Speculative fraud hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Why go through all the trouble of making a complex cipher if you could sell the book just as easily with it saying nothing at all?

First, it would be a sure way to make Voynichese look like a real language.   It seems unlikely that a forger of the time could devise a gibberish generation method with that property.  The methods of Rugg and Thorsten&Timm could do that with proper parameters, but no one has shown how the VMS Author could have figured out the proper parameters.

Second, to protect the Author from an angry mark.  Suppose that the Author creates the VMS with a gibberish generator and sells it to Rudolf, claiming that it was Bacon's Third Book obtained from some source in England.  Rudolf then gives the book to the mathematicians and cryptographers in his court to decipher,  After months of effort, they (like many modern Voynichologists) all agree that it must be gibberish.  They cannot really prove it, but they come up with some flawed "proof" like modern "hoax" proponents have done.  Or they just tell Rudolf that they cannot prove it, but are fairly confident that it is gibberish; and that is enough for Rudolf.  If so, the Author must have been lying and must be himself the forger.  What would Rudolf do to him?  What he did to Edward Kelley?

Now suppose the same story, but the Author creates the VMS by taking some mix of alchemical herbals with other "legitimate" texts, like Dioscorides or Galen, and encoding it with some bizarre but not too hard cipher.  Then same as above.  The Maths may be able to crack the cipher. Or they may give up and tell Rudolph "surely gibberish", so Rudolf confronts the Author, and the Author "by luck", finds the key hidden in the circular text of page f69v. Either way, Rudolf will be disappointed at the contents, but the Author can claim that he was fooled too, and could not have suspected it, because it is indeed a book of Secret Ancient Knowledge, just not Bacon's, and after all the contents is not more bogus than most other herbal/medical books of the times.

I admit that it is rather unlikely that a Forger-Author would reason this way.  But the "hoax" theory itself is far less likely...

All the best, --jorge