We are very offtopic here, but to me, the elephant-in-the-room question is: Why parchment at all?
Paper would have been readily available in all but the most remote regions or confinement situations, cheaper and easier to work with. Why did the author choose this inferior calf parchment over paper?
In my opinion, parchment was purposely favored over paper for a specific reason. Maybe even the bad parchment, to give the VM a certain ancient and mysterious look. That doesn't mean it has to be a hoax, more of an art project, but I think the author wanted to create his own version of the source manuscripts he had seen. And those were on vellum. If you think about it, isn't the VM a persiflage of a richly illuminated manuscript collection? It appears to follow the typical scheme, containing a herbal, astronomical and astrological sections and a bit about apparent balneology cobbled together. Compiling such a collection from existing works wasn't unusual.
So I've been thinking recently, call it a hypothesis rather than a theory - what if the author had seen all those famous and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, was fascinated by the images, but could barely understand the content (and generally lacked common sense)? So he came up with the wild idea to re-create something similar for himself. His personal manuscript. For the sake of the look, not the content. He copies the imagery in his own weird style, but since he's unable to copy the text, he has to create some lorem ipsum to fill out the blanks and make it look like a proper manuscript. Not necessarily to deceive anyone, but for his own satisfaction. In his usual style, he copies glyphs he likes and makes up some on his own and somehow generates a mechanism for Voynichese. I admit it is pretty much insane to write Q20 for the looks, but this person certainly was special.
Why not a hoax?
Too long, way too much detail. The same effect could have been achieved with considerably less work. Which means the author probably wanted to create the VM like that, not because he had to in order to achieve a goal.
I am certainly not convinced by this, but I am not convinced by any other of the myriad of theories either. In any case, I don't think the VM was a practical tool to store and recall relevant information. As said, the imagery is unnecessarily large and detailed for someone who struggled to obtain quality writing material. The VM must have been created to look the way it does, not because the information it contains requires it to look like that. This probably also includes the parchment.
Paper would have been readily available in all but the most remote regions or confinement situations, cheaper and easier to work with. Why did the author choose this inferior calf parchment over paper?
In my opinion, parchment was purposely favored over paper for a specific reason. Maybe even the bad parchment, to give the VM a certain ancient and mysterious look. That doesn't mean it has to be a hoax, more of an art project, but I think the author wanted to create his own version of the source manuscripts he had seen. And those were on vellum. If you think about it, isn't the VM a persiflage of a richly illuminated manuscript collection? It appears to follow the typical scheme, containing a herbal, astronomical and astrological sections and a bit about apparent balneology cobbled together. Compiling such a collection from existing works wasn't unusual.
So I've been thinking recently, call it a hypothesis rather than a theory - what if the author had seen all those famous and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, was fascinated by the images, but could barely understand the content (and generally lacked common sense)? So he came up with the wild idea to re-create something similar for himself. His personal manuscript. For the sake of the look, not the content. He copies the imagery in his own weird style, but since he's unable to copy the text, he has to create some lorem ipsum to fill out the blanks and make it look like a proper manuscript. Not necessarily to deceive anyone, but for his own satisfaction. In his usual style, he copies glyphs he likes and makes up some on his own and somehow generates a mechanism for Voynichese. I admit it is pretty much insane to write Q20 for the looks, but this person certainly was special.
Why not a hoax?
Too long, way too much detail. The same effect could have been achieved with considerably less work. Which means the author probably wanted to create the VM like that, not because he had to in order to achieve a goal.
I am certainly not convinced by this, but I am not convinced by any other of the myriad of theories either. In any case, I don't think the VM was a practical tool to store and recall relevant information. As said, the imagery is unnecessarily large and detailed for someone who struggled to obtain quality writing material. The VM must have been created to look the way it does, not because the information it contains requires it to look like that. This probably also includes the parchment.