The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[asteckley]

Just to make sure that I understand correctly. When you say the entire pre-Wilfrid provenance depends on our correct assessment of the Baresch letter, you are implicitly also assuming that the Marci letter did not belong to the VM, correct? Otherwise I'd guess we would fall back to that for our earliest provenance (hence my confusion).

That is correct. I’ve previously mentioned why the connection between the Marci letter and the VMS is weak. Let me expand:

1. Timing of Wilfred’s mention
Wilfred did not mention (anywhere I can find) the Marci letter until nine full years after he claimed to have acquired the manuscript. In his own words (which are apparently the only evidence up until 1921 that the letter was collocated with the manuscript at all):
         
“It was not until some time after the manuscript came into my hands that I read the document bearing the date 1665 (or 1666), which was attached to the front cover. Because of its late date I had regarded it as of no consequence, and therefore neglected it during my first examination of the manuscript.”

He could be telling the truth, but frankly, it stretches credulity. It would mean: 

• From his purchase of several items, he obtains the manuscript in 1912. 
  
• This manuscript is obviously very unique—remarkably strange and very old—and he naturally takes a huge interest in it for its potential monetary value, if not historical value. 
  
• “Attached” to the manuscript is a letter. Given his background (and the period) he could probably read Latin easily enough, but even if he couldn’t, he could easily see and understand the signature and the date. 
  
• He thinks (certainly after at least some period of thought—it wouldn’t be an immediate knee-jerk conclusion) that the manuscript is possibly over 500 years old. But meanwhile he can see that the letter—again, “attached” to the manuscript—is nearly 250 years old. 
  
• Yet he wants his audience to believe that, for many years, it didn’t occur to him to even ask, “Gosh, I wonder if this letter might say something useful about where this mysterious manuscript came from?” 
  

It’s hard to buy that scenario. (The fact that he felt he needed to explain why he neglected it is also a bit suspicious.)

2. What did he mean by “attached”?
Obviously, it wasn’t stapled. And it doesn’t sound like the word one would use if the letter were simply slipped between the pages (or the cover) of the manuscript. The letter has wax residue on it. But as Lisa confirmed recently, those residues don’t line up with any markings found on the front cover of the manuscript where he says it was attached. (In fact, I don’t even see any candidate markings on the front cover in the digital images, but maybe Lisa could see something of that nature on the actual manuscript. In any case, they don’t line up with the letter’s wax markings.) There are no holes in the letter through which a string might have been used to tie it to the manuscript—and that would be a very strange way to try to attach the two anyway. So it seems, for some reason, Wilfred was not describing things accurately in some way.

3. Even if the letter was “with” the manuscript...
If, nevertheless, the letter was indeed “with” the manuscript (which I would say was more likely simply folded and placed between the front cover and the first page, and probably not physically attached as Wilfred claimed), then there is the question of how likely it was placed there at the time of Marci/Kircher—and not by error at some much later time. There were 250 years (246 to be precise) during which the letter and the manuscript were in various hands and locations—possibly together (as the conventional theory supposes) or possibly separately. All it takes is for the two items to cross paths and be together in the same location and in the same custodial hands at some point during that quarter of a millennium. Suppose you are one of probably dozens of people who happened to have some responsibility—perhaps for no longer than a day or two—for the care, storage, inventorying, or transport of the documents, and you notice the Marci letter and the manuscript. How natural would it be to think, “Oh, this letter must be referring to this manuscript… let’s put them together so they don’t get separated again”? Is that a speculative scenario? Yes, of course. But it is so natural and plausible that one cannot rely on it being wrong in order to be certain that the letter and the manuscript were always in proximity to each other and that the one necessarily referred to the other. (And that plausibility is increased given the above points #1 and #2.)

Considering the other side of the argument (from how the letter came to be “with” the VMS if it did not refer to it): there is the question of how the letter came to be "separated" from the hypothetical other manuscript to which it truly did refer. That, too, might fall under the custodial-error scenario I just described. But as I write this, something occurs to me. There is in my library (to echo Baresh’s words to Kircher) a facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript. I obtained it just a month or two ago along with a facsimile of the Marci letter—they came to me together. Yet the letter and the manuscript are currently located in two different rooms of my home. This is because, as I wanted to peruse the manuscript, the letter was kind of in my way. So I set it aside. (And given my habits of piling up research material, it is plausible that the two may never get re-united.) So if it is that easy and explainable as to how two items could become separated within two months of being within a single home, I guess it is not surprising if two such documents could become separated during the course of 250 years.

So—returning to the main point—it is hard to argue (though I know you will) that the Marci letter, with its opening words of “This book,” was necessarily talking about the Voynich Manuscript. It would help, of course, if the Marci letter included further identifying description—even to the degree of the Baresch letter—but that isn’t really needed. I think it would go a long way if we could simply identify that it was in fact “attached” to the manuscript (as Wilfred claimed) at the time he obtained it in 1912. That could still mean it was attached erroneously some time earlier, but at least it would bolster the assumption that it is connected to the Voynich Manuscript.

By the way, regarding the lack of wax markings on the manuscript: it doesn’t take a long time (months, maybe years, but not decades or centuries) for wax seals to leave a mark on parchment when it is in constant contact with it. Yet, although there seem to be transfers of wax residue or grease from one location on the Marci letter to another due to its folds and storage, there is as I said no transfer from the letter to the manuscript. Why not?

And, to be clear once again—I am not trying to make the case that any of the above alternate history scenarios are true. Only that, after uncritically repeating certain claims over and over, we tend to start accepting them—and whole scenarios that depend on them being true —as if they are more factual than the evidence actually indicates.

I look at the scenarios above in this spirit: If, tomorrow, the Voynich Manuscript were discovered to be a fake after all, would we look at these scenarios and say, “That’s still not plausible”? Or would we say, “Oh, crap—of course that makes sense. Why did I ever think otherwise?”