VMs: Personal Guess

["Bernd Neuner" <bernd.neuner@xxxxxx>]

Well, since I do not have anything useful to contribute, I might as well spend 
my time guessing :-) Anyway, here are my beliefs of the day:

When? 
15th century, I?d say, though I?m obviously not an expert. So I just go along with some of the list?s opinion leaders ;-)

Where?
I have no grounds to exclude any part of Europe, as the educated classes obviously had access
to similar sources all over the continent.

Who?
A dabbler, or rather an eclectic person, well versed in those topics depicted by the MS?s illustrations, and probably also in languages and ciphers ? Although I do not believe Edward Kelley is the author, the person I?m thinking of would probably share many of the characteristics  commonly attributed to him.

Language?
Probably based on Latin, since I assume the text might be the result of a one-way coding process. Accordingly, any existing text should do the trick, and there should have been large corpuses available in Latin.

Contents?
Completely arbitrary, whatever comes handy. Anything of sufficient size might serve as input for the one-way coding process.

Decipherable / hoax?
Hoax. I think the unknown author devised a way to produce pseudo-random text out of an existing document. Probably he spent some time on fine-tuning the procedure so that it would yield properties similar to a language he knew (prefix/suffix structure, word length etc.). Perhaps he first scrambled the source text by deleting/adding/transposing etc. and re-structured it by sorting and padding. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps ?

As for the exact procedure, it could be any combination of leaving out letters, padding, sorting, permutation, look-up tables, throwing the dice etc. There is a slight chance however, that we could discover the source text after having established the procedure with a certain reliability. An obvious approach would be the application of the suspected method to known texts, as the books of the bible ? or known herbals :-), followed by comparison of the results.

Cheers,

Bernd
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