I think I've finally got that link proper, JKP. I clearly don't make my living tinkering with webpages.
I'm currently working on a project trying to put the Herbal B pages back in their original order, and part of this has involved looking at a lot of Herbal A pages that are mixed in with Herbal B pages in Quires 5~9. What has caught my attention are all the varieties of EVA=[p] (and to a lesser extent, EVA=[f]) embellished with dots and extra loops in many of the Herbal A pages. The embellishment of any loop with a dot only strengthens the already striking similarity to the "sling" surrounding Frederick III's AEIOU, which in his notebook has an almost identical looking dotted loop.
Just like I'm playing around with rearrangements of the Herbal B pages looking for a clear progression or theme, I wonder if all the Herbal A pages containing dotted loops can be rearranged to form a clear progression of some sort. For example, might f42r, with one dotted loop in a paragraph-initial EVA=[p], come right before a page containing two dotted loops? This is all speculation, and might not amount to anything, but I feel as though by trying to put the pages back in their original order, inter-folio patterns may become clearer. This is at least a step in the direction of the manuscript, or at least one section of it, coming into view as a coherent whole, with any references or connections to outside works that might exist (like Frederich III's AEIOU) easier to establish. I could really dream big and hope that this process could point us in the direction of a cipher key, but I've already speculated enough.
My wife is very much into Law of Attraction and similar "new agey" schools of inner transformation, all of which have their roots in Hermeticism and the Western Alchemical tradition, by way of New Thought and Transcendentalism. When I told her about HRE Frederick III's unexplained use of AEIOU as a sort of motto to mark all of his personal affects, along with the proposed meaning of
All of the world is under Austria's rule, her immediate response was, "Oh, so it was his mantra. His sigil. A manifestation tool he came up with." And this is basically what I think as well. In fact, my next dive down this rabbit hole will probably be to Google-translate transcripts of Frederick III's earliest travel diaries, and to look for early occult, alchemical, or possibly even Kabbalah-related works linking the five vowels of the Roman alphabet to other important sets of five, like the five classical elements, or the five points of the pentagram. (Funny how "pentagram" also means "string of five symbols" in computational linguistics nowadays.)
AEIOU, and Frederick III's use of it, is an interesting mystery in its own right, regardless of any connection to the VMs.
If I remember correctly, Disney's version of
Alice in Wonderland includes the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar repeatedly saying, and blowing as smoke clouds, the letters AEIOU, right before Alice encounters him. I reckon this is not only a reference to Frederick III's well-known mystery, but also the appearance of the string AEIOU in hornbooks, abecederia, and other didactic models for teaching children penmanship. After all, the main point of Alice in Wonderland is how abstract and confusing the highest levels education and the deepest levels of knowledge can get.