What would you NOT LIKE to be the Voynich Manuscripts?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It seems that Wilfrid Voynich did not have the opportunity to directly prove Bacon's authorship using any methods. The most he could do was to write "Roger Bacon" somewhere. Or am I missing something?

Indeed, the general premise of the umbrella Naughty Wilfrid theory is that there was absolutely zero evidence in the VMS itself that it was a Roger Bacon original.  So, the theory goes, Wilfrid manipulated things to make that claim seem more likely. Specifically:

• The Book Switch theory says that the VMS now at Beinecke is not the book that Marci sent to Kircher. Either Wilfrid could not get that book, or he got it but it was quite obvious that it was not Bacon. So he obtained somehow another book that roughly fit the description in Baresch's and Marci's letters and could pass for a Bacon Original. And attached the letter to it.
  
• The Forged Signature theory notes that, even with the letter attached, the only thing suggesting a Bacon authorship was Raphael's claim, quoted by Marci, that the Emperor had bough the book for a fortune believing that it was Bacon's.  But that claim was probably just a wild guess by Raphael, since he was still a student when that purchase supposedly took place, and he probably never saw that "Bacon's book".  Thus Wilfrid needed more palpable evidence that the book had been owned by the Emperor, and also an explanation for how such a precious book could have gone from the royal library to a nobody like Baresch.  So, the theory proposes, he chose Jacobus as a plausible enough intermediary, and forged what he thought was his signature on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- then erasing it almost completely with chemicals to make a forensics analysis of that "signature" impossible. 
  
• The Plastic Surgery theory says that some or all of the pages that are missing in the VMS were removed by Wilfrid because they clearly contradicted his claim that the book was a Bacon original.  (In particular, I have reason to believe that the Recipes (Starred Parags) section originally had  six consecutive parags containing the exact same sequence of ten words.  Anyone who noticed that quirk would have suspected that the book was a fake or meaningless gibberish. That may be why the central bifolio of quire 20 is missing...) 
  

I still give a rather low probability to these theories, but far from zero.  In fact, after looking closely at the images of f1r, I now believe that the Forged Signature theory is more likely than Raphael's Rudolf Ownership theory...

All the best, --stolfi