Speculative fraud hypothesis

[dexdex]

And why he took the pain to unbind and then rearrange and rebind the manuscript, cutting out leaves, adding new quire marks... a lot of evidence better explained by a manuscript with a long history.

It also leaves open the big question of how the text was created, with all its baffling statistical properties.

Here's a silly idea, incorporating the oriental ideas to my hypothesis: a con artist really did go somewhere oriental or met someone oriental, maybe even learned a few medicinal tricks. He then starts selling his knowledge; then, he stumbled on the idea of creating a manuscript, starting with a simple bifolio or two. He poorly mimics how an oriental language sounded to him with a simple system of word generation. Why? Perhaps he also had a system to 'read it' aloud and sound plausibly oriental.

It starts working well; and around him, quack medics with entire herbals abound, as attested to by Toresella. So he then mimics entire genres of manuscript with his nonsense words, though rather poorly, since they don't need to be that ornate to fool people coming for aid. Perhaps he hires or receives help from others: the point is not for the book to be good, but pass cursory inspection with people who might be interested, be undecipherable, and long enough to suggest mountains of knowledge. The sections naturally vary in quality, since he's familiar with herbals foremost. As a result, you have a somewhat logical sequence of events of an iteratively created tome with the properties we see.

I think this is wildly improbable and the inclusion of the oriental influence is completely unnecessary - the word generation is more likely to mimic oriental languages by pure accident in my mind. But still, a fun idea