(31-10-2025, 09:26 AM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The situation with the watermark and its relevance for the genuine/fake question of the Marci letter is really straightforward.
Let's look at an extreme, hypothetical situation.
In this situation, the watermarks of all Marci's letters would be known and would all be the same, and genuine 17th century. Now the watermark of the Beinecke letter would be different, yet also genuine 17th century.
What would be the conclusion?
It would be: "Aha, he used different paper for this letter".
Now let's look at another hypothetical situation.
In this case, we know the watermarks of many or all of Marci's letters, and there are several (genuine) different ones.
This shows he used different types of paper. That the Beinecke letter is also different is completely normal.
In reality, we do not know the watermarks of any of his other letters, with the exception of perhaps one that was drawn out in this thread.
So, in reality, there is absolutely nothing to be concluded from the watermark.
That would be flawed reasoning. In both of your scenarios, you have declared the letter genuine a priori.
The relevant scenario is that we have many Marci letters known to be genuine and they all contain the same watermark, but it's different than that on the Beinecke letter. That would make the Beinecke letter suspiciously different and increase the probability that is is not actually Marci's.
That would be EVIDENCE against authenticity. And like most evidence (and like ALL evidence related to the provenance of the VMS), it would be probabilistic. Its strength or weight would depend on factors like HOW MANY Marci letters do we have and how certain are we of their authenticities. But they would still comprise a statistical sample from which we infer the properties of the whole -- just like is done with all statistical sampling.
As Rich stated, if we find none of the others examples of the same watermark in the other (known genuine) papers of Marci, it would be evidence that that letter MAY BE inauthentic.