New Post: "I Do Listen to the Experts. Do YOU?"

[ReneZ]

The cases where we actually know everything about a manuscript's provenance are the extremes.

That the provenance of the Voynich MS should be bad is simply not true.
When people keep on stating that it has a bad provenance, it is only too easy to start to believe this.

The Marci letter, which is genuine beyond reasonable doubt, already takes it back all the way to the 17th century and mentions several owners. Several other pieces of evidence confirming and extending this have been found in the mean time.

This is clearly a problem for someone suggesting that the MS is a modern fake, so the chosen approach is to discredit this evidence and then claim that there is none. This discrediting is either by saying (without any supporting evidence) that the Marci letter is also a fake, and/or suggesting that the original MS in unreadable writing with drawings of herbs etc. etc. was lost, and a fake has been made to replace it. Also without supporting evidence of course.

Let's look at the Rohonc codex, which was mentioned  in another thread the other day.
This MS was found in a private library of a count that was donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
And that's it. There is no record when it entered the library, where it came from, who owned it before.
Nothing.

Now that is a case of bad or missing provenance.

And, indeed, this has led to a belief for over a hundred years that the Rohonc codex should be a fake.
Even a potential faker was identified - here also without evidence. He could have done it.