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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I am wondering why up to seven people made an extensive manuscript and did not produce additional scripts using the same method. For me it seems to be a strange thing to develop a special language or code for only one piece.

There may have been multiple Scribes copying the thing to vellum.  But we have no reason to think that there more than one Author -- the person who devised the script, choose the contents, composed the text, recruited the Scribes, and got the book from them.  It is quite possible that he was also the single person who could read the book...

Over the last 600 years thousands -- if not millions -- of books have been destroyed by all sorts of disasters, burned for all sorts of reasons, lost, or just left to rot away.  

By the 1400s most writing in Europe was on paper, as opposed to vellum (calf or lamb skin), because it was cheaper.  Just for that reason, if there was other writing in Voynichese besides the VMS, it was more likely to be on paper.  But paper, like wood, will be literally eaten by mold in a matter of months, unless it is kept dry all the time.   

Paper was also great for kindling fires, packing bullets into guns, wrapping fish, etc.  Now, in an epoch without newspapers and paper towels, where would the kitchen maids, soldiers, and fishmongers get their paper from?

Thus only a very small fraction of the books that existed in the 1400s still exists today. The fraction is even smaller for short documents, booklets, letters.  And it is smaller still for books and documents without illustrations, or which people did not know were important -- for instance, because they could not read them. 

So, even if there were hundreds of documents and books in Voynichese in the 1400s, it would not be strange if the VMS was the only one which survived.

And only a fraction of the books and documents that did survive has been looked into.  Thousands of books have been sitting unopened for the last hundred years on shelves, closets, and trunks.  So maybe there are more document in Voynichese.  Maybe even a dictionary and grammar...

All the best, --stolfi