[Movie] Is the Voynich Manuscript an Elaborate Medieval Hoax?

[Koen G]

The video is well-made and researched, but I find his conclusions a bit quick sometimes. For example, he assumes the MS was owned by Rudolf without question, and assumes the alleged price was correct as well. Then he goes on to say that since the MS was sold to Rudolf for so much, it must have fetched a similarly high amount when it was originally sold for a similarly handsome price. This feels like a few assumptions too many. 

Let's assume the MS was indeed purchased by Rudolf at some point. This would have been almost two centuries after the VM was made. It is well possible that Rudolf's combination of wealth, status, reputation, interests and readiness to spend good money was the first time ever someone was willing and able to pay good money for the MS. It says nothing at all of what the original maker could have hoped to get for it in his own context. And let especially the perceived value of things be highly dependent on context.

He also argues (with some passion) that the VM is ugly and hence it was made quickly. I think this is a flawed argument in my opinion. There is an astonishing amount of attention to detail in some of the plant drawings. And there are so many of them. If one really wanted to make something just with the intention of making a quick fortune, why make so much? Why draw a full one hundred and twenty-nine pages with different large plant drawings? Why not stop at, say, fifty? Additionally, it is really the atrocious paint job that gives the images a sloppy look. With the paint removed, the plant drawings would look okay. So why paint it, even though painting is clearly not your forte and would likely reduce the perceived value of your work? Why write so much text, and why add so many pages with just text? And so on.

The argument of "no corrections" is obviously also flawed. We can't read the script and we don't know which variations in glyph shape are meaningful. Who knows how many times one shape has been turned into another. Or maybe mistakes are simply left in, or maybe they swiftly copied from a prepared example. As long as we don't understand the text, I don't think a perceived lack of mistakes can be used as an argument.

The best argument he used in favor of medieval hoax is probably that the text's statistics point away from simple substitution. If the text is encoded, they must have used a method unknown to medieval times. And still unknown to us. This is definitely something to keep in mind. But there is a flaw in that argument as well: if the text was generated, this was done by an equally unknown method! So why would we assume that the VM makers could come up with a novel and highly efficient method of pseudo-text generation, and not a novel encoding method?