Voynich's anatomy

[JoJo_Jost]

On the other hand, it seems that the Church never objected to such books.  So that does not seem to be a plausible reason for the VMS being encrypted, nor for the presumed anatomical illustrations to be disguised as a spa travelogue.

Yes, that’s correct in principle, but we need to distinguish this a bit more precisely: Anatomy books themselves weren’t banned outright. Dissections of corpses also took place. The sensitive issue was “corpse theft and the opening of graves” when carried out on one’s own initiative.

So the danger lay less in owning such a book than in having produced one yourself and thereby coming under suspicion of having performed an “unauthorized” dissection.

The penalties for this were quite severe.