02-02-2026, 03:21 AM
(01-02-2026, 02:26 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We know a possible motive, which was to prevent the Italian government from knowing of the existence of that pile of books, which they might confiscate. But didn't that motive cease to exist in 1929? Was that the real motive, or just a convenient excuse for the lies?
Voynich was definitely told that he could not tell anyone where he got these books. This collection was hidden, secret, and there are piles and piles of documents and records from before, during and immediately after, that make this clear beyond all doubt. I realise that nobody has seen any of this, so it is still possible to imagine all sorts of things but reality is very clear.
Now note that the 200+ Latin classics (etc) were not the Jesuits' main concern. If they were, they would not have sold them.
There are letters dated 1912, explaining that the Jesuits could get a lot more money by selling all of these to private book sellers, but that would simply be too much of a risk towards exposure. This is one clear example for the need of secrecy. Voynich had made an offer of 100,000 Lire for the 200 books, but the Vatican paid only 50,000 for a much larger set including these 200.
The real concern was this:
the Jesuits had about 2000 (or more?) manuscripts related to their origins. Autographs from their own founders, the origins of their philosophies, their important professors. At least one of them was declared a Saint. Everybody here knows about Kircher, but that is just because of the Voynich MS. He was very far down on the list of important historical Jesuits (not to mention that he was a very unusual one).
These books stayed in Villa Torlonia until 1919, when they lost control over the villa, and secretly moved them back into Rome.
All three cases: the sale of 30 books to Voynich, over 300 books to the Vatican, and the move of the thousands of books into Jesuit archives, were coordinated by a Jesuit called Tacchi Venturi.
When he was asked in the 1920's about the Kircher correspondence that is mentioned in the 1678 catalogue of Kircher's museum, he said that he did not know about it, and it was probably lost.
That was a lie in order to still keep the whereabouts of this collection secret.
I don't know when it stopped being a secret.
Again, some of the books Voynich had sold were recognised as being from the Collegium Romanum, already before Voynich's death. The Vatican published their collection in 1959 but state that they don't know where they had been kept.
In 2012, the day we met before the Mondragone conference, I had spoken with the MS librarian of the National Library in Rome (BNCR). This library should have owned the entire Jesuit library, and she expressed her opinion to me that the Jesuits had been quite dishonest in keeping all these books. But that seems to be it for now.