Was the VMS artist a fan of Michael Scot?

[Bernd]

Although, do we know for certain that they made it themselves? Did parchment makers have different qualities available?

The bit we are missing is whether the Voynich MS is 'typical low-quality' or 'unusually low-quality'.

We don't know whether the book creators made it themselves - this is a hypothesis.

I asked the same question here in the vellum / parchment thread:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Lisa responded on quality:

I don't think the parchment was "scrap", I just think it was poorly made. Much depends on the health and age of the animals whose skin is used. Younger, healthier animals produce finer parchment. Old, sickly animals result in poor parchment

Parchment production is labor intensive. So answering which business (if any) commercially made parchment of such low quality and for what purpose seems crucial. The issue here is that quality correlates with age of the calf. The younger the better. But the younger the animal is slaughtered, the less meat it produces. So there is a trade-off between meat and hide production. Also the processing of diseased and naturally deceased animals was frowned upon for disease prevention. So from the livestock owner's perspective, the option was either to monetize a very young calf for vellum (sic), with little meat as by-product, or use an older one for meat if that was a priority - with low quality hide as by-product.

For the parchment maker, high quality vellum yielded higher revenue than bad quality parchment, but production would have to be dependent on supply and demand. Surely less care would be used in the treatment of a low quality source, but I had hoped that it was possible to determine if the VM parchment was, independent of the initial hide quality, product of professional or amateurish treatment.

However, Lisa argues that, while the quality of VM parchment is not unusually low for manuscripts, it is badly worn.

All of the parchment is of similar quality. There is no difference in quality from one section to another. And - to respond to an earlier comment - the parchment is so worn that it is nearly impossible to distinguish hair side from flesh side

It would be interesting if we could determine if this wear happened pre- or post binding which would help answer if the VM saw heavy use by its original owners or only by later ones who likely did not understand the content (as it was mis-bound).