The Book Switch Theory

[Jorge_Stolfi]

why the Jesuits decided to sell books to Wilfrid

This is well recorded in the letters that were found in the Vatican, but already clear from a paper written by F.Ehrle. They got significantly more money from private booksellers than from institutions. At the same time it was unsafe to sell all to him.

I understand that, and also imagine that they could not get museums and libraries to swear to secrecy and lying about the provenance.   

But was the amount that the Jesuits expected to get from the sale substantial enough to drive them into what was effectively a crime?   

The sale to the Pope in 1913 could be defended as being just an internal accounting and re-shelving matter within the Church; since, from the State's viewpoint, the Jesuits were just a department of the latter.     Not so the sale to an American dealer.

For me, the sale makes more sense if was Wilfrid who proposed the deal in the first place, and pushed hard to make it happen -- because he badly wanted MS 408, specifically.

I agree that it is hard to understand why he was not interested in [Marci's letter]. I don't think that he was actually hiding it. He referred to its contents (incorrectly) in 1915.  He was only interested in the Bacon origin, and had simply not understood the letter at all. He thought that the Rudolf mentioned in it was Rudolf I, a contemporary of Bacon. He had no idea at all who was Marci. I guess that his Latin may not have been good enough.

But, again, Raphael's remark in that letter was the only thing that could have suggested Bacon as the author of MS 408.  If Wilfrid could not read it, why did he even think of Bacon? If he could barely read it but believed that the "Rudolf" mentioned by Raphael was Rudolf I, that would have been proof that the book was not Bacon's.  And if he did not know about the letter before 1911, why would he have picked MS 408 as one of the books that he wanted to buy?

So I think that, in fact, Wilfrid knew about the contents of that letter, and understood that it was about Rudolf II, before the sale -- and in fact his goal was to get MS 408, because of that letter.

It's only when Newbold was indicating that he could read the text, that Voynich decided to investigate the later history of the MS.

That too is a bit strange.  To sell it as a Bacon lost book, he would have needed a minimally plausible provenance story.  I think that even a stupid rich banker would not have been satisfied with "a castle in Austria"  and "my nose tells me that Bacon was the author"

why the VMS is not clearly described in the records of the sale, ...

Any records of the sale (presumably in the correspondence with Strickland) were destroyed by Voynich.

Sorry, I was referring to this entry in your table:

• Miscellanea | c.m.s.XV / Census 1846 DR II p.1846 | J31
  
• (The estate of [...] Voynich [...], Ms. 8)
  
• Almost certainly 'the' Voynich MS
  

Why was this entry so vague, when all the others were quite explicit?  If the author of that entry was aware of the connection to Marci's letter, why did he list the book as "s.XV" instead of "s.XIII" (as per Raphael's Bacon guess) or "s.XVII" (the only firm date implied by the letter?  

If the author of that entry did not know about the the letter, where did he get that "s.XV" date?  What did that "Census 1846 DR II p.1846" entry (pre-Garibaldi) say?

And where did that note in parenthesis come from?  

Was the conclusion "Almost certainly 'the' Voynich MS" reached only by elimination?

by the way, the other manuscripts were valuable above average.

Which makes the inclusion of that ugly anonymous "c.m." in the sale all the more strange...

All the best, --stolfi