I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

[proto57]

This is also what caught my interest in the beginning, that the surviving early correspondence involving Baresch, Marci, and Kircher does not exploit a (what should be) obvious Tepenecz signature on the manuscript.

These people were experts of their time. Yet nobody mentions Tepenecz as owner or seems to investigate it further.

Maybe because... it wasn't there at that time?

Yes. And on a related note, the 1665/66 Marci Letter, which Voynich claims he found in his "Bacon Cipher": Like the "signature", all the information which Marci supposedly relates to Kircher in that letter would have been extremely important, and should have been related to Kircher decades before. Why wait until a year before your death, and finally tell Kircher all about the Ferdinand and Bacon and all the other info in that Letter?

Of course all these and related information is, and has long been strongly presented as iron-clad provenance. But very much to the contrary, I believe, when critically examined, it is not only no provenance at all, but even, "anti-provenance", in that it suggests the "men of the Letters" were not looking at the Voynich we know today, at all. They were looking at something else entirely, whether or not the Voynich is genuine, old, fake, new... everything we do know about all of this tells us they were not looking at it in the first place.

Rich

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