What happened between the manufacturing of the MS and Baresch?

[ReneZ]

To me the whole Rudolph thing has unreliable narrator and questionable source written all over it. But anything goes in specilation.

Skepticism is a healthy attitude, but the natural next step is to take a closer look.

There are two sources involved. The first is Marci.

All those things that Marci writes in his letter that could be verified until now, turn out to be correct. He is a reliable source.

The second source is Raphael. He was speaking about the MS between 1626 and 1636. 1636 is also the year in which Barschius sent his transcriptions to Kircher. Raphael wrote a book in the style of Trithemius. He was interested in secret writing. He was deeply interested in alchemy. He wrote in a letter of 1630 that he was familiar with the MSs of Rudolf, both in characters and in cipher.
He was a highly intelligent, very knowledgeable person who spoke many languages.
He is a very reliable source.

One cannot just wave this off.

Note that this is described in quite some detail in the book "Alchemy and Rudolf II", edited by I.Purs and V.Karpenko, Artefactum, Praha 2011, pp. 297-314. This is unfortunately available only in Czech, but an English edition is undergoing final proofs as we speak. I have no idea when it will be available for sale. Hopefully this year still. I attach the Czech table of contents, which includes a sufficient number of familiar names to give a good impression of the interest of the book.