Is the VM an autograph or copy?

[geoffreycaveney]

If the VMS was financed by a patron it certainly broadens who might have been involved in creating it.

True. A lot more possibilities, but then that would have exposed the system and potentially the content to a wider audience, a thing that it seems to me, they tried to avoid in the first place.
And that makes me wonder why a one-shot, why not reuse the system for more things? People tend to have more than one secret in their closets.

They did reuse the system for more things: herbal things, cosmological things, astrological things, bizarre story things, historical things, pharmaceutical things, etc. They just bound them all together in one big manuscript.

As Koen points out, most documents from such a remote historical time period have been lost. Somewhere out there, missing folio pages from the Voynich MS itself were presumably floating around at some point in time (unless they were deliberately destroyed for security reasons). But I don't think any of us are holding our breath waiting for the missing folio pages to be discovered in someone's archive. In all probability, they are lost and gone forever. And the same may be true for any other documents that happened to be written in this script, if they ever existed.

If it was indeed the creation of a single lord or family, that would restrict the number and distribution of such documents even more strictly and narrowly. How many families, even lofty noble families, still have historical archives maintained with personal documents and papers from the early 15th century? If it was English, for example, many of those records would have been deliberately destroyed when the nobility's possessions were ransacked in the English Civil War in the 17th century. In my research I come across reports of very prominent 14th and 15th century principals whose burial monuments were destroyed during this period. If even their graves did not survive, what hope was there for a handful of secret cipher documents to survive?