Water, earth and air

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The reason I challenged Stolfi is that he advocates a cosmology featuring waters above—as described in Genesis—a view that is anachronistic given the Aristotelian understanding of the universe, which was already commonplace by the 15th century.

What people believed at the time is not important.  What matters is that the diagram from Oresme's book, which is being proposed as the source of f68v3, depicted the Biblical (not Aristotelian) cosmology: without the sphere of fire and separate spheres for the planets, and instead with the "vault of the sky" separating the stars and planets from the "waters above".

The diagram of f68v3 closely matches the Biblical cosmology of that Oresme diagram, except that the cloud-band was turned into that "thick nebuly line", and eight "spiral arms" were added, crossing the "vault of the sky".  

Until we find another version of the Biblical cosmology with similar "spiral arms", we must assume that these were an invention of the Author.  If that is true, we should conclude that it was the Author (not the Scribe) who chose the hypothetical Oresme-like source and determined that the rest of the diagram should be copied from it.    In any case, it must have been the Author who defined all the Voynichese text in that diagram. 

All the best, --stolfi