The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[asteckley]

At the risk of adding something to this MFT thread that might cause a new line of  (unnecessary?) debate, I'll add something that I've suggested in private, but have left half-baked. It is just something one might consider in the story of MFT. (By "story", I just mean the artifact of a forensic or "retrodictive" theory, like previously described in comment You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..)

One common criticism of the MFT (if not the most common basis for counter-argument) is: “How could Wilfrid Voynich have packed in so many details—clothing styles, motifs, etc.—that also happen to align with the parchment’s radiocarbon (C-14) date when that technology didn't exist and wouldn't have even been foreseen?”
Two background points can help suggest a natural answer to that:

1.  In Europe, animal-skin parchment was common through the 1400s. Paper began replacing it in the 1500s, after which parchment was used mainly for especially important or formal documents (think, for example, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence).
   
2. Document survival isn’t even over time. The farther back you go, the fewer manuscripts survive. In general, there are more extant documents from the 15th century than from the 14th, more from the 14th than the 13th, and so on.
   

Taken together, these points suggest that if someone were composing a forgery and was starting with animal-skin parchment, 15th-century content might be exactly what you’d expect to see: it’s the latest period when parchment was still routine and the period for which examples are most plentiful and influential.
Now imagine Voynich happened to acquire (and be inspired by) a sizable cache of parchment. Given his expertise with rare books, a few things follow:

• He would know that a convincing forgery would be set in a time when parchment use was still normal—i.e., pre-1500.
  
• The materials and styles most likely to shape his imagination (even while trying to come up with something that looked highly unusual and therefore appealing, and even though not consciously aiming to restrict his content to a specific historical period) would be the later-parchment era, especially the 1400s, because those are the parchment manuscripts he’d have encountered most often. 
  

So he would have a natural tendency to produce content consistent with the 1400s. He might even have assumed his stack of parchment dated from that era—but even if he didn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered much to him: there was no age-testing at the time, and he knew the parchment was sufficiently “old enough”. 

One can imagine the following graph -- but this is strictly meant for conceptual illustration -- not representing any verified data.