Expert Opinion

[proto57]

So I assume that it was a book, so that I come to the same parchment with the same age. I will disregard the leaflets.

Since the pages must have been blank for the drawings and text to have been applied, this should be obvious. A cleaning of the parchment is visible.

General impression. Heavily used, worn.

Now you have to explain to me why a book should be worn if it was previously blank. Have so many people actually picked it up to realise that it is empty? Or is that a coincidence or part of the forgery?

Now it's getting to be too many coincidences, and for a forgery he's long overshot the mark.

Whether the parchment according to C-14 is from around 1400 or 1500 has nothing to do with a forgery from around 1900. The only issue here is the age of the source material.

How do you describe the general impression of the book?

Hi Aga: I'm afraid I again don't fully understand what you mean about the various points you mention here. We do have a language barrier I think. But I'll try, and correct me if I misunderstood you:

"So I assume that it was a book, so that I come to the same parchment with the same age. I will disregard the leaflets."

I think you mean you agree with averaging the dates to reduce the 60-plus range, because you, too, believe it was made into a book in under ten years. Of course I disagree with this, for a couple of reasons: First of all, it is science done in reverse. Normally, one would take data resulting from a test, and use that to determine what the object might be. In this case, rather than thinking it was a genuine book, one may think that random aged parchment was used from stocks of old parchment, with no regard for the age. It would make sense, as C14 dating was far in the future.

Instead, what was done was to FIRST decide it was a book made from parchment all from one time, and to fit this desired result, the wide range of dates were combined and averaged in order to come up with a shorter time span than actually discovered.

"Since the pages must have been blank for the drawings and text to have been applied, this should be obvious. A cleaning of the parchment is visible. General impression. Heavily used, worn. Now you have to explain to me why a book should be worn if it was previously blank. Have so many people actually picked it up to realise that it is empty? Or is that a coincidence or part of the forgery?"

I think what you mean is that the Voynich pages look worn, so how can this be if, as I claim, the Voynich was written on old, blank, pages? First of all, I am not sure why you believe they are "worn", nor in what way you think they are worn. That being said, even if the pages ARE worn, then why is the ink and paints applied to these worn sheets NOT worn? I mean, even accepting your premise of worn pages, how would that happen without also wearing down the ink somehow? But in any case I don't know that the leaves are particularly worn in any way, more than might be expected for old, unused parchment. They do have scars, and also holes. I've heard the parchment described as both high quality, and of low quality, but can't recall claims it is "worn".

I think you mean by "A cleaning of the parchment is visible", that it "would be visible" if this were a palimpsest. That is true, if scraped off, and you would be correct. I have made the point, however, that there are chemical methods of bleaching off inks of some kinds, to reuse parchment. I think they still call it a "palimpsest" though, when that is done. That being said, I don't believe this is a palimpsest for various reasons... just old blank parchment, probably found by Wilfrid in the vast unkempt stocks of the Libreria Franceshini in 1908.



"Now it's getting to be too many coincidences, and for a forgery he's long overshot the mark."

Well we disagree, and of course that is fine. I see it differently, and that there are no coincidences needing resolution: He found piles of old parchment, he cut it down to make a fake book, he made the ink, and he went wild.

"Whether the parchment according to C-14 is from around 1400 or 1500 has nothing to do with a forgery from around 1900. The only issue here is the age of the source material."

I'm sorry, I don't understand that part at all. Well maybe parts of it: I do agree the source material is "about" early 15th century, but would rather not use the pre-averaged processed date range of 1404-1438, and instead use the actual test result range which is 60 or more years apart. And as I've noted, I agree there is an issue with the "age of the source material", as it does not match virtually all the expert opinions as to what was applied to it. That is a fact, no matter how one wants to remove those experts... the dates do not match the content on it. So "yes" it is an issue, but I disagree with you as to what that issue is.

"How do you describe the general impression of the book?"

Do you mean my own impression of it? I've only seen it in person twice, and those times behind glass. Different pages were opened each time. I thought, as others have reported, that it looked very bright and colorful for such an old manuscript. The script is surprisingly tiny, something not obvious when scanning the scans of it on your computer screen. It looks tight, and meticulous.

As for the content, I think is it amateurish, and seems to me more of a parody of an actual ancient manuscript... or bits of many of them thrown together... than any real one. And the general style of the figures... the women... looks cartoonish, like the Katzenjammer style artwork and their ilk. And as I've said before, while it exhibits some elements of more sophisticated artistic talents, such as perspective, it seems as though the illustrator was not good at it, and needed to copy examples of illustrations properly done. In my opinion, overall, I've come to think of this as a poor attempt to mimic what the creator thought a genuine medieval manuscript should, or could, look like, while adding in some of their own fantastical elements to make it more "exciting".

It looks like a really bad forgery to me, I mean. Even back when it looked "real", I found myself excusing its faults... you can see it in the things I've written and said. Even back in 2009, only two years after being introduced to it, I had begun to believe it was some sort of "fantasy document", and not "real" at all. It was actually ironic, because I was invited to speak in the ORF documentary mostly on the basis of my microscope identifications. Perhaps they wanted me to talk about this manuscript with real microscopes in it... but by the time I was being interviewed, I had come to believe it they were not real, only influence by real ones.

Anyway, I've drifted and become wordy, as is my habit and fault. Sorry. But that is my "general impression".

Rich.