Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

Logically, your argument can be extended anytime all the way up to the modern day. Anyone at any point after 1597 could have learnt old handwriting, decided to create the marginalia around the Nostradamus quartet, sourced ancient vellum, etc.
If we extend the logic (including the motive for why based upon the provenance and history of the manuscript as established by Rene Z.), then we end up with Rich SantaColuma's "Voynich faked it for cash in the modern era" theory.

I was thinking the same thing, David.

As soon as someone uses the argument that the VMS mimics old styles of handwriting and that it was written on vellum that had been sitting around for two centuries, it pretty much opens to the door to saying it was created any time up to the present day (and not specifically in 1600).

JKP, your comment implies that you completely misunderstand my theories. I am not claiming that the VMS was written around 1600 on vellum two centuries old. It makes sense that the VMS would have been written soon after the making of the parchment, circa 1420. It is only the marginalia that was written around 1600 with the purpose of explaining how to go about decoding the manuscript.

In general, I view forgery theories as no more credible than theories that the VMS was written by aliens. Indeed, I saw a new alien theory on sci.lang just yesterday. Chances for either forgery or aliens having any validity are zilch. The root cause of forgery and alien theories is the same: the general inability of scholars to say anything sensible and believable regarding the origin and history of the VMS as well as their inability to decode the meaning of its glyphs.

But all that is changing now. With help from the marginalia, it is only a matter of time before someone, perhaps someone from China or Japan, successfully undertakes a second decoding of the VMS whereupon the forgery and alien theories will collapse.