116v

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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.

Yes, I should have added that the physical properties of the parchment tell us where the parchment was made.  But only that.  It does not even tell us where the manuscript was written.  Parchment made in Europe must have been exported to many places outside Europe for use by Europeans stationed there, such as ambassadors, merchants, explorers, etc.

As for the properties of the ink, it is a more complicated issue, which I will save for another post.

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.

If the Scribe was not the Author (which I think is all but certain), the manuscript "changed hands" as soon as it was completed, when the Scribe delivered it to the Author.  Then there is a substantial probability that the Author moved to another city or country during his lifetime, and took the VMS with him.

Then it probably changed hands and location many times in the next 200 years.  Consider that, just within a few decades in the 1600s, it went from Jacobus (in Tepenecz) to Barschius (in Prague) to Marci (in Prague) to Kircher (in Rome).  If the VMS was indeed the "600 ducats" book, in a few decades before that it went from Widemann (in Augsburg) to Rudolf (in Vienna or Prague) and then to Jacobus. 

There has to be a reason why the information on these transfers was lost at some point, be it by coincidence or on purpose.

Sure there must be reasons.  But we must be aware that the locations where the VMS has been, even soon after it was made, have little bearing on the location where it was put to parchment; and this is not the same as the location where it was conceived and composed.

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.

I am not sure I get your point.  Again, the observable properties of the physical object generally tell us only about the Scribe and the scribing on the parchment, and about additions by later authors; not about the Author and the composition of the text (which must have been created first as a draft on paper).

[Your final comment] implies the VMS would require more creative, outside-the-box thinking that mostly ignores the historical evidence.

Indeed, I believe that.  Because the historical evidence that we have does not really imply anything about the authorship, language, contents, and encryption method.  The assumption that it does, which practically every non-crank Voynichologist has made, leads to a dead end: "The stats of the text say that it is natural language, and the historical and physical evidence implies that the language is European, but since the stats don't fit those of European languages or a simple encoding thereof, it must be some very complicated cipher."  My point is that the "implies" in this reasoning is a fatal logical error. 

by far best work on the manuscript has been done by working within the boundaries that historical and statistical evidence set.

Yes, there has been tons of very good work.  But what progress has resulted from it?  Has it led to the decipherment of a single word?  Or to any definite conclusion about the language and/or the "encryption" method?

All the best, --jorge