Speculative fraud hypothesis

[dexdex]

I believe Lisa Fagin-Davis also said, in her recent UPenn seminar, that the idea of it being produced as a con to sell to a wealthy gullible buyer was non-credible. (Apologies if my memory on that is wrong.)

I agree with this, but coming at it from the perspective of someone who knows a bit about con artistry. For a one-time scam, it's easier to just find someone more gullible, and in fact such cons tend to be crappy on purpose so as to filter out people too intelligent to deceive. The only exceptions are if you already have a buyer set, for instance for an art forgery - but in the case of the VMS it is very unlikely you'd be able to secure such a buyer without having the fraud already created. So the creation would have to be a lot of effort for a dubious payday - extremely unlikely to be done.

However, an iteratively built prop to aid in deception of educated marks might need to stand up to scrutiny and will be reusable, as well as being useful (and therefore profitable) from the creation of the first page.

If you believe the theory that the Marci/Kircher letters refer to the VMS, then you presumably also accept that the manuscript was -- or even just could have been -- bought by Emperor Rudolf II for 600 ducats. That's the equivalent of roughly $200,000.   That's a LOT of Starbuck's coffee (or if you have my wife's coffee addition, it is about 5 year's worth.)

I think a reasonable assumption is that this was for a sale of MANY books, as the 600 figure has been traced to a bulk sale to Rudolf II. An individual artifact with no provenance would not fetch such a sum, and educated conmen would know this.

Wilfrid Voynich did hope to make a great deal of money from the manuscript. Early on he offered Newbold 10% "of the first $100,000", and I think 50% of anything over that, if Newbold's Roger Bacon attribution stuck. $100,000 in 1920 would be worth $1,673,823.83 today. Hans Kraus wrote that Voynich had wanted $160,000 for it (maybe he knew this through Anne? I forget how), and that would be worth $2,987,727.17, if Voynich came up with the latter figure in 1925.

Those prices are for a unique, antique artifact with decent provenance, not for what anybody educated would realise is a relatively newly bound tome with unknown provenance. Voynich also failed to sell the manuscript further. The 600 ducats figure is the upper bound of what you could expect for a sale, and even that was already being bought as an antique by a medieval ruler.

For 3 mil, yes, you would make such a book. For 40k per person, it starts to be dubious to put in that amount of effort instead of finding someone more gullible. And if we then lower that even further, we start getting less money than we would just scribing regular books. But, as a prop, it can function for years and years and improve your take from educated marks, who had more money than regular townsfolk. The profit incentive fits better.

I don't think so. The original makers lived long before Rudolf. The fact that he was willing and able to pay a lot of money for it in his timeframe is irrelevant to their original motifs.

Exactly.

Very subjective, but this is not so obvious to me. Possibly if he paid a group of scribes in order to have it finished quickly.

To elaborate further: conmen like to work together, so it's not out of a question that a group of such people collaborated. Or, the main creator of the idea made the first short draft, it worked very well - then he paid scribes to make something even more impressive, as you said.

We do not know if the parchment was acquired all at once or piece by piece. It may have been acquired over a 20-year period. The dating is simply not accurate enough.

I never heard any opinion on whether it has been prepared similarly.

Interesting. This may be just my misreading, but my impression was that the parchment preparation level matches (where the skin and flesh side are barely distinguishable). Of course it may have just been a supplier doing the same thing to his stock over a long period.

The VMS is not actually a single book.  It is at least six separate books - Herbal, Pharma, Cosmo, Zodiac, Biological, and Starred Parags (StarPs) -- that have in common only the script, the "encoding", and the general handwriting and drafting style (nymphs, stars, scalloped fringes etc), but have very different contents and textual structure.  They even seem to have two different languages.  AFAIK no one has managed ti point out any strong link between the contents of these six books, except that some drawings in Pharma are almost identical to some details of Herbal.

In my view, this actually fits the 'prop' hypothesis more. You generate the first bit based on something you know decently well, it works well to fool marks, maybe someone asks you if you got something for the zodiac - so you generate a zodiac section based on zodiacal books of the time. The book builds up as you go, and eventually you have an entire manuscript filled with esoterica. Maybe one of the sections you made is a dud, but it felt like a good idea when other stuff worked so well. And the quality is worse since you weren't so familiar with zodiacal books as you are with herbals.

And then there is the question of why -- not how, but why -- would the author bother to invent a gibberish generator  whose output is so like a natural language by many statistics (which were not known at the time) and yet so unlike the languages that the marks might have known.

This, I confess, was something I was thinking about. While such a prop would be useful, for most marks you could just use gibberish. 

But then I had an idea: suppose the original conman tried a primitive version of this, and generated a scroll of 'magic' that was basically lorem ipsum, claiming it held arcane knowledge, but the fake was much less elaborate. This is something that you'd use on an educated mark with more money, and perhaps an educated mark noticed that words were repeated gibberish and didn't feel like a scroll. So, to improve your scam, you have an incentive to make a simple process that makes something that looks weird but also doesn't look like gibberish. The Stolfi (and later) hypotheses of word structure fit with such a relatively simple process to build a word dictionary that a 15th century conman would be capable of inventing.

I still confess this is the weakest part of the hypothesis (or indeed a weak part of any fraudulent hoax hypothesis), but it's not inconceivable and the book can be used for scamming purposes before being the entire tome we see, making it a much better profit proposition.

This is close to a hypothesis from a reputable expert on ancient herbals: Sergio Toresella, described in this publication: Toresella, Sergio: Gli erbari degli alchmisti, in: L. Saginati, Arte farmaceutica e piante medicinali; erbari, vasi, strumenti e testi dalle raccolte liguri, 1995.

I will check this out.

I was wondering, what possible clues would this (very radical in the sense of being quite specific) assumption bring. For one, we could expect a prolonged creation and so textual differences between 'books' should be big. And, the method of creation that fits best is crafting a word dictionary and then using the crafted words in place of words basing the book on some other text. I don't know how that would imprint itself in the syntax, though; nor how would it be different than just multiple books written from a natural language and then collated.