The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[proto57]

I have to say I enjoy this thread very much, just don't have anything interesting to add to it. I definitely won't bet on VMS being a modern forgery, but I think it's less fantastic than many seem to believe. Certainly not in the flat earth category to me.

I appreciate that, oshfdk, and thanks for keeping an open mind.

But then, why choose Bacon when he knew the imagery he used was ~200 years later? Yet again, given his expertise with rare books, he knew he was going to expose his fraud. Why not choose, say, a lost work of Pico della Mirandola, from the right time period? It's weird, Voynich could not be both intelligent and expert and dumb and ignorant, I think.

But this didn't expose the hypothetical fraud? Even though Voynich claimed this to be a Bacon's work, and some contemporary experts said it was more likely to be a later manuscript, I don't think there were any serious accusations of forgery?

I'm not an expert in forgeries, but to me the manuscript ticks a few points that could make it work well as a forgery. 

1) For starters - it is extremely vague and ambiguous in almost all aspects - which enables plausible denial. You can say it's Bacon, but if someone proves it can't be Bacon, you can say, ok, it's Pico della Mirandola, and if this doesn't work either you can just say you are stumped yourself.

2) Undecipherable text. I'm not sure it is very easy to fool experts by faking a completely new work of Bacon. You have to mimic the specific style, language and take into account what knowledge was available to Bacon and what not. If this is a "ciphered MS" which for some reason can never be deciphered, all the better.

3) Vague images, which seem to support many possible interpretations.

4) Provenance that both includes some famous figures (Kircher, Rudolf) and at the same time lacks specific details, which could be found in contradiction with one another.

The main thing that makes me think MFT implausible is that, as far as I understand, the experts say all parts of the MS look genuinely old (stitching, creases, trimmings, etc) and the McCrone analysis (even if vague in some aspects, as people say) doesn't seem to show any strong evidence of a modern work.

I think you make good points. Even before I was fully committed to modern forgery, I had noted a similar things about the overall vagueness of every single aspect, and mused that it could be a "cover", to insulate a forgery from detection. It is often in the attempts, by a forger, to relate some genuine fact or facts by which they are discovered... such as the case of the Vinland Map, in which a readable Latin phrase (was one important clue which) belied the ruse. If that phrase had been written in indecipherable gibberish, though? And in a set of MesoAmerican leaves, written on period bark, the forger made errors in the calendar. It is always risky for a forger to try to emulate genuine cultural knowledge, language, histories, icons, because it is all too easy to make a mistake when doing so.

Along these lines, I had outlined the point you make with "it is extremely vague and ambiguous in almost all aspects", and suggested just how this seems to point to an intent to make it turn out this way. Think about it: How are the plants, writing, zodiac, marginalia, animals, and hundreds of other things, all "just almost" like something we know, but then "just wrong enough" to not be those things? Not one plant happened to... even accidentally... be "right"? It makes the whole thing vague enough to skirt identification, and to me, seems to imply it was intentional to do so.

Here was my 2010 post about it, "A Little Bit Like Everything, a Whole Lot Like Nothing": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Rich