The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Battler]

To be fair, there could easily be a manuscript that was unintelligible to Baresch, Marci, and possibly even Kircher, but that is intelligble to us now because it's in a language and/or writing system that has since been deciphered, or even in something that we now know is quite mudane, but was completely unknown to them. For example, imagine if they owned a Korean manuscript entirely written in hangul (which certainly existed in the 17th century), it would have been illegible and mysterious to any of them but perfectly legible and mudane to a modern audience. Or, for something geographically closer and more likely to have ended up in Europe - some Persian herbal written in the pahlavi script. In fact, from what we see from their corresponse - even something as mundane as glagolitic would have been bafflingto Baresch and Marci and that was still in active use in what is now Croatia at that time. So what Baresch talked about, could be some manuscript that's completely mundane and nondescript to us but would have been mysterious to them.

I agree, Battler, and I tried to make the same point in this post: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The point I was making (in an especially clumsy way... I had trouble articulating my thought) is exactly what occurred to you. As I wrote,

"... the difference between what scholars knew, or would have known, in the 17th century, compared to what they knew by 1912. The two are obviously vastly different, I think everyone would agree. A majority of what was considered “mysterious” and “unknown” in previous ages was, by the turn of the 20th century no longer a mystery."

So the claim that, of all the scripts unknown to the men of the letters, Voynich just happened to find one of the very few that would STILL be unknown in 1912? I know you are not directly saying this, not using it this way, and that you are only pointing out that the Baresch Manuscript, if not the Voynich, could simply be something which has not been unknown for centuries, like your chose of Hangul, or Pahlavi.

But I also see this situation implying that, to fulfill the "need" to match the description of "unknown", a 1910 forgery would have to make one up... because there were none, anymore. And if not, and the Voynich is real, what are the odds that the Ms. he found just happened to be, still unknown?

Rich

Rich

You do actually raise very good points. I read through all of your blog at least from present day down to 2011 two days ago (I intend to read the rest soon) and you raise very valid points. And yes, it's a bit strange that Voynich just so happened to find a manuscript written in a language and writing system that just so happened to still be unknown. And you also raised another valid point in your blog that how come Baresch and Marci, if they were truly talking about the Voynich Manuscript, never pointed out that the unknown alphabet is based on Latin letters and abbreviations. And even more baffling is that Kirecher wouldn't have observed the same thing himself - I believe we have one of his responses with the identification of the unknown alphabet and there's no mention of it looking like abbreviated Latin, albeit with no way to make any sense from the text. That, and your third raised point about how none of them mentions Tepenec's signature, makes the notion of Baresch and Marci talking about the Voynich Manuscript very unlikely IMHO.