The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Bacon's authorship determined this price. Not the book's later history.

But the book's later history was central to his belief and/or arguments for the Bacon authorship.  As you reported in great detail, he did spend quite a bit of effort tracking down that history.  Including investigating the doings of Dee and Kelley, Rudolf, Jacobus, and other people in Rudolf's court.

Without Marci's letter and Raphael's comment in it, Voynich would never have suspected that it could be a Bacon manuscript (or imagined that he could pass that book for one).  It would be just a manuscript with bizarre cipher and illustrations, written on poor quality vellum, with poor handwriting and poor artistic skills.  He may even not have bought the VMS in the first place.  Even if he did, most likely the VMS would have been again sitting at the bottom of a box somewhere, and its existence would be known only to a couple of librarians, at best...

The late history of the manuscript is not important for me.  That is not why I am hacking at the puzzle, and I am convinced (like everybody today, I hope) that, whether Rudolf bought it or not, the Bacon story was just a colossal misunderstanding or scam, and what happened to the VMS between 1600 and 1930 (including a possible bookA/bookB switch) does not give us any clue as to its origin and contents.  

But it matters to me a lot whether the VMS is a genuine "work of love" from ~1420 or a forgery from ~1920, because the possibilities for its  "language" and "encryption" are vastly different in the two cases.  Thus, while I think that a recent forgery is very unlikey, I would like to see good evidence against it.  Better than just "Voynich would not have dared/bothered/thought of doing that".  

And I don't see what is the relevance of him having made a good deal of money with other books.  Except that it shows that he probably had enough money for hiring a forger or finding whatever else it took -- a stack of "13th century" blank vellum, a copy of Jacobus's ex-libris, a suitable "book B"...  Possibly more spare money than all of us and the BL put together...

All the best, --stolfi