A noob needs help: A lot of questions

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The single most informative source is Rene Zandbergen's site voynich.nu   
About parallels for the zodiac diagrams: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

By the way, Beinecke MS 255, cited by Sniezynska-Stolot via Rene, " is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at the Beinecke site.

While maybe it was not of "commercial" quality, it is too neat to be really a "notebook".  It looks more like a set of copies of other texts made for the owners' own use.   It was clearly written by several different "professional" or "semi-professional" scribes, with very different handwritings and conventions.  One scribe put the red sentence(?) marks in red ink, within the text and on the left margin, that I saw on other manuscripts of the time; they seem to have been a scribal standard, like black round item bullets on today's documents.  Another scribe instead used large black font on the head line of each parag.  Some wrote in two columns, some in one column...  Sometimes the scribe left blank spaces for figures that were never drawn.

Thirty years ago, the equivalent of that "notebook" would be a stack of photocopies of disparate articles and book chapters made by a grad student while researching his thesis

But I saw no astrological diagrams there.  Maybe they were in the other manuscript cited by Ewa, "Beinecke MSS 227", that Rene says it must be a typo and indeed does not seem to be there.

All the best, --stolfi