116v

[N._N.]

Sorry, but this is clearly a misleading oversiplification. Everything we know about the manuscript, every kind of reasonable research reveals connections or information that we may not yet be able to piece together, but which might ultimately help getting closer to a solution, whatever that might be.

Perfect, but where does this contradict what I wrote?  Why was it a "misleading oversimplification"?

Unless I missunderstood your point, this is:

Again, the "Northern Italy" clues only tell us that the Scribe(s) who actually wrote the text on the parchment and drew the illustrations was/were from Northern Italy.  The "Southern Germany/Augsburg/Prague" clues only tell us about where the manuscript may have been ~200 years after that.  The similarities of the Michitonese lines and month names to specific scripts and languages, like German or Latin charms, only tell us what language the person(s) who wrote those bits meant to write them in.  

First, there are elements indicating the region north of the alps for the manuscript itself, but you know that anyway and it is not really my point.

Isolating the clusters of information (i. e., regional, temporal, on language, on expenditure...) to the degree you seem to suggest here is an oversimplification, because we know there had to be connecting elements. Someone had to bring the manuscript from the place of origin to whichever library(/ies) or  collection(s) stored it for the following 200 years and then to Prague. There has to be a reason why the information on these transfers was lost at some point, be it by coincidence or on purpose. We have to combine the historical, scientific, linguistic etc. data to come to reasonable conclusions. This is explicitly or implicitly done all the time, for example, when dismissing the identification of 93r with a sunflower.

Additionally, it is also misleading to characterize the knowledge about the writing as limited to what the author(s) "meant" to write, in terms of language or anything else. With today's possibilities in terms of technology, comparative material and general knowledge, we can identify aspects that the author(s) were unaware they would reveal. See, for example, the project by Koen G and Marco P on this particular folio.

Lastly, I strongly disagree with this aspect as well:

As I wrote before, I believe that the reason why no progress was made in the decipherment of the text in 600 years is that everybody jumped to the wrong conclusions about the language and contents, precisely because they tacitly but wrongly assumed that a certain mountain of evidence that has been collected was relevant to those questions.

This implies the VMS would require more creative, outside-the-box thinking that mostly ignores the historical evidence. However, there is certainly no lack of this kind of works, on the contrary. What you are suggesting here is exactly the approach of all the numerous people who claim they have solved the cipher and bring their 'deciphered' texts here, to youtube or even the odd overly credulous university website... The by far best work on the manuscript has been done by working within the boundaries that historical and statistical evidence set.