those "more than 120" herbal plants...

All the best, --jorge