No text, but a visual code

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Orem

Why do you call him "Orem"?  Is that how his name is rendered in Russian? (Like "Magalhães" is "Magellan" in English?)

You said that the visual form is part of this branch.

Sorry for the confusion.  Just to be clear, I disagree diametrically from Antonio in that I believe that the figures are mostly decoration provided by the Scribe with minimal input from the Author.   I believe that there is convincing evidence that many of the figures were (badly) copied from books that were circulating at the time, like the Balneis and Taccola's notebook.  That puts into question whether the illustrations could be a visual code, or at least raises that question for each specific figure or detail.

[The Scribe] could also copy the text with errors

Yes, unfortunately I think that this conclusion is unavoidable when one has tried to transcribe a significant part the manuscript, or considers the large number of single-use "weirdo" glyphs and words.  I discussed the possible sources of those errors in the proper threads.   A large fraction of errors makes decipherment harder, but not impossible.

and one of the owners was so foolish that he decided to rewrite the text in Latin

Only the text of f116v, and perhaps the top line of f17r.   And it was Latin script, yes, but the language was a mix of German and Latin, and half the words that he guessed were not valid in any language.  That has its thread, too.

Take a look at the [cloud-band] pattern from Orem. The VMS scribe/artist has no reason or opportunity to draw the same pattern. It’s easier for him to draw ordinary bulges. He has no need to put in effort, but that doesn’t mean he should cut corners everywhere.

That means he did not know that the cloud-band was a specific "graphical idiom" that had to be drawn in a specific way.  But when he got to the Big Fold-Out he apparently had been taught that point, because on the central rosette he drew a fairly "correct" cloud-band. 

For me, the question is how much of the f68v3 diagram was specified by the Author, and how much was "provided" by the Scribe.  

One possibility is that the Author gave the Oresme book to the Scribe and told him to copy that diagram, with some specific changes.  

Or perhaps the Author sketched crudely the diagram, copying some details from Oresme and modifying it according to his own ideas, and gave only that draft to the Scribe. In that draft, the could-band probably was just a single knobby line (the "nebuly line" of heraldry), and the Scribe mindlessly copied it as such before the Author could see the mistake.  

The changes determined by the Authormust have included the Voynichese text that should go in the three sectors of the "inverted  T-O map" and along the eight "spiral arms".  Maybe the "spiral arms" were his original idea, or maybe they were in his copy of Oresme's book. 

I proceed from the assumption that there is a diagram with planets nearby. If there is a relationship between the diagrams, then most likely, the Orem map is simply Earth.

There is a diagram with 12 "moons" with faces several pages earlier, on f67r2.  Those are depictions of the Earth's Moon, not of planets; because in the 1400s no one know that the planets were spheres.  Everybody assumed that they were mere points of light -- like the stars, only moving.

If f68v3 is indeed based on Oresme's diagram of the Universe, the central "inverted T-O map" does indeed represent the Earth -- but the sectors are not the three continents (Africa, Asia, Europe) as in the common TO-maps, but representations of the Biblical separation of dry land from the "waters below" and the creation of plants.

@Linda found matches in the shapes of the lakes. She published it in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

I saw a couple of such proposals, namely 

• Island of Lesbos (or route around it) = serpentine pipe of f77v, center east margin. 
  
• Lake of Garda = middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (rotated 90 degrees)
  

Frankly I cannot see any similarity in the first case.  In the second case, the only similarity is that both shapes have a long "handle" with a roundish "pan" at the end.  Not an uncommon shape...

All the best, --stolfi