The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[rikforto]

- It You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., "Follies of Science in the Court of Rudolf II", which was Voynich's favorite book

I would point out that recapitulating your entire argument is not really responsive to specific criticisms of it, but you have answered it in the extracted quote, at least if I understand you correctly. You believe that his choices were influenced by this particular book. Note, this was not claimed in the post I was responding to, which specifically dismisses the need for this line of argumentation. Again, if I understand your position, you at least implicitly agree that Voynich's choices call out for an explanation since you provide one, and I appreciate that confirmation from the theory's progenitor.

Narrowly sticking to my point, this doesn't answer questions about the patterns in the (possibly non-) cipher, which is still a pretty substantial mystery even if I take Bolton as a smoking gun of a forgery. (You probably correctly detect I don't; like a lot of "looks like" theories, I don't see correspondences that are particularly discriminating, and I could just as soon take the looser parallels I do see as suggestive it was the sort of thing Rudolf II would have been interested in purchasing.) I also think in this telling Voynich made a real mess of things in ways that made his ultimate goal of cashing in on a lost Bacon manuscript harder for himself. I'm not completely unsellable on the conclusion it's a forgery, but one reason I have remained skeptical is that it requires me to believe that Voynich vacillated between a very skilled forgery and a very incompetent scam, and I think the neatest way to resolve that is to instead posit he was struggling with the same ineffable text the rest of us are. The former certainly isn't impossible, but proponents of your theory tend to underestimate how much they are relying on Voynich to have been exactly as brilliant or foolish as each line of evidence requires, and it nags at me.