The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[asteckley]

There are several major issues with the modern forgery hypothesis:

- C-14 dating strongly suggests the parchment dates to the early 15th century, and most parchment created in the early 15th century was used in the early 15th century.
- As convincingly demonstrated by Koen and Marco in this very forum, the marginalia handwriting is diagnostic of the early 15th century, specifically of documents created in a region approximately centered on Fulda, Germany.
- Some of the illustrations, notably the crossbow-wielding human Sagittarius, are also consistent with some Germanic depictions from the late medieval period.
- There are no anachronistic ingredients used in the ink or pigments.
- …And with all of this in hand, Wilfrid Voynich went around claiming the VMS was a 13th-century English document created by a specifically well-documented individual, Roger Bacon.

It strains credulity that Voynich completed a forgery in which all available material evidence converges on the early 15th century and Germanic Alpine region, even though he repeatedly and publicly attributed the book to a well-documented man living in 13th-century England.

There are some specific pieces of evidence against the modern forgery theory -- but none of your points are members of that set.
The C-14 dating as even the critics of that modern forgery theory understand and admit, are an indication of the age of the calfskin parchment. ( I have adopted calling it parchment rather than vellum because as someone pointed out -- I think it was Lisa Fagin-Davis, but my memory might be wrong -- vellum is a term usually used for animal skin parchment of a particularly high quality, which the VMS parchment is not.). The fact is, quantities of old parchment have been found and are indication that such quantities may remain in storage for long periods.  The discovery or acquisition of such a cache could indeed be part of the inspiration for a forger to produce a forgery.

And the remainder of your points are really moot, because the whole point of a forgery or fake is to reproduce features that would simulate that kind of authenticity. So, OF COURSE, one may find many of those features in what turns out to be a forgery.  [Correction -- your one point that "There are no anachronistic ingredients used in the ink or pigments." is simply false.  The report includes Titanium Compound which is anachronistic, unless one bends over backwards to explain it away.)

A stronger argument against the modern forgery theory would be evidence of something that the forger (at whatever time he existed) could not or would not have foreseen as being important to include.  In that respect, something that is ONLY detectable by the application of modern microscopic or spectral analysis, for example. That is something that was not available and not plausibly foreseeable by a potential forger prior to the mid-20th century or so.

The presence of a third column in the marginalia of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which was only recently revealed is, in my opinion, perhaps the biggest challenge to the defense of a modern forgery theory.

On the other hand, there are a number of other pieces of evidence that SantaColoma has discussed in his blogs that cannot be simply dismissed. (Certainly not dismissed as readily as many members of this forum like to do.  The latest tactic seems to be to shut down any thread in which that evidence threatens to enter the discussion, using the justification of  "one theory per thread", whatever the hell that means.)