10-11-2025, 07:13 AM
To start with the positive, I consider an intentional or unintentional switch of the books significantly more likely than a modern forgery given the C14 evidence. However, that is still very low, particularly, since I find hardly any order of operations suggested here plausible.
Voynich could have probably forged the ex libris under certain circumstances which are rather unlikely on their own, but why exactly this one? If he had the letters from some other source and wanted to forge the provenance, there would have been more useful candidates than Sinapius. Additionally, Voynich would have had to trick not only the detection methods of his time, but also the scientific methods of today - even if this theory was not the focus of investigation, it might have been uncovered by chance.
The alternative timelines for a switch are not much more plausible either in my opinion, but should not be ruled out completely in case additional evidence pointing in that direction shows up. For example, two similar books existing in Prague at that time which end up with Kircher, and the letter(s) getting attached to the wrong one at some point in the care of the Jesuits. The 'lost' book doesn't even have to be written in a cipher, it might just be one in a language that none of the people involved in Prague could understand. While there is nothing that rules out this order of events as far as I can see, it is still significantly more complicated than the linear provenance and has no real evidence behind it.
Voynich could have probably forged the ex libris under certain circumstances which are rather unlikely on their own, but why exactly this one? If he had the letters from some other source and wanted to forge the provenance, there would have been more useful candidates than Sinapius. Additionally, Voynich would have had to trick not only the detection methods of his time, but also the scientific methods of today - even if this theory was not the focus of investigation, it might have been uncovered by chance.
The alternative timelines for a switch are not much more plausible either in my opinion, but should not be ruled out completely in case additional evidence pointing in that direction shows up. For example, two similar books existing in Prague at that time which end up with Kircher, and the letter(s) getting attached to the wrong one at some point in the care of the Jesuits. The 'lost' book doesn't even have to be written in a cipher, it might just be one in a language that none of the people involved in Prague could understand. While there is nothing that rules out this order of events as far as I can see, it is still significantly more complicated than the linear provenance and has no real evidence behind it.