The Voynich Ninja

(06-11-2025, 07:05 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Bacon's authorship determined this price. Not the book's later history.

But the book's later history was central to his belief and/or arguments for the Bacon authorship.  As you reported in great detail, he did spend quite a bit of effort tracking down that history.  Including investigating the doings of Dee and Kelley, Rudolf, Jacobus, and other people in Rudolf's court.

Without Marci's letter and Raphael's comment in it, Voynich would never have suspected that it could be a Bacon manuscript (or imagined that he could pass that book for one).  It would be just a manuscript with bizarre cipher and illustrations, written on poor quality vellum, with poor handwriting and poor artistic skills.  He may even not have bought the VMS in the first place.  Even if he did, most likely the VMS would have been again sitting at the bottom of a box somewhere, and its existence would be known only to a couple of librarians, at best...

The late history of the manuscript is not important for me.  That is not why I am hacking at the puzzle, and I am convinced (like everybody today, I hope) that, whether Rudolf bought it or not, the Bacon story was just a colossal misunderstanding or scam, and what happened to the VMS between 1600 and 1930 (including a possible bookA/bookB switch) does not give us any clue as to its origin and contents.  

But it matters to me a lot whether the VMS is a genuine "work of love" from ~1420 or a forgery from ~1920, because the possibilities for its  "language" and "encryption" are vastly different in the two cases.  Thus, while I think that a recent forgery is very unlikey, I would like to see good evidence against it.  Better than just "Voynich would not have dared/bothered/thought of doing that".  

And I don't see what is the relevance of him having made a good deal of money with other books.  Except that it shows that he probably had enough money for hiring a forger or finding whatever else it took -- a stack of "13th century" blank vellum, a copy of Jacobus's ex-libris, a suitable "book B"...  Possibly more spare money than all of us and the BL put together...

All the best, --stolfi

(06-11-2025, 09:59 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the book's later history was central to his belief and/or arguments for the Bacon authorship.  As you reported in great detail, he did spend quite a bit of effort tracking down that history.  Including investigating the doings of Dee and Kelley, Rudolf, Jacobus, and other people in Rudolf's court.

The evidence suggests that it was the other way around, sort of. He was boasting a Bacon origin as from 1912.  Then, as late as 1915 he was arguing that the Rudolf in the letter was Rudolf I, who was a contemporary of Bacon, who died in 1291, and _NOT_ Rudolf II. 

So yes, he read the name Bacon and the name Rudolf in the letter before that, but he only started to dig into that part of history after he realised it was Rudolf II of Prague, not Rudolf I.
Apparently, that happened around 1918-1919.

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See also here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(06-11-2025, 10:42 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[Voynich] was boasting a Bacon origin as from 1912.  Then, as late as 1915 he was arguing that the Rudolf in the letter was Rudolf I, who was a contemporary of Bacon, who died in 1291, and _NOT_ Rudolf II.  So yes, he read the name Bacon and the name Rudolf in the letter before that, but he only started to dig into that part of history after he realised it was Rudolf II of Prague, not Rudolf I.  Apparently, that happened around 1918-1919.

Thanks for the clarification, Rene.  But does that rule out this alternative history?

1. (1911) Voynich gets hold of the Marci letter, somehow, somewhere. (He lied man times about that, so we can't tell, can we?)  All he can see in the letter is "Bacon", the rest being obfuscated by the glare of imagined gold.

2. But the book mentioned in the letter (book A) is not available.  Or, to his great disappointment, the book attached to the letter (book C) turns out to be a camel owner's manual in Tiffinagh, with a few drawings of plants that are good or bad camel food, crude diagrams for camel breeding,  or something like that. 

3. Still in 1911-1912 he (or someone in his behalf) searches Kircher's Carteggio and other likely places, in the hope of finding the missing book A.  Or hoping that book A was not book C, and the latter was attached to the letter by mistake after Kircher's death. 

4. In that early search, he gets copies of Baresch's letters.  But no book A.

5. Still, he decides to use Marci's letter to sell some "Bacon" book to some gullible millionaire.   Somehow he gets (or, less likely, forges) another manuscript (book B, the one at BL now) that looks like 13th century and fits the description in Marci's and Baresch's letters.  And attaches Marci's letter to it.  His initial story is that the book was bought by Rudolf the First, almost directly from Bacon.

6. Prospective buyers are not convinced that the book he is offering is the book mentioned by Marci.  And besides tell him that the "Rudolf" of Marci's letter could not be Rudolf I but must be Rudolf II.  

7. Thus, by 1918-1919, Voynich starts looking for evidence that would support an alternative story, where the book is bought by Rudolf II instead.  

And from then on it is as I wrote before.

So, what evidence is there that breaks this alternative theory?

All the best, --stolfi

(06-11-2025, 07:05 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.May I point out that all the guessing and second-guessing about what would have been a natural or likely course of action, that is included in the last more than a dozen posts, amounts to zero evidence?

But we are all working with the exact same evidence, and we are all guessing. Speculation is not unique to any one theory... I mean, it is not as though 1420 Genuine is based on facts, and 1910 Forgery, or even 1550 Medincinal, are ignore the known facts and consist of pure conjecture. The known facts allow for different interpretations. 

Quote:Voynich could have....
Voynich should have...
Yes, also: Kircher would have...

It is all entirely subjective and means nothing.

Yes, and likewise I could state that 1420 Genuine, one could say, "Voynich could have found the VMs in the Mondragone, and bought it, Voynich should not have lied about the origins, nor removed the labels, and should have seen the Marci letter, and Kircher would have written back a clear description of it", and so on and so forth..." Again, all theories are subjective, and any plausible ones work with the available facts... your theory, mine, others. 

Quote:Most people here are interested in the MS as a historic item.

I think many people... actually I know this for a fact, are VERY interested in whether or not the Voynich is a real item or not. Many are upset by the idea, I understand that, but they still want to know. But it is interesting that you phrase it that way, because I agree: There are many who are interest IF it is an historic item (well I think a modern forgery would be 'historic', also, but I know what you mean by that: That 'historic' means a genuine ancient item in your context), and would be disinterested if it turned out to be a modern fake. Fakes don't interest some... they are cheap, dirty, unethical... negative connotations.

But it is what it is, whatever that is, and one should not worry about what people want to be, only what is in the end. If they are upset, or uninterested in any particular outcome, we can't let that direct our investigation. 

Quote:Voynich was not. For him it was business. All his books were objects that he wanted to sell at as good a price as possible. Bacon's authorship determined this price. Not the book's later history.  
They were also his, i.e. his possessions. He would remove and dismantle bindings, and make annotations on their pages. That is not specific for Voynich, by the way.

Agreed. But also, it shows what we all realize: Voynich was quite familar WITH bindings, and covers, and so on. Small, related point here: It is accepted that the current covers (I think, 17th century?) are more modern than the leaves. A case of an anachronism, which is dismissed as "added later". It is one of a great many cases in which anachronisms are dismissed if they could have been added or changed; but if inherent to the book, and cannot have been added, then they said to not what they seem to be, they must be something else, or coincidence, or pareidolia. That is, anachronistic evidence should be used to help determine age, meaning and origin, but in this case, it never is).

Quote:These are recorded facts: he had the MS in 1912 (read Sowerby), and he just knew a few names from the letter as late as 1915-1918 and actually misunderstood the identity of the key people.
Furthermore, he became interested in the history of the MS only as late as 1919-1921.
I will follow my own advice and not start any speculation whether any of this is unusual, why he changed his mind, etc etc.
Not even what this implies about the probability that he created this letter in the first place.

In this you remind me that I ought to write a post about a certain "habit" of Voynich's, which I touched on relating to one particular case: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which by its structure and wording... and spelling (!!!), smacks of being totally disingenuous to me. This same pattern was repeated him for his "Bacon Cipher", and also used for the "Lost Chart of Magellan", the "Columbus Miniature", the "Boy Sketch", the Lives of the Martyrs illustrations, and other works... He would appear to not understand something about the work in front of him, then request some expert(s) "help him" understand it for him. Then, he would use the response from that expert to advertise his work for sale.

But this deserves its own post, outlining this curious behavior, and my proposed motivations for him using it. 
 

Quote:One of the most remarkable aspects of the fake theory is a story that has now been posted here twice, if I have seen it correctly, namely Voynich's proposed visit to the Mondragone, where he would have been given the entire Kircher correspondence to take home for a while. Entirely hypothetical, and without any form of evidence.

Yet it tells me that Rich realises that this would have been necessary.

You misunderstand the nature of that line of reasoning on my part. But first of all, the "given the entire Kircher correspondence to take home for a while" is not the only, nor my most plausible scenario... you have gone through those and straight to the most "sensational" one, in order to make all this seem more unlikely. I've also outline several more "tame" possibles in which he was made aware of the contents, or they were taken out for him to see, or he was let in. But yes, that is one scenario I propose... it was actually much more acceptable and common in the past for collections to allow items to be removed for examination... books, letters, other resources. It is probably only because of repeated abuses... copying of them, addedums added, parts removed and even parts placed... that gradually we come to today, in which you turn in your cameras, and pens, and sit ridgedly with the curators behind you, in their institution, with a their eyes boring a hole in the back of your head. You should read "The Map Thief".

Anyway, back to my point about your misunderstanding of my delving into the accessibility of the Carteggio, and the conclusions I came to: You and others had, as a "protection" for the authenticity and age of the Voynich, had LONG claimed various versions of "It would have been impossible for Voynich to see or know of the contents of the Carteggio". Done and dusted, nothing to see here, folks. The phrase you used for some time was that the Letters were "Under lock and seal". There were... are, actually... many variations on this claim.

So in the desire for completeness, and not ignore nor dismiss evidence to the contrary of modern forgery, I looked into the issue. I will and would have accepted if I were wrong, but I don't want to make claims which I cannot backup... and if Voynich truely could not have known of the descriptions in those letters... if it were not just speculation, with no basis, I would want to know that.

And it turns out, the "lock and seal" claim has no factual basis, and actually, the opposite is perfectly possible and plausible. I explained the reasoning for this, and the facts I use, in my post, "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.". And yes, I do realize that, as said, while the Voynich bears little resemblance TO the descriptions of the letters, it seems that it may have used them as a seed, to claim provenance.

That was the purpose of my inquiry into this: NOT to support modern forgery, as much to examine, and verify or dismiss, a MAJOR claim against it. As it turned out, it was dismissed. We both know that is a very important aspect of the Voynich story line... that is, you realize it as much as I do. 

Quote:Also, that he was dealing with the Jesuits (which we knew anyway). At this time, he was securing the acquisition of some of their manuscripts, which he would be able to sell at a great profit. 

These 30 or so manuscripts are never mentioned in the frame of the fake theory, perhaps because they basically destroy Voynich's main possible motivation, and drastically reduce the time frame for the creation of such a fake.

OK, but I do sometimes mention those other books. But unlike you, I don't at all find them relevant to the fake/genuine issue. We all know he bought and sold many books, all book dealers do. It does not at all give an indication of any other possible creation or sales of forgeries.

Quote:The fake theory does not provide a timeline, but he could have only started considering making a fake illegible MS after seeing the Barschius letter (if he did). This timeline would therefore be extremely challenging.

But I absolutely DO give a timeline, and it is not at all "challenging". I remember you similarly claimed, at one time, that my theory would "need a time machine" to work. But this claim can only be through some misunderstanding of what the elements of my theory are, and the timeline I do propose. Here it is, again: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The timeline of my theory fits all known facts.

I could, however, counter that, in case after case, trying to fit the known facts of 1420 Genuine... at least, based on the descriptions of the Carteggio, and the 1665/66 Marci letter, do not make sense. This is apparent constantly, and even in this very thread, in which these problems have been discussed at length, and not resolved. Things like "why didn't they describe the signature" (and all the other mentioned features) if book A was B; why did Marci wait until his last letter to mention the Bacon and other rumors? Why didn't Voynich see the letter in his Ugly Duckling? Let alone the anachronistic content, such as the modern foldouts, which no 1420 scribe should have known about. And so many more cases, which absolutely would have required a time machine to explain.

For my theory, the order is simple, and clear: Buy the Libreria in 1908, learn of the Letters through De Sepi, see or receive the descriptions of a weird cipher herbal, create or have created the Voynich between 1908 and 1910, show it around before 1910, reorder and edit it by 1911, show it privately in 1911, announce it to the world in 1912, create (or have created for him) the later Marci letter and claim to have not seen it, inquire about various aspects of both ("Raffieal who??" "Tophat who??? (Rudolf who???"), lecture on it AS a Bacon, brought to Rudolf by Dee by 1921 (when he knew that was not correct), leave a letter for Ethel by the time of his death in 1930. There are obiously many other facts which can be inserted in that simplified timeline, but they do fit without any alteration. 

Quote:Voynich had made a blanket offer of 100 US dollars for each MS that the Jesuits would sell him (although he may have paid more for the first few - I don't know that).

100 dollars in 1911-1912 is quite a lot of money, but he sold his first two already early 1912 for a combined 60,000 US dollars, and he was offering others for 150,000 US dollars, more than he even asked (later) for the Voynich MS. This was a huge deal and it is not a stretch of the imagination that this must have been the foremost thing on his mind.

Again, and superfluously, all this is only secondary to the question of the authenticity of the MS.

Yes, I agree it does not relate. It is very interesting, and part of an overall picture, and very interesting in its own right, but most of his other sales and activities do not affect the issue of genuine/forgery.

(06-11-2025, 07:05 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.May I point out that all the guessing and second-guessing about what would have been a natural or likely course of action, that is included in the last more than a dozen posts, amounts to zero evidence?

Voynich could have....
Voynich should have...
Yes, also: Kircher would have...

It is all entirely subjective and means nothing.

I think your dedication to the theory that it is an authentic 15th century creation has caused you and many others to lose track of how little hard (i.e. objective) evidence there actually is, and how much of the story depends on subjective suppositions, speculations, and scenarios that just seem "plausible".

The only hard evidence there is amounts to:

1) C-14 dating
The C-14 dating shows that the parchment (some and "probably" all of it) came from animals that died in the early 1400's.  It is a supposition that the manuscript was therefore created shortly after. It is a subjective assessment that no one would store the resulting parchment for any significant period of time.  

Note: The McCrone chemical analysis from 2009 is often referred to as additional hard evidence. But it actual contributes basically nothing.  It could have presented "damning evidence", such as was the case with the Vinland Map showing components that simply weren't available till too late of a date. But it didn't, as you've noted. But it also didn't provide evidence that narrowed the materials back to the 15th century -- what it found was consistent with the time period including that century and several centuries after that (and consistent with what a potential late-era forger could have used for that matter.) Yet, that McCrone chemical analysis is often mentioned, around this forum and elsewhere, as hard evidence of why we "know" that the manuscript is from the 15th century. It isn't. -- Another good example of how people expand their favorite story to include non-facts as if they are indisputable evidence.

2) The Letters (of Marci, Baresch, Kircher, etc.)
The Marci letter and the others definitely exist and they all seem to legitimately cross-reference to some strange manuscript.  That much, and only that much, is definite -- that is the only 'hard evidence' aspect of The Letters. The rest of it -- specifically the critically important relevance of the letters' content to the VMS and whether they therefore tell us anything certain about the VMS at all-- is circumstantial.  (Some questions have been raised about the Marci letter that suggest a possibility that it was forged, and those should be given due consideration, but by and large, there is little doubt about the authenticity of all of those letters.) 

So the claim that the Marci letter was directly connected (physically and conceptually) to the VMS comes only from Wilfred's own words. One must "suppose" that he was telling the truth. (And, as we've discussed, there are reasons to be concerned about that since his story has curious inconsistencies. He was known to be loose with the truth and he had motivation to be so with the VMS.) After 1921 - after he died and the VMS made its way through various hands and into the Beinecke -- the fact that the letter and the VMS were physically together is meaningless -- there is no hard evidence to conclude that they were ever together before Wilfred himself touched them. It is a subjective evaluation whether his claims can be trusted and therefore whether the letter was ever even related to the VMS at all.  It is further a subjective evaluation as to whether the description of a document in those letters is sufficient to single out the VMS.  One can certainly argue that the description is referring to the VMS -- as is commonly done -- but then any inconsistencies with that claim have to be explained by yet further suppositions and guesswork. (e.g. my favorite: Baresch didn't make the obvious mention of the bathing ladies because it would have been indelicate to point out nudity.)
------

That's it. There is no other hard evidence -- and #2 becomes hard evidence only after accepting the multiple suppositions that Wilfred was honest, Marci's letter was authentic, AND the Baresch was describing the VMS.  

(Let me say in advance, if I have indeed forgotten -- and I might have-- to mention some other particular piece of evidence that is actually "hard" evidence, the point remains -- the body of circumstantial inferencing, supposition, and guesswork that fills in all the blanks to any of the theories, including the most popular 15th century one, is vastly greater than the very short list of actual hard evidence.) 

Everything else related to the VMS including the swallowtail merlons; the period of the clothing in the drawings (good work Koen, by the way); whether the script is a cipher, meaningful text, or gibberish; and much much more) is all based on soft evidence that requires subjective assessments of available data. 

We could go on to list several pages of all the various observations and claims that are made about the VMS within the scope of 15th century theory, and why they are based on circumstantial evidence and subjective suppositions, but there's no need (or available time today to do so); anyone who is willing to look at it all objectively can surely recognize just how very few facts we actually "know". And thereby hopefully recognize how often (within this forum and elsewhere) people state things about the VMS as if they were established facts, when in reality those declarations are built on a Jenga stack of suppositions and speculations.

(06-11-2025, 06:02 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think your dedication to the theory that it is an authentic 15th century creation has caused you and many others to lose track of how little hard (i.e. objective) evidence there actually is, and how much of the story depends on subjective suppositions, speculations, and scenarios that just seem "plausible".

There is some tension between citing the scattershot early theories towards a date to undermine the hard evidence for a 15th Century dating and narrows back to the hard evidence to provide plausibility for a 20th Century dating. I'm sure that this will generate a long response explaining how you square those two modes, and it's not entirely impossible to do, but the tension remains nonetheless

If we read more relevant history, we will know more facts. Consider the VMs use of heraldry. The VMs artist built the structure for heraldic canting in the first three zodiac pages. From the modern perspective, however, the necessary artistic elements are unknown and unnamed and cannot be recognized without the historical, heraldic connection.

Despite the profusion of botanical pages, some of the VMs illustrations do seem to contain historical information, and much of it occurs after 1300 and matches with the parchment C-14 dates. At the same time, the VMs artist is not clear and demonstrative, but ambiguous and partly deceptive. The copy of a pictorial Earth would be another pictorial Earth, but not in the VMs cosmos. White Aries is clearly dualistic. Historical reference information was used by the artist, but it was also altered. Structure is maintained; so, it's still the same thing, but alternative variations in the visual elements were used to maximize the difference in appearance like the stars in comparative cosmic illustrations. This is why interpretations based too much on appearance are misdirected.

Clearly the artist for these VMs illustrations, knew a lot more 15th Century information than has been recognized by the first century of VMs investigation. Who is likely to possess that level of information? A person contemporary with the era 1400-1450 or someone later?

(06-11-2025, 06:02 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The McCrone chemical analysis from 2009 is often referred to as additional hard evidence. But it actual contributes basically nothing.  ... But it also didn't provide evidence that narrowed the materials back to the 15th century -- what it found was consistent with the time period including that century and several centuries after that (and consistent with what a potential late-era forger could have used for that matter.)

Yes.  Slightly correcting my previous summary of that report:

• The 20 minuscule samples that we collected must contain an unknown large number of non-crystalline substances (including possibly iron-gall ink) that our instruments are unable to detect or identify.  We did identify and approximately quantify the elements that each sample contained, but we could not identify the non-crystalline compounds, if any, that comprised those elements.  In particular, we can tell that the green paint contains copper, and the brown text ink contains iron and titanium, but neither of them in a crystalline form, so we have no idea of what those copper, iron, and titanium compounds are.  But we did find some crystalline substances in some samples, which we could in principle identify. In some of these, the structure of those crystals matched mineral pigments used at the time, such as azurite (blue). In others, out software said that the best matches to the crystal structure were some exotic minerals, such as palmierite, that were never used as pigments (including today) and cannot even be contamination from the environment.  We cannot explain those matches, but we don't dare question the software's output, even though you can see in the attached figures that the spectra are quite noisy.
  

PS. However, let me say that I do not think it is likely that the VMS is a modern forgery, or even an ancient one.  But I believe that there is plenty of internal evidence that (1) the color paints are not original and were probably applied many decades or centuries after the manuscript left the Author, and (2) the text and drawings were extensively restored, retouched, and even incremented at various times in the last 600 years.

(06-11-2025, 07:35 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(06-11-2025, 06:02 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think your dedication to the theory that it is an authentic 15th century creation has caused you and many others to lose track of how little hard (i.e. objective) evidence there actually is, and how much of the story depends on subjective suppositions, speculations, and scenarios that just seem "plausible".

There is some tension between citing the scattershot early theories towards a date to undermine the hard evidence for a 15th Century dating and narrows back to the hard evidence to provide plausibility for a 20th Century dating. I'm sure that this will generate a long response explaining how you square those two modes, and it's not entirely impossible to do, but the tension remains nonetheless

I'm not sure who you expect to generate a long response but to be clear, it wouldn't come from me because I have never tried to square those two modes. (Nor have I tried undermined any of the hard evidence where it actually exists.) My post above, from which you quoted, was only addressing the lengthy history of people on this forum (not just Rene by any means, but others too) overstating where hard evidence actually exists with the VMS, and of not recognizing the role of subjectivity in many of their own claims.  

It does seem from a few of your comments that you perceive some "scattershot" in Rich's arguments since they certainly do cover a lot of different angles and various proposed scenarios.  I can see that a little, though I don't find it all that distracting. It is just inevitable if one is trying to respond to a variety different comments and questions, which are themselves coming from different uncoordinated directions and counter-arguments.  I think you'll probably find much less of that in his blog series though.

(06-11-2025, 09:19 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.PS. However, let me say that I do not think it is likely that the VMS is a modern forgery, or even an ancient one.  But I believe that there is plenty of internal evidence that (1) the color paints are not original and were probably applied many decades or centuries after the manuscript left the Author, and (2) the text and drawings were extensively restored, retouched, and even incremented at various times in the last 600 years.

Come on, Jorge - that's pure speculation. Even if it does sound plausible

P.S. For the record, I have never myself gone to bat for any overall theory on the VMS. I just haven't seen evidence on any particular theory that rises to the level of "proof".