I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

[LisaFaginDavis]

I can't, of course. But given my decades of experience studying thousands of medieval manuscripts, I feel confident that my assessment is reliable.

Again, as I have often said, nearly anything is possible, but not everything is equally possible. 

Is it POSSIBLE that a modern forger could take the time and effort to meticulously create a manuscript such as the VMS with all of the consistent material elements and provenance recreations and fake documents that would fool everyone who has seen it? Sure. But it is significantly more likely that the manuscript is authentic. The number of people who have seen it in person is quite small, but I have never met anyone who has spent any significant amount of time with the manuscript who believes it is NOT an authentic medieval object. 

Is it POSSIBLE that the manuscript could have been written by one person writing at five different periods or under five different set of  conditions? Sure. But it is significantly more likely that it was five different people writing at the same time. The differences between the five hands are not indicative of one person getting older - the ductus, the way certain glyphs are formed, can be quite different from one to the other. No matter how old you are, the way you write certain letters is not going to change, in terms of stroke-sequence and morphology. If you write an [o] by starting at the bottom and going clockwise, you aren't suddenly going to start writing it by begining at the top and going counter-clockwise. Your handwriting might get sloppier or slant differently as you age, but that is not what we see in the VMS. 

Nearly anything is possible. But for a lot of reasons it is significantly more likely that the manuscript was created 600 years ago by five people working with low-end material using a writing system that is otherwise unattested for purposes still to be determined.