Ninety percent of the time forgeries are created to make money.
Creating something as out-of-left-field original as the VMS (rather than the kinds of manuscripts that could be reliably sold for good money) would not only be creatively and logistically difficult but would be a gamble.
As Emma pointed out, Voynich (and his wife) enlisted the help of many people in his efforts to solve it. Forgers tend to ask a "friend" (accomplice) to solve something that has been forged so they are not caught out.
There are simply too many earmarks for the possibility of forgery to be likely. You need the right inks, the right parchment, EXTENSIVE knowledge of medieval life and documents, knowledge of plants (yes, many of them are real and accurate), significant time, calligraphic skills, drawing skills, and as I already pointed out, significant time to work out the textual system (I'm guessing this process alone took several months) before committing it to parchment.
Do you think a forger would do something nonstandard like starting a series of zodiacs with Pisces instead of Aries? Do you think a forger would cut out pages of the document and forge letters from people in previous centuries about the cut pages? Would a forger draw cancer with double crayfish? There are clever forgers out there but imagination of this kind is not a common commodity.
Also, from a purely psychological/logistical point of view, if I were TOLD this were a forgery (if experts had determined it was so without yet knowing who did it), I wouldn't be looking at Voynich's handwriting (other than a quick check), I'd be looking at that of his wife, secretary, and other associates. He was too busy traveling and running a business to spend the many months or years it would require to create this manuscript.
Creating something as out-of-left-field original as the VMS (rather than the kinds of manuscripts that could be reliably sold for good money) would not only be creatively and logistically difficult but would be a gamble.
As Emma pointed out, Voynich (and his wife) enlisted the help of many people in his efforts to solve it. Forgers tend to ask a "friend" (accomplice) to solve something that has been forged so they are not caught out.
There are simply too many earmarks for the possibility of forgery to be likely. You need the right inks, the right parchment, EXTENSIVE knowledge of medieval life and documents, knowledge of plants (yes, many of them are real and accurate), significant time, calligraphic skills, drawing skills, and as I already pointed out, significant time to work out the textual system (I'm guessing this process alone took several months) before committing it to parchment.
Do you think a forger would do something nonstandard like starting a series of zodiacs with Pisces instead of Aries? Do you think a forger would cut out pages of the document and forge letters from people in previous centuries about the cut pages? Would a forger draw cancer with double crayfish? There are clever forgers out there but imagination of this kind is not a common commodity.
Also, from a purely psychological/logistical point of view, if I were TOLD this were a forgery (if experts had determined it was so without yet knowing who did it), I wouldn't be looking at Voynich's handwriting (other than a quick check), I'd be looking at that of his wife, secretary, and other associates. He was too busy traveling and running a business to spend the many months or years it would require to create this manuscript.