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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

a person who could barely afford vellum, but who could create a paper draft

It is not that he could create a paper draft.  He must have done so.

Again, writing directly to vellum would cost more than writing a draft first; because big mistakes and changes of mind are unavoidable when writing a new book, and mistakes on vellum are hard to fix.  Possibly requiring discarding a half-filled bifolio.  Thus the fact that he was not rich only makes it more likely that he wrote a draft first.

Why would [such pauper] hire a very poor inexperienced scribe - basically wasting the money and jeopardizing the whole project - instead of just personally copying the MS on the vellum?

Because the vellum copy had to use small letters and a neat handwriting -- abilities that not everyone had.  Not using a scribe would have jeopardized the project more.

Moreover, copying a draft to vellum was a mechanical but slow task.  In this case, it included inventing and drawing all the decorative details, such as the thousand scallops in the big fold-out and the 360 stars nymphs hats hairdos in Zodiac.  I guess that each herbal page took about one hour to produce.  Although poor, the Author must have wanted to pay a scribe than do all that boring work himself.

And, just as the vellum was the best that he could afford, the Scribe was the best that he could afford.  

As far as I remember, initially you needed this to make the Chinese theory believable: the Scribe introduced European styles and imagery while interpreting an oriental draft.

No, I did not need "Author different from Scribe" for that.  In my "Chinese Theory", the Author was probably European, or at least not "Chinese" -- because he invented the alphabetic Voynichese script to record the "Chinese" source texts.   The draft was in Voynichese.  Therefore, even if he scribed the vellum himself, the fact that the styles and decoration are European still does not imply that the language and source material are European. 

That is, the "Author not Scribe Theory" is irrelevant for the "Chinese Theory".

But now with a full team of retracers trying to fix quickly fading details, maybe it's time to let the Scribe go?

The "Massive Retracing Theory" too is irrelevant for the "Chinese Theory".  The main restoration pass had little effect on the text itself, and on the drawings it at most changed a few secondary details.  The details added by later retracers, even the Boobs Retracer, did not make the drawings more or less "European".  

BTW, is it possible to find out what scribes would take per hour and compare with the price of the vellum?

Good question. 

I recall a quote that, adjusting by estimated cost of living, vellum would cost the equivalent of US$2 per folio.  But I don't know how that varies with size and quality. 

Transforming the skin of one calf or sheep into vellum requires tens of hours of hard manual labor.  Perhaps one can get 10 VMS-size folios out of that?  

The Scribe could have been a Starving Student, who may have charged a fraction of what a professional Scribe would.  Maybe less than US$1 per page?  It would help explain why the Scribe seemed so careless at times...

All the best, --stolfi