A Numeric Solution

[oshfdk]

I was wondering about someone like Baresch.  Keeping in mind that Baresch was looking at the manuscript 2 centuries after it was written and the common number system was closer to what we use today, I'm not surprised he was confused.  The amount of information he would have had available was miniscule.  Drinking mercury and leach treatments didn't help either.

I can't agree with your assessment of Baresch's knowledge on the matter.

While it's not impossible that there is a numeric solution to the MS and it has been suggested many times before (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), but visually I think the script is designed to look like text and I think medieval readers who don't know what this is would perceive it as some kind of text and not as strings of numbers.

Edit: by the way, the post I linked above mentions letter assignments for different digit-like shapes:
 "In Latin, all of the VMS “numeral” shapes can double as letters:

• The “7” that looks like a caret sometimes stood for “a”.
  
• The “8” often stood for “s” or “d”.
  
• The “9” symbol could be a number or a very common Latin abbreviation used at the beginnings and ends of words.
  
• In early medieval Latin texts, EVA-l (numeral “4”) was used as an abbreviation symbol, a convention that had mostly disappeared by the 15th century."