The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[ioannestritemius]

Let me save everyone some time. Each and every last letter contained in PUG 555-568 pertaining to Kircher's supposed Prague correspondents, plus Beinecke 408A, is a modern forgery.

This includes the two letters from Kinner to Kircher, PUG 562, both also using "â" meaning "from" in the same "incorrect" way.



Here is a 1653 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from Kinner to the famous mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens:

Set quoniam ab eo tempore iam tertius mensis labitur, neque tamen responsus â te video, quem aliàs in vices alienis literis rependendas cognovi satis pronum [...] morbus aliquis â scriptione te prohibeat.

Translation: But since the third month has passed since that time, I still see no response from you, whom I have known to be quite prone to replying to other people's letters at other times [...] some illness may prevent you from writing.



Are all Kinner's letters fake? Is Kinner fake?  

Indeed, the 28 letters by Kinner in the respective APUG-volumes are genuine. A cross-check against letters by Kinner printed in Vol. I of Huygens's Oeuvres, I, Correspondance (1888) confirms Kinner's idiomatic diacritics, especially "â" and "è" in both collections, also characteristic turns of phrase like "pace tuâ", salutations, letter signatures conform, even Kinner's seal recognizable on some of the letters (his coat of arms facsimilied in Correspondance). The Latin in the APUG-letters corresponds to that in the letters printed in 1888. – Which stands in stark contrast to the horrendous diacritics in the Barschius-letter. However, it has been suggested to me that post-humanism they could be employed not for grammatical reasons at all, but simply to differentiate the shape "u", both /u/ and /v/, from similar upstroke letters, like "n" (as still in 19th century German Sütterlin). The indiscriminate placement and formation of these signs, even for that purpose, remains difficult to comprehend, especially if Barschius, as the signature suggests, wrote the letter manu propria. Some other APUG-letters, like the Martinic-set, the German letters by Duke August and Johann von Lichtenstein, or the French one by the publisher Elsevier contain some extreme linguistic and orthographic allegr[i/os] di confusione – "Agosto Duca di Brunswjc & di Lunæbourg" = four languages; "Lünäbúrgk", which combines a German trema with a Germanified Latin "ae"; "Antonio Gontier mercante fiamengo" in Elsevier's letter (he refers to the Florentine publisher) = two languages. Martinic enciphered, for no apparent reason, the innocuous "lego" in a simplistic cross-Polybios à 4 (four angles of the cross paired 11, 12 etc.), the same cipher about which Johann Schega corresponds with Kircher as a "new invention". Andreas Schaffer uses quaint abbreviations for which even Capelli has no answer (yes, his Dizionario is limited to medieval abbr.). And Marci must have mumbled "succulata[m] bona[m] to his very inexperienced and inattentive amanuensis to drop the accusative endings, or to not overline the two "a". – Since it is difficult to surgically remove Kinner's letters from the same manuscript collection that contains so much semantic and orthographic mumbo-jumbo, logic dictates that I can no longer consider the volumes APUG Mss. 555-568 as forgeries. Apparently, 17th century linguistic standards varied as widely as the measurements taken of the famous total solar eclipse of 12 August 1654 by Kircher, Kinner, and Huygens (APUG Ms. 557, f. 239; Correspondance, p. 287). The German Jesuit Johann Jacob Balde published a satire about the event in 1662, with amusing pictures. People had time back then ... Kind regards, TE.