I will post more about this when I have read through what I copied.
A first glance suggests to me that this kind of renaissance humanist
production is the background to the VMS and not the late mediaeval
stuff I studied at university.
Excellent, thanks - really looking forward to seeing what you post. :-)
Perhaps I should also say why I'm [suddenly] so interested in Giovanni
Fontana... it's hard to pin it down exactly, but it's to do with a feeling
of his having been in the right place at the right time - kind of "cut from
the same cloth" as the VMS' author.
OK: I'll freely admit that I don't currently think that Fontana wrote the
Voynich - to my eyes, the differences (between the hands and the drawings)
are too great, and (AIUI) it's pretty certain that Fontana's manuscripts
are his own.
However, I'll predict that, as we understand more about Fontana, we will
increasingly find strong echoes of his work in the VMS, in curiously
resonant ways. Perhaps the two authors met... or the VMS' author was
informed by Fontana's writings - or perhaps they just shared a very similar
intellectual climate.
It may be no coincidence that Fontana lived in Padua, home of the Palazzo
della Ragione (containing the zodiac frescoes we've discussed recently).
Even if I'm completely wrong, understanding more about Fontana's cipher
might well help us to empathise with the whole cipher mindset in 15th
Century Italy. Interesting times... :-)