The prisoner scenario: a though experiment

[oshfdk]

Scrap vellum for a hermit, or tiny pieces of vellum sneaked into prison, don't work because of the large foldout.

I agree that foldouts can be a problem. On the other hand if the author had no access to cutting tools (as a prisoner) maybe foldouts were born out of necessity when a larger piece of vellum was smuggled in by accident. Generally, since I think the vellum can be folded or bundled temporarily without any adverse effect, smuggling in or hiding a large piece might not be much harder than for normal bifolios. But working on a large piece without a proper desk could be harder and quickly hiding it when someone approaches will also be a problem.

One thing I vaguely remember is that someone who saw the manuscript in person described a certain hole in one of the folios that appeared created by deliberately rubbing the vellum rather than by cutting or by accident. Would make sense if the creator had no access to a knife and needed a hole of certain size or shape for some reason.

But the real problem is not that the text is unreadable.
It is the fact that this mysterious text is so consistent: consistent alphabet throughout, consistent words over 200 pages. This is not the result of some on-the-fly and without-much-preparation effort.

I'm only familiar with fictional(ized) accounts of prison life, but as far as I understand, if the potential punishment is severe people can execute complex plans which require very long term meticulous planning. Various successful prison escapes are a good example of these.

For example, let's imagine the prisoner was in for life or at least 20-30 years. The idea of making a manuscript only occurred on something like year 2 or 3 when the prisoner realized it was possible to obtain some vellum and make some inks and hide all of it, maybe then preparation of proper hiding and working spaces took years. And the actual writing was only possible on some special nights, say when the guards would be asleep after some celebrations and the moonlight was just right. Then the author would make sure everything is safe, would fetch a single bifolio, make the stale ink usable, and spend some 3-4 hours writing and an hour carefully hiding everything back and then there would be days or weeks to think about the next folio before the next writing session. Obviously, the author couldn't have any notes about the encoding system or any plaintext drafts, so the whole system should have been memorized, maybe the prisoner spent hours each day creating the text and enciphering it in her/his head so by the time of the next writing session it was possible to just put it on vellum relatively quickly. This means that the cipher itself could be quite complicated and require some nontrivial mental work and still compatible with the appearance of written down in one single stream.

Interestingly, while there are near copies of large plant images in the small plants section, I don't think there are many details like nymphs or other complex shapes that would be perfect internal copies in the manuscript, made by looking at a past folio and copying to the new folio. Maybe the nature of the images never called for this, or maybe the author never had the luxury of having more than 1 or 2 bifolios out at the same time.