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

[ReneZ]

Please point me to that -- it sounds quite relevant.

I was not talking about the signatures, but about the body of the letters.

Here is an example of the handwriting of Marci. There are over 30 letters of him in the Kircher correspondence in this hand. Some of them specifically indicate that this is 'manu propria'.



Following is a clip of the letter that accompanied the Voynich MS, now in the Beinecke library:



This is clearly a completely different hand.

However, there is one letter in that collection that was sent one month later than the letter with the Voynich MS, which is also the one that Rich discussed on his blog. It looks like this:



This is the same hand as the letter with the Voynich MS. However, (as one can see from Rich's blog), the signature is in Marci's own hand. He had to use a scribe, because his own eyesight had already deteriorated too much. He could only sign his name.

A year later he composed his testament, and by this time he was blind, and could no longer sign that document himself. (This fact is written on the testament).

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Edit, just to add a brief summary.

Imagine a 1911 faker who wants to create a fake letter by Johannes Marcus Marci.
What handwriting should he use? If he was really good, and had a lot of time to research, he might be able to find some original Marci handwriting that he could copy.

How could he come up with a handwriting that matches the handwriting of a real letter that only surfaced in 1930, and was not by Marci but by a friend to whom he dictated?