Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It is commonly agreed today that 

• it is lacking many bifolia and two cut-out bifolia halves
  
• it may not have been bound originally
  
• quire and bifolia/page numbers were added later
  
• the current order of the quires and bifolia is not correct.
  
• there could have been more quires or bifolia, including title page
  

Yes, I believe those points and I believe most people here also believe them.

if it was meant to be a private handbook for the use of its author(s)

I don't think so.  A private handbook would not need nymphs, figurative Zodiac signs, and hundreds of "tombstones" on the cosmo and rosette diagrams, and would not use a separate page for each plant.  Maybe the Starred Parags pages were created with that purpose, but the rest was put on vellum to be shown, given, or sold to someone else.

The scribes must have been writing on the vellum by copying from drafts.

That is my belief, based on common sense arguments (fixing mistakes on vellum would be a pain, writing small letters on vellum was a skill that not everyone had, etc.) and on internal evidence that the Scribe(s) knew the alphabet but could not read the contents.

Was the author living when the draft was copied to vellum?

I think so, because the Scribes apparently knew the alphabet, so they probably were taught it by the Author.

were the drafts destroyed after completion of the original manuscript?

If they were not discarded by the Author himself, they almost surely were after his death.  There are records of many valuable paper manuscripts being lost because they were used as tinder on fireplaces and stoves.

Was the text abbreviated by the scribes?

We don't know for sure, but I believe that the Author may have told the scribes rules like "you can abbreviate aiin as am if you need to".  Because am is common at the end of lines, and I believe that the line breaks were chosen by the Scribe, not by the Author. 

Were the complete illustrations on the draft, or did the scribes add to them?

I believe that 80% of more of the illustrations, including all the nymphs and most parts of each plant, were provided by the Scribe.  At best, the author may have left notes "Put 30 nymphs and 30 stars on this page, with the following labels" or "copy the leaves and flowers of this plant from random pages of those books I gave you".

But few people here seem to share this belief.

Did the carbon dating narrow the “solutions space” for the manuscript?

Definitely. It excluded any origin theory that involves the Americas (no sunflowers or armadillos!) , and made it very unlikely that it could be a forgery created between the 1600s and early 1900s to look like a "Bacon Original" or whatever.

All the best, --stolfi