Water, earth and air

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It doesn't seem like a good start to say that it doesn't matter what people of the time thought.

I meant that the VMS Author could well have chosen to use the "Biblical" cosmology even though it would not be the "consensus view" of scholars of the time.  Just as he used "months" of uniform 30 days (or 2 x 15 days) in the Zodiac, instead of the 28/30/31 schema that everybody used.

The claim is not that the VMS figure was based on Oresme's conception of the cosmos.  He surely was aware of the Aristotelian model too.  The claim is that it was copied from a specific figure of some copy of Oresme's book that depicts the "Biblical" model.

It is highly unlikely that folio f68v3 is a copy or that its authors drew inspiration from Oresme’s cosmos (BNF Fr. 565, fol. 23). This last illustration does not feature a conventional T-O map; instead, we see the lower half of the Earth covered in water—reflecting the view held by Oresme and the educated public in general. The T-O map on that page of the Voynich manuscript, however, appears to be a conventional map of the three known continents.

 
Conventional T-O maps usually have the undivided half-circle (representing Asia) at the top.  The VMS "T-O Map" is not  like that; is oriented exactly like Oresme's map, with the undivided half-circle at the bottom.

Note that the lines of the T are straight, whereas in Oresme they are curved to simulate sphericity.

On some copies of Oresme's book, the dividing lines of that diagram are straight.  Like the one in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

The spiral arms visible on folio f68v3 of the Voynich manuscript are a simple graphic device used to simulate motion. This is what misled Newbold into believing they represented the Andromeda galaxy. But it does not originate with the Voynich. There are other medieval examples, such as one cited on ReneZ's page.

There is only one comparable historical source for this structure - [Anania] Shirakatsi's Eight Phases of the Moon. We may never know how that structure made it into the VMs, but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Thanks @R.Sale, I had missed that reference! 

That Shirakatsi diagram does not have much resemblance to f68v3 other than the eight curved "spokes" with writing along them.  The center is a simple circle, without the T-O division, starry sphere, and cloud-band.  And the arms are curved in the opposite sense. 

But, still, that Shirakatsi diagram could have been the source for the curved arms of f68v3. 

That raises the intriguing possibility that the VMS Author was Armenian, not Western European.   That could explain why the language of the month names in the Zodiac are so hard to identify, and why he chose to invent the Voynichese script from scratch instead of using Latin letters. 

My faithful Lalamo claims that 80% of the manuscripts produced in 15th century Armenia are on paper, but 20% are on parchment -- which could be calf, sheep, or goat skin.  

So Beinecke MS 408 could have been scribed in Armenia, and could have had Armenian owners for 100-150 years after that...

All the best, --stolfi