Could incantations explain some of the problems of the Voynich Manuscript

[Jorge_Stolfi]

how strongly Bavarian is monosyllabic (today) and was already moving in that direction back then

Let me insist that one cannot assume that the pronunciation of Bavarian at the time matched the way it was written.  Consider English spelling: it often uses letters that have never been pronounced in English, just because medieval scribes adopted the spelling from Greek,Latin, Norman, whatever. 

Bavarian had German as the "high status" language, so it would be natural that Bavarian scribes used a spelling closer to the German than a strictly phonetic one.

So spoken Bavarian may well have been "mostly monosyllabic", as you say, already by the 1400s.  In fact, considering what is happening to Italian "dialects", I bet that in recent times the pronunciation of Bavarian became closer to that of German...

All the best, --stolfi