The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

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If the two "corner stones" which support the authenticity of the VMS, the letters Baresch 1639 and Marci 16650819, could be proven to be forgeries – along with a whole stash of other letters in the Kircher-correspondence, such as the Martinitz-, Liechtenstein- and Schega- exchanges – what would be the best venue to present such evidence? Paper-analysis not necessary. Letter-texts themselves suffice.

I don't personally believe the letters of the Carteggio are forgeries, although I have recently seen the case for this (by you?). Of course "I've been told" many things in the last couple of decades which have turned out to be totally unfounded, so "never say never".

But the thing is it does not matter if they are forged or not, because they actually, on careful, critical examination, to not only NOT serve as any reliable provenance, but in fact, their content and nature work against the Voynich being the manuscript being discussed by Baresch, Marci, Kinner, and Kircher.

Briefly, because the purpose of those letters was to describe to Kircher some manuscript these men owned, or saw, so that Kircher could help them identify it. Therefore it is illogical that they would not have included, in those descriptions, the most defining and obvious characteristics the Voynich exhibits. Among these are the same ones we first describe it with, today, such as nude women in colored baths; the Zodiac, and its missing signs; and most strikingly, the "signature" on the very first page! I've read the excuse that these were "men of the cloth", and would not have mentioned naked ladies out of propriety or something. Obviously not. They would have described them, or, at least, alluded to them tangentially. I outline all my reasoning in: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., for anyone interested.

To me, it is clear that they were describing some other manuscript, which I call The Baresch Manuscript. The characteristics they DO mention, "stars", "chemical symbolism", "unknown script", and "plants unknown to the Germans" would easily describe dozens of other manuscripts, in many languages and scripts. And there is another fact, one hard to describe but obvious once you "see" it, in that of all the scripts these 17th century men would have considered "unknown" to them, virtually all of them would have been known to the World by 1912. So "what are the odds" that these men happened to see the (virtually) one script which remained unknown to modern times? It beggars the imagination. It is far-fetched. Rather, a forger who may have seen those references, or heard of them, would feel it necessary, or useful to match that description, to come up with an "unknown script" to match it. Voila: Voynichese. I try to explain this in "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.". But this is a huge area of research I work on from time to time, in trying to learn all the scripts these men probably did not know, and the many manuscripts written in each, in order to try and determine what that manuscript they actually saw may have been. 

An addendum: hermeneutics dictate that a text should be about something. The VMS is, or rather was. In June 1921, two months after his joint presentation with Newbold, Voynich followed up with the sales pitch in Citizen Kane's "Hearst's International", at the time the most widely distributed American monthly: "Mr. Voynich [...] holds the Bacon manuscript at a value of over one hundred thousand dollars, and he is eager that the manuscript should fall only into the hands of a purchaser who will consider it a public trust." That equals about $2,000,000 in modern currency.

Yes that is one of the pillars of Genuine that fell years ago, along with others that have gone crickets. It was, believe it or not, a common argument that, paraphrasing, "Why would Wilfrid have forged the Voynich when he never tried to sell it?". Well, he never got around to selling it, and never openly tried, but from various sources we know he very much wanted and hoped for a huge fortune for the thing.

Rich