The Book Switch Theory

[Jorge_Stolfi]

This diagram attempts to summarize the main points of evidence for the provenance and to highlight where lie the tenuous connections, that are so relied on.

Thanks for the neat diagram!

I have three quibbles.  First, the C14 date suffers from the "Scottish Cow" fallacy.  What was dated was only the vellum of a single folio. That is only a lower bound for the time when the book was written.  But it is quite possible that:

• the manuscript was written over a period of, say, 50 years.
  
• the author used vellum that had been sitting unused for decades,
  
• the author scavenged blank bifolios from a pile of old books
  

Given the overall quality of the book, it is quite possible that the Author had created very few vellum manuscripts before this one, or none at all.  Thus his "blank vellum drawer", if he had one, must have seen very little turnaround...

(Moreover, it seems that the C14 date was never published, not even in a conference proceedings. Which is surprising, given how many people have come to depend on that date.  I found an abstract of a conference talk, but it does not state the date. Rene has a copy on his site, but one can wonder whether it can be trusted...)

Second, AFAIK the only evidence that Wilfrid bought the VMS from the Jesuits in 1912 is his own word.  AFAIK, the records of the sale do not mention it.  I understand that there is an unspecified manuscript on that list that could be the VMS by elimination, if one assumes that the VMS must be on that list.  But that entry is not how the VMS should have been described, especially if Marci's letter was attached to it.

Third, Jacobus's name of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was assumed to be his signature because it matched a "signature" on a "numbered ex-libris" on another book.  But there are now several of these, and the "signatures" as well as the style of the numbers seem to be all different.  To me they look a lot like notes written by librarians at the Clementinum or other libraries.  Or a forgery based on one of those books...

All the best, --stolfi