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

[pfeaster]

Actually, exactly this scenario happened to Athanasius Kircher a few hundred years later. Some of his students thought he was getting cocky, so they forged a letter in invented hieroglyphics, which he happily confirmed was genuine and translated for them. It was all nonsense, and Kircher was roundly shown up for the pompous fool he was.

On the subject of saleability as the motive for a hoax, do we know anything about what prices "real" manuscripts in other locally illegible scripts were fetching in fifteenth-century Europe?  Quoting from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on Kircher's forays into Egyptology:

Although the Vatican Library had assembled a large collection of Coptic manuscripts over the centuries, almost no one in seventeenth-century Rome was able to read them.

Kircher apparently had a Coptic-Arabic manuscript that he used to begin "unlocking" the language for his compatriots in the 1630s, but for some time before that, wouldn't a Coptic manuscript have been nearly as illegible in Rome as a Voynichese manuscript?  If there was any trade in Coptic manuscripts there during the fifteenth century or so, it might open a window on what people were then willing to pay for writings of exotic origin that were only potentially legible.  Or we could substitute any other language that was little-known in Rome at the time for Coptic.