The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In the comments below my blog post of September, 2015, "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.", Thomas Ernst has posted a series of comments carefully explaining why the Latin of that letter (the one Voynich claimed to have found in the Voynich, of course) is problematic in ways that would never appear in a genuine letter of the (supposed) time, by the (supposed) authors. But when is "enough is enough", and when will others let this overwhelming torrent of evidence be allowed to speak for itself?

The problem with this Fake Letter Theory is that the evidence for forgery is far from an "overwhelming torrent".  IIRC, the letter was supposedly written by Marci's secretary, at a time when his eyesight was failing and he could no longer write by himself.  So the bad Latin can be just failing of this secretary; and the paper would be whatever the secretary had at hand at the moment. 

I think that the way Voynich obtained and handled the letter should raise eyebrows higher.  For starters, why wasn't the letter filed with all the other letters that Kircher received?  Why is there absolutely no mention of it anywhere, until Voynich decided to make it public and claimed that it was attached to the VMS when he bought it?  Why wasn't the contents of the letter used when the Jesuits compiled the list of books sold to Voynich?

I do suspect that there are still some hairy bugs to be found under the unturned rocks of this story.  But I still don't think that there is enough evidence of the letter being a forgery.   And I have another theory about it, as you know...

All the best, --stolfi