What would you NOT LIKE to be the Voynich Manuscripts?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

What, however, was Wilfrid's motive? It seems to me that he did not try to inflate its value, but he might have tried to attract the attention of specialists to it by claiming that it was written by Roger Bacon.

He was an antique books dealer, not a scholar.  AFAIK he (and his successor Kraus) did try to sell the book as a probable Bacon original, for the corresponding price.  

I suppose that he honestly believed the Bacon claim at first.  My guess is that he first knew about Marci's letter, including Raphael's claim, through Strickland or other Jesuits who had access to the hidden stash of Kircher's stuff.  Smelling the book deal of his lifetime, he then convinced the Jesuits to sell him the book, disguised among a couple dozen other "ordinary" ones. 

Whether he continued believing the Bacon origin to the end is more doubtful.  All Bacon experts he consulted must have told him "no way, absolutely not".  

Maybe he went through a process that I have seen happen with many inventors turned scammers more recently.  Like Pons and Fleischmann and Elizabeth Holmes.  Namely, when further research showed that their big discovery or invention was a dud, instead of admitting it (and thus losing all the perks they had obtained from it), or shifting into outright fraudster mode, they convinced themselves internally that the facts were no longer important and that truth was defined by belief, not by external reality.   Thus they just had to continue to defend their original claim, carefully avoiding any thoughts that would have led away from it...

So perhaps Wilfrid did forge the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. "signature and/or removed problematic pages, but all the time telling himself that he was only helping others see what he was convinced was the truth...

All the best, --stolfi