The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The argument is now, that book 'B' is a modern fake created by Voynich

That is Rich's theory, which I find extremely unlikely too.

My alternative proposal is that Voynich somehow got hold of Marci's letter to Kircher (or maybe just a copy that Marci kept for himself?).  The mention in it of a "Bacon" book which would be worth millions prompted Voynich to search Kircher's carteggio for it (personally, or through some friendly Jesuit).  He did not found book A, but instead found Baresch's letter.   Or he found book A too, but it was obviously not a Bacon original and would not be worth a case of Pilsen.  

But by luck he managed to find somewhere else an old book B that roughly fitted Baresch's description (although it had some additional notable things that were not specified in the letter), and thought he could pass it for book A.  The date of B could not be determined at the time, but it could have been written in the late 1200s.  So he attached Marci's letter to B.  Perhaps B had been owned by Jacobus and has his signature, or perhaps Voynich just forged the signature, to provide  a barely plausible explanation for how the book could have gone form Rudolf's library to Baresch.

As I said, I don't find this version likely either.  But is there significant evidence against it?  

One bit of evidence for it is the lack of any evidence that the VMS had ever been owned by Rudolf, and the unlikelihood of a manuscript that Rudolf paid "600 ducats" for having ended up on Baresh's shelf.  And the fact  that neither Marci nor Baresh mention Jacobus as the previous owner, in spite of his signature being still visible on f1r; and that Baresh did not mention Bacon to either Kircher or Marci.

The "Modern Fake" theory would have a big impact on our studies, because it would make it very likely that the text is meaningless gibberish generated with the benefit of modern statistics and linguistics. But the alternative above would not make much difference for us. It would only remove some of the late historical attributes that made the VMS famous.  Instead of "a bizarre and undeciphered manuscript from the 1400s that Rudolf once bought for a fortune mistakenly thinking it was Bacon's", it would be just "a bizarre and undeciphered manuscript from the 1400s", period...

By the way, another distinct but vaguely similar theory is that book A got lost after Kircher received it, and the unrelated book B somehow ended up in the Collegio Romano's library, and some Jesuit found Marci's letter and assumed it referred to book B, and he attached it to the book.  Again, this theory would not impact our studies.  (Reminds me of the old theory that Shakespeare's plays could not have been written by such an obscure commoner, so they must have been written by another obscure commoner with the same name...)

All the best, --stolfi