Speculative fraud hypothesis

[dexdex]

Hmm. What would such signs actually be – particularly in the 15th-17th centuries? After all, just about anything a potential buyer would find appealing can be produced by a would-be forger, including age.

I’m trying to imagine what any signs of intentionally making the manuscript look older would possibly be …

You can make parchment and paper visually old in a variety of ways, but the most common would be to introduce it to the elements. Liquids, urea, 'tea' in the sense of extract from plant matter into water. Physical wear. The manuscript would probably not survive if that had been done to it when it was new.

As for ruling out a fraudulent manuscript just because we expect a forger would produce a higher quality product, how can we possibly judge their available talent and resources? Perhaps the reason the manuscript is so ‘ugly’ is because someone happened to hear a  wealthy person express a willingness to purchase something like it, and so they urgently and sloppily produced the manuscript with the meager talent they could get together, before the opportunity to make a scam sale waned.

To preface: you have a good point, in that whatever the circumstances of the production of the Voynich are, they must be unique - just because of how it is.

However, fakes for sale done by conmen in the modern era are typically one of two things: either they are of the absolute highest quality (for a fake art sale, when you have a buyer already lined up or the potential for a buyer is very high); or they are quite slipshod (when you intentionally target gullible people; these would be fake rolex watches you buy by the dozen to resell to marks).

The Voynich is in the anti-goldilocks zone where it's not really that quality and wouldn't fetch a price worth the upfront effort, but it also has some care, time, resources and knowledge put into it. To my mind, it makes the for sale hypothesis extremely unlikely; it would have to be an amateur conman delusional about the price they can fetch, which is at odds with the obvious knowledge the creator(s) of the manuscript have; and they would have to make the book quickly but also completely accidentally manage to immediately create a passable conlang ex nihilo.

With the 'prop' theory, the balance changes a bit. For one, we have sources like Toresella giving good indication that there existed a cottage industry of quacks with quack herbals, which happens to be the most well crafted portion of the Voynich that seems to be what the author(s) knew the best. For another, a reusable prop can have more care put into it, and can be made iteratively. There is also room for the scam to develop: perhaps it started with a primitive prop and the author(s) got caught by it being intuitively recognised as gibberish, making them put the effort into constructing a language. This explains the motive for why the language itself is so well crafted, and even why it might evolve during the manuscript creation. The foldouts are a fantastic addition to a prop: they take not that much time to make, but they are a 'wow' factor when showing off the manuscript. They also mimic a folded almanac: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , entirely in keeping with the quack doctor scheme. And the 'books' cover a variety of topics, almost as if someone was looking at everything 'popular' in manuscripts at the time - manuscripts which typically were much more delineated in topic.

This is why I find the prop theory much more plausible - but I still want to underline that I think the manuscript carries meaning and was meant to be used non-fraudulently by the creators or their community. 

If it's a prop, I think there would be some unique imprint of this fact on how its structured, which may be worth checking.