Hi everyone, new user, got interested in the Voynich manuscript recently as a result of watching Koen's Youtube videos 
I was wondering if anyone could point me to a source on the price of vellum in late medieval Central Europe? I have oscillated my thoughts on whether the manuscript is an authentic piece of writing or a hoax designed to be sold as an esoteric/mysterious text, and one of the things that I have been thinking about is the cost to manufacture it. We have about 240 surviving pages, but it was probably closer to ~270, and it was written on vellum with colored inks and includes the hands of multiple people, with many sources I can find online saying five people. Needless to say, assuming it was designed to be sold as a bit of fakery, this seems like a lot of work even if you assume everybody that was working on it was doing it for free.
Obviously we know that Rudolf II bought it for 600 ducats, which is an insane amount of money for a book, but that's at least 150 years after it was likely made, and I'm curious about what it likely would've cost the authors to make in the first place. My thinking is that if it had been made up by a group of broke university students or someone else looking to made a quick buck by copying a bunch of stuff that looks like a book (or a bunch of books) they'd seen earlier, they either wouldn't have had enough money to make it in the first place, or wouldn't have needed the money they could get by selling it, especially given how much you time and effort it must've cost to write all this stuff down in a way that it somewhat resembles a natural language or cipher. Anyways, thanks for the help, and I hope I haven't bothered your community with my silly question too much
I was wondering if anyone could point me to a source on the price of vellum in late medieval Central Europe? I have oscillated my thoughts on whether the manuscript is an authentic piece of writing or a hoax designed to be sold as an esoteric/mysterious text, and one of the things that I have been thinking about is the cost to manufacture it. We have about 240 surviving pages, but it was probably closer to ~270, and it was written on vellum with colored inks and includes the hands of multiple people, with many sources I can find online saying five people. Needless to say, assuming it was designed to be sold as a bit of fakery, this seems like a lot of work even if you assume everybody that was working on it was doing it for free.
Obviously we know that Rudolf II bought it for 600 ducats, which is an insane amount of money for a book, but that's at least 150 years after it was likely made, and I'm curious about what it likely would've cost the authors to make in the first place. My thinking is that if it had been made up by a group of broke university students or someone else looking to made a quick buck by copying a bunch of stuff that looks like a book (or a bunch of books) they'd seen earlier, they either wouldn't have had enough money to make it in the first place, or wouldn't have needed the money they could get by selling it, especially given how much you time and effort it must've cost to write all this stuff down in a way that it somewhat resembles a natural language or cipher. Anyways, thanks for the help, and I hope I haven't bothered your community with my silly question too much