The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

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But here is another problem with that... the overwhelming majority of experts, of all backgrounds, did not think this was penned in the 15th century... not until the results of the C14 came back did all the opinions begin to abandon those later theories, and begin to drift towards early 15th century. I've NO doubt that if that C14 dating happened to be different than it is, the opinions would drift to THAT date, too. And so on.

Why can I say that? How could I know that? Because I trust those experts. For instance, Charles Singer. Well I have heard so many excuses, post C14, as to why he wasn't the "right" expert, and that is why he "got it wrong". And all the others... I trust them. I even trust the two who hit the C14. I think they were all right. I think all the stuff they "saw" in there, is in there. And there is only one way that could have happened.

But in any case, in order to hold the position that, "Everything we know is explained quite well by the hypothesis the VMS was penned in the XVth century...", one has to ignore the great number of expert opinions, and evidence, that says it was not.

That's simply not true, take D'Imperio's Elegant Enigma, page 9: the overwhelming majority of experts placed it sometime between 1400 and 1550, consistent with the C14 dating.

Thank you, Dave, but those two lines are a simplification of the whole group of experts used. I also used D'Imperio to come up with my numbers, but I went through, page by page, looked at every one of them, and the actual, specific date ranges that each one theorized. Here is the graph I created in order to show where the ranges landed:

   

You can see that only Lehmann-Haupt, a book cataloger, was in the range of the C14 results (yellow band). There is a second, if you take in Panofsky's first impression, after he was with the Voynich for 2 hours. But he later changed his mind, and moved to the early 16th century. Rene knew of third, who I don't think is in D'Imperio... who hit the C14 dates in a letter, or in a meeting and was quoted, or something like that.

So I am unclear how they compiled the two lines you copied here, but it does not reflect all the experts mentioned in D'Imperio. And also, note that it does not make a breakdown for each range, as I have.

Anyway, it is actually very surprising how UNPOPULAR the date range was, before it was found that the calves died then. Then it became all the rage! 

Here are my two blog posts on the subject, if you, or anyone is interested in this subject, in the order I wrote and posted them:

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