The Book Switch Theory

[kckluge]

OK... I just did a short search... took just a minute or two. And as often happens. I was stunned that, once I did do it, nobody, including myself, had thought to it this way. First I asked Google AI, "When was the name "tepenencz" first mentioned in any printed, published form in history. Did that version of the Horcicky name appear in print before 1910?" And I got the usual, and somewhat expected answer:

I wasn't going to respond, but this triggered a discussion.

This is misleading on so many levels... not even just the anachronistic use of internet resources.

Certainly there are old sources referring to Jacobus de Tepenec.
My biography of him: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. lists a whole bunch of them.
Jorge Stolfi spent time transcribing one of these, and he can comment how unlikely it is that Voynich read through that volume (it was only one of six volumes IIRC).

But the main point is: you searched for Tepenec because you knew his name from the entry in the Voynich MS.
You did exactly the same as what Voynich did after he found the name in the MS.

You got a response from AI within a minute.
Voynich got a response in a few days by mail (from Garland) and a few more days also by mail (from Prague).
 
I don't think I ever claimed that Voynich could not possibly have known the name Tepenec.
What I did say is that he could not have obtained it from Bolton's book, as you have long suggested.
This is because in this book he is never called Tepenec. Only Horcicky and Sinapius.

Again, there is evidence that he read Bolton's book after 1920. There is no evidence that he did before he realised which Rudolf was meant in the Marci letter.

But that's the wonderful thing about conspiracy theories -- we can't prove that he didn't read it before 1920. Of course, Rich also can't prove that he isn't being followed around by a pink-and-purple polka-dotted unicorn that becomes invisible any time he turns around. Which is why understanding the concept of burden of proof and who has it and why it's on the person making the positive assertion (Rich is being followed by a unicorn that vanishes when he turns around) is really critical.

Having said that...in the context of clams that Voynich forged the ex libris the letters to Garland and Prague are assumed to be mere window dessing to get someone else to connect the Jacobi a Tepenecz of the ex libris with Sinapius. In that context the question is the plausibiity of Voynich as the supposed forger of the ex libris knowing that Sinapius (in his signature) and whoever wrote his ex libri (which may or may not have been him in all the known cases) didn't use Horcicky as part of his name. Rich has yet to produce a published source referring to him that way, but of course we can't prove that Voynich didn't pop into the Clementium and manually leaf through the card catalog in the hopes of stumbling across a book that had Sinapius' ex libris. Just like Rich can't prove that he's not being tailed by that unicorn. 

On the subject of the difficulties involved in pre-digital research tracking down manuscripts, a useful Voynich-adjacent data point/case study is the Book of Soyga. This was a "lost" manuscript book that had belonged to John Dee that some people had speculated might be the Voynich Mss. (for instance, Robert Turner in his 1986 edition of Dee's The Heptarchia Mystica of John Dee). Some limited information was known about this book -- on 29 April 1583 Dee says in his magical diaries "...E[dward] K[elley] and I wer talking of my boke Soyga, or Aldaraia and I at length sayd that, (as far as I did remember) Zadzaczadlin, was Adam by the Alphab et therof...", and later Elias Ashmole stated "the Duke of Lauderdale hath a folio MS. which was Dr. Dee's with the words on the first page: Aldaraia sive Soyga vo cor". It was also known that it contained square tables of letters that had been copied into Dee's Liber Loagaeth.

Bear in mind, it wasn't just the fairly small (at the time) community interested in the Voynich Mss. who were interested in trying to locate the Book of Soyga -- there were also academics interested in Dee, as well as the community of practitioners of ritual magic interested in Dee & his system of Enochian magic. So there were a non-trivial number of people interested in tracking it down.

Then in 1994 historian Deborah Harkness, who was working on a thesis about Dee, came across a copy in the British Museum. Jim Reeds then started studying the tables of letter and discovered the algorithm that generated them (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). When he announced this to the Voynich mailing list, I idly poked around using one of those new-fangled "search engines"...and found that someone had made an on-line transcription of the existing physical catalog of the Sloane manuscript collection in the British Museum. While that link has long since gone to 404 heaven, the entry can still be seen at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

MS. Sloane 8.
Paper. Folio. 143 folios. 16th Century.
[Anonymous work on the astrological and magical art.]
Title: 'Aldaraia, sive Soyga.'
Begins: 'Qui conjunctioni naturae passus intendunt, et qui.'

Yep. That's right. Under the title "Aldararia, sive Soyga", just like incipit Ashmole gave. Maunscript number eight. So not buried way deep down the list.

In fact, it was also listed in an earlier catalog of the collection printed in 1782, where it was listed (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) as

Aldaraia.
8. Sive foyga, vocor tractatus aftrologico-magicus.

(that's "foyga"-with-a-long-s), listed in the index under "Aldaraia"

So basically, this "lost" book owned by Dee had been sitting out in plain sight for centuries before Harkness found it. And it was "lost" despite the fact that it was listed in indexes of the Sloane collection. The lesson being that just because something was listed in a physical index in the pre-Internet days didn't mean even motivated searchers were necessarily going to find it.