Was the VMS artist a fan of Michael Scot?

[Pierre Dumont Himself]

Wasn't literacy the norm among middle class people? Any one of them could have "picked up a notebook" (acquired parchment) and "started writing." In the 16th century, the Friulian miller Menocchio was burned at the stake for his religious writings. In the seventeenth century, the cobbler Hans Heberle wrote his Chronicle of the Times (Zeytregister) after witnessing a comet. 
From the introduction to Dana Sajdi's "The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant": 

This book arises from a footnote—note 13 on page 188 of Tarif Khalidi’s book Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period—upon which I chanced more than a decade and a half ago. Envious of the feats of modern European historiography, which had managed famously to uncover the history and reconstruct the worldview of the sixteenth-century Friulian miller, Menocchio, I set out to retrieve “commoners” from the history of the medieval Levant (by which I mean Bilād al-Shām—thearea covering the present day states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel, (see Map 1). Individuals wiser than me warned of the monumental obstacles ahead: our main (perhaps only) sources for the medieval period are histories written by `ulamā’ (singular,`ālim, scholars of religion,who are equivalent to today’s academics), largely about themselves and for themselves. The social historian, then, is left with only one textual window to the social history of the medieval past, and it is a window with a very limited aperture. Obstinately, and all-too-naïvely, I decided to prove that“`ulamology” could not possibly be “almost all the social history that wewill ever have.” I spent a year canvassing the historiographical productionof medieval Levantine `ulamā’ in the hope of delivering up the commoners,but to no avail. I was in a state of dejection when I chanced upon footnote 13, which mentions “‘popular’ historiography [by] . . . the 18th-centuryDamascene barber or the 18th-century South Lebanon farmer al-Rukaynī. ”Barber historian! Farmer historian! I immediately resolved to desist, once and for all, from lamenting the irretrievability of medieval Arabic-Islamic commoners—and from indulging in bouts of “source envy” of the European historians—and switched to eighteenth-century Ottoman Levantine history. Here, I discovered that the Damascene barber and South Lebanon farmer(s) were not the only commoner or unusual authors to write contemporary history; such chronicles were also written in the eighteenth-century Levant by a couple of soldiers, by a court clerk, by Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests, by a Samaritan scribe, and by a merchant.
While I was conducting my research on these histories, there was an extraordinary occurrence: a serendipitous discovery of the original and unique manuscript of the chronicle of the aforementioned Damascene barber: Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Budayr (fl. 1762). The version that I—and the rest of the field—had been using is one bowdlerized and significantly altered in language and content by a scholar in the late nineteenth century. Given that Ibn Budayr’s chronicle is the only one in Arabic-Islamic history known to have been composed by a barber, the discovery was most auspicious. I had finally found my Menocchio, or his Arabic-speaking Muslim counterpart.

All this happened in the Ottoman Empire, where the literacy rate was less than 5%, perhaps only half of that, and functional literacy barely existed. Yet even in this context, it was not unusual to find elaborate works written by commoners, and one can only wonder how many similar manuscripts were lost. 
What makes the VM unique is that the community that wrote it also produced their own parchment (from about 10-11 sheep, iirc). None of the writers mentioned above is known to have attempted such a feat. Who and how many people could have done it in early fifteenth-century Italy or southern Germany? How many modern people have made their own notebook?