[split] Did the VM go straight from cerebellum to vellum?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

While agree that it was likely standard at the time to do such practices of writing on paper and transferring to vellum later, we simply can't use that assumption as any definitive evidence for the actual construction of the VMS.

It is not 100% certain, of course.  But it should be a default assumption -- both because of statistics and of the costs of mistakes.  It is the "brain-to-vellum" hypothesis that needs good evidence.

Using that logic, [we should assume] many different practices were standard at the time, such as simple substitution ciphers.

Indeed, and anyone learning of the VMS for the first time would be justified in assuming that the text was in Latin or some other European language,  with a substitution cipher.  We don't make that assumption any more, because that possibility was disproved long ago.

In fact, given the sheer WEIRDNESS of the VMS, I would argue that the author seemed in ways to actively shun the conventions of the time.

Yes, and I myself have been urging people to not make the mistake of assuming the VMS is X -- like, being written with iron-gall ink -- just because most surviving manuscripts are X.

But claims that the VMS is Y instead of the standard X require at least some evidence.  Just because the VMS is known to deviate from the norm in some aspects, we cannot conclude that it must deviate in X too.

How does the hypothesis of multiple scribes account for the fact that we have numerous pieces of evidence to indicate the "scribes" also illustrated the drawings on the pages, often with the same pen in the same session?

Good question... 

Here is what I find hard to beleive: (1)The Author created an extremely unique uncrackable encryption scheme or language which likely took much thought to even design/figure out.

I don't believe that, either.

The Author wrote an entire Proto-VMS, for some reason to encode some meaningful information, using this scheme they designed. This included all the illustrations too(?)

Yes, the Author must have written a draft of the book first.  Like practically every book writer has done, ever.  Logic and internal evidence support that.

The draft must have contained some sketches of the illustrations.  My guess is that the drawings of Pharma (excluding the jars) are straight copies of the Author's sketches.  He must have  made crude hand sketches of the Cosmo diagrams and the organs in Bio (but without the nymphs).  As for the Herbal figures, my guess is that only the text and some details (like the roots) came from the Author's draft, while the rest was invented by the Scribe, with "inspiration" from other Herbal books.

Then, The Author taught 1-5 additional people how to write in their system, enough that they could reasonably correct mistakes in the original Proto-VMS, know how to rearrange words or sentences that are crossed out.

No, I don't think so.  The Author definitely trained the Scribe(s) to copy the alphabet.  But there  is some evidence that the Scribe(s) could not read the text. 

how would the scribes know how to correct mistakes without understanding the underlying system?

Well, they didn't.  Unless the Author noticed the mistake while he could still ask the Scribe(s) to fix them.

Then, the scribe(s) copied the entire Proto-VMS, including illustrations, and drew them often in the same session with the same pen.

Yes, that is how it would have worked if the Author could only afford to hire and train one Scribe at a time.

Why are the illustrations so seemingly crude if so much preparation went into even the drawings?

 

While the Scribe was able to write neat small letters with a quill, he apparently had little experience scribing books, and zero experience drawing figures.  He did not use scored guide lines for margins and baselines, and had no notion of perspective drawing (not even the little that artists and professional scribes grasped at the time).  He knew how to use the compass, but could not even divide a circle into four equal parts. I guess that his experience was limited to writing letters and other mundane documents; not even contracts or deeds.

It is pretty clear that the Author was not rich.  The vellum is of very poor quality -- "factory rejects" -- and he tried to use every bit of it, even pages that were undersize or missing a corner.  Thus he probably could not afford to hire a good professional scribe or "scribing factory".

Also, in my view, the decorative elements in the illustrations were not important to the Author, thus he did not care if a few nymphs were missing arms, or if the Scribe got tired of tubs and found more interesting things to draw on them.  And I suspect that the Author created the Herbal section with the format we see, with mostly fake plant drawings, only because he had tried to sell his book of of exotic medical and astrological knowledge, but found that no one would buy it because everybody in Europe expected a herbal to have full-plant figures and that format.

To me, this feels like a rather elaborate explanation to explain 2 anomalous things about the VMS: ... If these 2 things can be explained in a simpler way with the hypothesis of The Author being the only scribe/illustrator, writing in a custom personal script, directly on vellum, with no draft, over the course of years, I'm inclined to think that's an overall simpler explanation which requires less assumptions.

But unfortunately both logic and internal evidence broadly contradict "Author = Scribe", and thus "Direct Brain to Vellum".    And neither of those 2 things is certain...

All the best, --stolfi