The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[LisaFaginDavis]

On a related note, today I was at Harvard and saw a codex created by the Spanish Forger...not his usual MO of scraping text away to add pictures, but faking an entire codex: using old parchment, creating nested quires, writing the text of Suetonius, illustrating it, sewing the quires and binding the whole thing to pass off as an authentic 15th-c. manuscript. No one who had spent time with authentic manuscripts could look at this codex today and not immediately realize that it was a modern forgery. While not "proof", this does speak to the idea of the VMS being a modern forgery - there's just no way anyone could pull that off convincingly. There are way too many pieces that would have to be perfectly authentic...parchment, ink, pigments, sewing, structure, binding, provenance evidence, etc. etc. The Spanish Forger, who knew what he was doing, got away with it at first but couldn't pull it off in the long-term. I sincerely doubt Voynich could either. It's one thing to forge a painting or miniature on a piece of parchment. It is quite another to convincingly craft an entire codex.

Here's the Houghton record of the Suetonius manuscript:
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And here a few images from when it was sold by Christie's:
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