The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

in order to create a fake Marci letter, with all the verifiable facts in it, one really should have had the letter in the first place.

Again, I am satisfied that the letter is genuine and the VMS is an authentic 15th century manuscript (with various later interventions).  Not because I think that Wilfrid would have had scruples about forging anything, but because forging either would require a lot more work than he could afford, and the risks would be much greater; and he did not need to go to either extreme.

As I wrote before, when investigating the possibility of malfeasance by Wilfrid, we must disregard completely everything that he said or wrote

When assuming the malfeasance of Wilfrid, one has to do that.  When investigating his malfeasance, one has to judge each aspect.

Sorry, I don't follow.  When investigating whether someone may have committed fraud, one must assume that he did, and check whether that hypothesis is compatible with the evidence.  And then it would be foolish to assume that the suspect told the truth about X or Y.

This is when it becomes a conspiracy theory.

A conspiracy is a secret agreement between two or more parties.  Could be to hide the office birthday party from the subject, could be to assassinate Julius Caesar.  Conspiracies for criminal purpose happen all the time. 

The popular meaning of "conspiracy theory" is a claim of a vast conspiracy by hundreds or thousands of people.  (Which sometimes do happen too.)  

Suspecting that one person may have engaged in fraud, or even that two people may have conspired to do so, is not a "conspiracy theory" in this common sense.

[Did Wilfrid forge the Marci letter?], my opinion on that is quite clear: he found this letter in the book. Easy explanation. Fits everything we know.

From "the letter is not a forgery" it does not follow that "Wilfrid found the letter in the book".

"Everything we know" only says that he had possession of the letter a few years after 1911.   There is no record of the whereabouts of the letter before Wilfrid showed it to the public.  Nor any record of how and when he obtained it.  None.  If we accept it as genuine (which, again, I do!), we may only say that it probably was sent to Kircher shortly after the date on the signature.  

(But can we confirm that the letter at Beinecke was indeed sent to Kircher, and is not --say -- a copy kept by Marci's secretary?)

The evidence that Marci sent the book to Kircher, beside the Marci letter[], is one line in a letter from an unimportant Bohemian named Kinner, referring to 'our common friend Dominus Marcus', asking about an explanation of 'that arcane book'.

Agreed: Marci's cover letter is evidence that Marci intended to send Kircher the book ("Book A") that he inherited from Barchius; and the Kinner letter is evidence that Marci did send some "arcane book" to Kircher.  I am happy to assume that the latter was Book A.  (And that cows in Scotland are black on both sides.   )

But there is no good evidence that Book A is the same as MS 408.  That is only a guess, based on Wilfrid's statement that the letter was attached to MS 408, and a partial similarity of the latter to the vague descriptions of Book A by Baresch and Marci.

Even if Wilfrid was telling the truth, the letter could have become detached from Book A and got attached to MS 408 by the mistake of some Jesuit librarian, before Wilfrid got both.

And if we are assuming that Wilfrid was intentionally falsifying the provenance of MS 408, we just have no idea of when and how he got the cover letter and the book, and where they were before.   In particular, we have no reason to assume that the letter was ever attached to MS 408, or that Wilfrid obtained both in the same transaction.

And, under that assumption, the similarity between Book A and MS 408 would not be an unlikely coincidence: Wilfrid would have chosen MS408 to be the "Bacon book" specifically by that criterion.

Here seems to be the root of our disagreement.  You seem to give 99.9% probability to the thesis that Wilfrid was being honest about everything except the "Castle in Austria" story.  I give it 80% probability, at best.  

Maybe it is all the time I spent watching that scamfest that is the crypto plague.  Maybe it is some cases of academic fraud that I have run into.  Maybe I am giving too much weight to the way Wilfrid cheated people out of valuable books, and boasted about it...

All the best, --stolfi