(10-11-2025, 12:51 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While we do not have records for every single step in how Voynich obtained the MS and the Marci letter, this alternative scenario creates an additional list of unexplained steps. Some of them are not only unexplained, but either unlikely
Another way of saying the same thing is "both scenarios include one or more steps for which there is no good evidence" ...
Quote:or contradicted by other evidence
I still don't see this evidence, sorry.
Quote:Also, it is one thing to consider that Voynich lied about the provenance of some of his books (for good reasons, as we know), planting a fake signature in a genuine book is quite a different step.
There is one reason why our probabilities are so different. You think, a priori, that it is very unlikely that Voynich would be sleazy enough to do such thing. I think it is far from unlikely. Say, 20% probability.
Quote:The question of course has to be: "why?"
To make it easier to convince buyers that (1) MS408 was BookA (the book that Marci sent to Kircher), that (2) BookA was indeed the "600 ducats" book cited by Raphael ("BookC"), and hence that (3) MS408 was a Bacon original.
Without that signature, there would be no evidence of 1 other than Voynich's word that Marci's letter was attached to MS408 when he acquired it. Even if the buyer believed 1, he may well have hesitated before spending a million bucks based only on Raphael's statement -- on which Marci himself had "suspended his judgement".
Voynich probably never found out that Barschius had worked at the court of Bohemia. (Was Rafal who found that out, ~25 years ago?) But (see below) he knew that Sinapius did, and was highly regarded by Rudolf II. The signature of Sinapius on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. would make both 1 and 2 much more likely.
Quote:[The BST] would also have required him to:
- know who was Jacobus de Tepenec
- know how he numbered his books
There is no evidence that he did.
And there is no good evidence that he did not, either.
In his letters to Garland (IIRC), he says that he researched the people who frequented the court of Rudolf II (specifically, not just Rudolf I) until he found Dee. He also says that he knew about Sinapius, but claimed that he did not know he was the same person as Jacobus Tepenecz. Was this last part true, or just another one of his lies -- to create an "alibi" of sorts if someone suspected him of having forged the signature?
To forge the You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. signature, he naturally needed a sample to copy from. A sample of Jacobus's signature would not be enough; it had to be a copy of one of his ex-libris. A few such books still exist. Is it impossible that he obtained one of those books, or a photo of the ex-libris from one of them?
And it would not have to be
Sinapius, specifically. For the above purpose, he had to forge an ex-libris of anyone in the court of Prague who could have taken BookA out of the royal library. Preferably not too famous (like Ticho Brahe) but still important enough to receive a book as gift from the Emperor. In this theory, Sinapius was just the one among those candidates whose ex-libris he managed to get a copy of.
Quote:I am not sure if you are aware that there are photos of the first page before Voynich's chemical treatment and after.
I know that there are such photos. But what do they show? Is the signature more legible after the treatment? Or maybe
less legible?
And did Voynich show those photos to anyone before his death? Did he ever mention the signature in public, or in private?
Quote:The alternative scenario does not explain how and where Voynich acquired the Marci letter.
The only evidence that he acquired it from the Jesuits is his own word. So the Standard Path Theory (SPT) provides an explanation, but without good evidence.
One could add to the BST the claim that he obtained the letter from a castle in Austria. Then the BST and the SPT would be in exactly the same footing on that point: both with an "explanation" for how Voynich got the letter, both with no evidence for it other than Voynich's word...
Quote:We know it was never included in the carteggio, because each volume has an index listing all letters.
And that fact is one detail that casts doubt on the SPT...
Quote:I am also quite sceptical that this letter presented huge monetary value, but we can leave that aside.
The letter itself had little value. But a lost Bacon original would be worth millions. According to the SPT, the letter convinced Voynich that the MS408, attached to the letter, was a Bacon original. In the BST, either he got the letter without any book attached, or the book it was attached to was obviously not a Bacon original; but then he decided to use the letter to sell some other book as a Bacon original.
Quote:It also does not explain where he got the Voynich MS.
Either he happened to have MS408 already, or discreetly hunted for a suitable book -- one that could pass for 13th century, and fit the description of BookA; and eventually found MS408.
Quote:Many things that are easily explained in the normal scenario now become minor or major coincidences: - He obtained the MS and the other books from the Jesuits in the same year
We have
no evidence that he obtained either BookA or MS408 from the Jesuits.
Quote:- The cover of the MS matches the covers of the other books he acquired from the Jesuits, and the books that the Vatican acquired. (This is not hard proof, but it is just one of several things that now become a coincidence, and the regular story has to be preferred).
It is not a coincidence. Once he decided to pass MS408 as BookA, he had to make it seem like it had come from Kircher, which implied it had come from the Jesuit collections. He got "30-ish" books from the latter. Couldn't he have reused the cover of one of them for MS408?
AFAIK the glue used in the current binding of MS408 has not been C14-dated yet. Has it?
In fact, could he have bought those "30-ish" books from the Jesuits just to obtain a cover for the MS408 -- both in the literal and in the metaphorical sense?
And the BST includes the possibility that Voynich
did buy MS408 from the Jesuits, but it was not the book attached to the letter. Or that MS408 was attached to the letter when Voynich bought it, but it was some Jesuit librarian who had attached the letter to MS408 by mistake, instead of the true BookA, because it seemed to fit the description in the letter.
Quote:The remarkable match between Barschius' description and the Voynich MS now becomes a huge coincidence.
Again, it is not a coincidence. Once Voynich conceived the plan to use Marci's letter with a book that was not BookA, he had to know what Barschius and others could have said about BookA. That meant scanning Kircher's correspondence for letters from Barschius. He could have done that in person or through a frendly Jesuit. Fortunately for him, the description of BookA in Barschius's letter to Kircher was rather vague.
Quote:The entry in the Jesuits' catalogue of books sold to the Vatican, which Ruysschaert matched with the Voynich MS, now becomes a loose end. Not impossible, but:
+ it is the only one in the entire list without author or title (check)
+ it is listed as from the 15th century (check)
+ it is listed as being on parchment
If the book in that entry ("BookE") was MS408, how did the Jesuits conclude that it was from the 15th century? If it had Marci's letter attached, why didn't that entry mention it, nor any information contained it it? If the cataloguer saw the letter and trusted Rapahel's claim, he should have written 13th century. If he went only by the date of the letter, he should have written "17th century or earlier".
Was there some other material attached to BookE, like someone's evaluation of the date based on style etc. that concluded "15th century"? Or was there something else in BookE, or attached to it, that definitely established a 15th century date, and hence excluded a Bacon authorship?
Quote:All of this becomes unnecessary when we accept that Voynich bought the MS from the Jesuits with the Marci letter inside.
But, again, there is no evidence for this claim that does not depend on Voynich's word.
And, again, I do not think the BST is more likely than the SPT. Just that it is far from being "very unlikely".
All the best, --stolfi
PS. Between ~2012 and ~2023, my major "internet hobby" besides Wikipedia was following the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, and (unsuccessfully) trying to warn the world against those scams. In that world, anyone who is not an unscrupulous scammer is a juicy gullible mark, totally ignorant of finance and computing. It was mostly the stories of the scams that keep me interested in that topic.
Among the many crypto scammers, basic and advanced, there is an Australian called Craig S. Wright who I would place in the same league as Lustig and Madoff. He claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and there seems to be many who believe him -- even though he has shown time and time again that he does not know math or computing even at the high school level. His story (including why he decided to become Satoshi) is amazing, but unfortunately too long to even summarize here.
For this thread, what matters is that at some point he told the Australian Tax Office that he owned the 5th largest supercomputer in the world, and "proved" it by having it previously entered in a list of top supercomputers maintained by some professors at Berkeley. He even posted a video on YouTube describing his supercomputer, complete with a piechart on a monitor showing in real ltime how processors had been allocated to various tasks, and an interview with a "grad student" who was developing software for it. He also taught a lab course on parallel computing at a major Australian university, as an invited lecturer, where the last lab assignment involved logging remotely into his supercomputer. (I got the syllabus of the course, and it is hlarious.) And he forged a letter from a major computer manufacturer, letterhead and all, "proving" that he had bought the hardware from them and had contracted them for support and maintenance. Needless to say, he never had more than a few ordinary PCs.
Then, when it became necessary to tell the ATO that he was Satoshi, he planted some backdated emails in some obscure forum, and had two reporters "accidentally" find those emails and publish what they thought was the scoop of the century.
I am telling this to show that, once a scammer decides to do a scam, he will strive to make the most amazing coincidences happen in order to support it. Thus, when considering whether something is a fraud, one cannot argue "this would have been too much of a coincidence" or "he would not have dared to do that"...