The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[proto57]

If you can reference me to McCrone's paper, thanks 

Hi Mauro: You can download the McCrone report from here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The main report is voynich_analysis.pdf The others on that list are various microphotographs and such which were supposed to accompany the report, and never were released for some reason. With some patience... last year? This spring?... the Bienecke finally realized they did, indeed, have these reports.

Anyway, read You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. if you think you would find it interesting or informative. But in it, I quote McCrone, and outlay the reasoning we know this marginalia and the main inks are the same. But first I wrote, "After matching up the sample numbers with the pages they were taken from, it turned out that sample 16, from the marginalia’s “black ink on text”, was included in the reports conclusion". Then I quoted McCrone's report:

“All of the inks used for text or drawing were identified as iron gall inks. The variability of the amounts of iron present is not unusual in iron gall inks. We found no significant differences between the writing inks and the drawing inks used throughout the document and tentatively conclude that the text and drawings were most likely created contemporaneously.”

And I added, "And Barabe also concluded that certain quire and page numbers were different than the main text inks, telling us that if the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ink were different, we would have been so informed. In effect, the conclusion tells us that the marginalia was applied “contemporaneously” with the main text ink! And there was my “smoking gun”, and the root cause of the paradigm shift from “marginalia added sometime later, by some later person”, to “marginalia added by the Voynich author, or from his/her inkwell”."

You see, I had actually noted the above "shift" in the given story, and wondered why this happened... which then caused me to look critically at the McCrone report... and saw that someone else had quietly noted the same thing I outline here, about the ink being the same, and that was the reason the story was changed. I mean, no one else said, "Guess what!" about this ink revelation, they just changed the story to fit the new information.

No matter, it is what it is. And I do know all... at least most... or the objections to my personal implications of all of this, and listed some of them in the other comment. You may have others... in any case, it is an interesting example of the live nature of this research, each time you peel back the layer of the onion, you might find something new.

Rich