The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Let's have some evidence that Voynich did anything that is presented as part of him faking it. ... Anyway, the sort of 'evidence' you are looking for simply does not exist for the majority of old manuscripts around the world. There is no need for it to prove that any book is genuinely old.

Today we know that MS 408 is not a Bacon's original.  But Wilfrid tried to sell it as one.  And whatever value it has today derives in part from its "known" history.  Specifically, from having been in the hands of Marci and Kircher, and from having been once owned by Rudolf who would have paid a fortune for it.  

Because of the monetary consequences of those claims, evidence is owed by those who make them, starting with Wilfrid.  Not by those who doubt them.  

For all I know, Wilfrid was quite capable, morally and physically, of doing any or all of the foul play things I listed before.  He definitely would have had a strong motivation to do them, if necessary to uphold the "probably Bacon's Original" claim.  And there are several parts of the Standard Story that are suspicious, to say the least.

I do understand and believe that the Jesuits wanted to keep secret the existence and whereabouts of the collection of books and letters absconded from the PUG (and other Church libraries?) in 1860.   A collection that included Kircher's Carteggio and possibly Marci's cover letter as well as the book mentioned in it (BookA) and/or MS 408.  However:

Why wasn't Marci's letter included in Kircher's Carteggio?  If it was attached to the book, the compiler of the latter may have missed it at the time; but eventually someone must have seen it (at the very last, when and if BookA was sold to Wilfrid) and appended it to the Categgio.

Why did the Jesuits decide to sell those 30 books to Wiflrid? Did they really need that money that badly?  Merely telling him that those books existed would have been a huge risk.  Besides, the sale was obviously a serious violation of Italian law, that regarded those books as property of the Italian government.  The government could have excused them for keeping the collection secret ("sorry, Eccelenza, we were a bit busy for the last 70 years and we forgot to tell you about it").  Not so for selling valuable cultural Government property to a foreign dealer.

(Edit: Clicked some wrong key by mistake and the post was sent while I was still writing it. To be continued in the next post.)