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I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

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  • I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS
• I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  JustAnotherTheory > 23-08-2026, 10:02 PM

  (23-08-2026, 06:02 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My understanding is that a number of extremely normal and almost certainly genuine manuscripts would not hold up to the kind of scrutiny of the provenance history the VMS has received---gaps, exaggerations, and outright lies are normal in provenance accounts and it would be strange if the VMS's provenance was airtight and perfectly consistent given when it was surfaced and sold. I would go as far as to say that not all of Voynich's sales pitches have held up lend a certain credibility to his involvement because had he forged it, he might not have been so hapless describing it!
  
  Now, I hasten to say this is not ironclad proof it is genuine by any means, but it does reframe the questions that are being asked about the provenance

  
  From what I've read, Voynich reportedly made at least 3 different claims as to where he got the VMS from, including an Austrian castle, an Italian Villa, and a book collection.
  
  On top of that, he is claiming it contains knowledge that is beyond that of the 20th century.
  
  So according to this, it appears that:
  

  • Voynich repeatedly and knowingly lied and mislead the public for the sake of $$$, 
    
  • In which case that tells a lot about his character, 
    
  • And therefore brings into question some other aspects of the VMS provenance,
    
  • I.e., if he is totally fine with lying in such a manner, what else could he have lied about (letters, signatures, ...) ?
    

  
  Can you really reason all that away with "boys will be boys" when talking about a document of such historical significance?

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  oshfdk > 23-08-2026, 10:57 PM

  (23-08-2026, 10:02 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Can you really reason all that away with "boys will be boys" when talking about a document of such historical significance?

  
  Suppose every single word of what Voynich said about the manuscript was made up, the signature forged and the letter sourced separately. Does this really change a lot? This is genuine ~15 century parchment, judging by the images this manuscript was created in Europe, looking at wear and tear and insect holes going through the ink, the writing appears to be old too. Marci, Baresch, Kircher appeared to be as clueless about the manuscrript they talked about as we are about the Voynich Manuscript. What would materially change if the provenance story is wrong? There are of course hopes that tracing the provenance further in time would answer a lot of questions, but as it stands now, the provenance doesn't affect our reasoning about what the manuscript is and how to approach it.

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  rikforto > 23-08-2026, 11:08 PM

  (23-08-2026, 10:02 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Can you really reason all that away with "boys will be boys" when talking about a document of such historical significance?

  
  I can, on two counts. First of all, I can say that for documents of actual historical import, but second of all, I would not count the VMS in their number. To the latter point, we cannot read the VMS, and from what we can glean it appears to be from a tradition that left no other mark on the historical record. In this way translating it would be of interest to specialists---and it is possible, though I think doubtful, that the contents turn out to be consequential---but that is very different from being significant.
  
  To the former point, I was just telling a friend about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., one of our scant sources for the layout of the Roman road system, and I think it is instructive. We don't know much about its early years, it surfaces in 1494, and the reason we don't know about its time before that is that its owners wanted to conceal what was likely theft. While the details are different, this has contributed to questions about its authenticity. There are gaps in our knowledge of the history of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., especially before it was put into a single manuscript, and I would argue that is one of the most important manuscripts in English literature. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was looted from Mexico and obscured before turning out to be a genuine and contains unique knowledge of pre-Columbian Mexico. All of which is to say that the Voynich is not, at face, unusual in this regard.
  
  Again, I recognize this situation is ripe for forgery---and more to the point, forgers have long recognized this.

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  anejati > 24-08-2026, 04:04 AM

  The forgery story contradicts itself, because Voynich was trying to pass it off as a 13th century manuscript by Roger Bacon (which would have been a priceless find), not a 15th century manuscript by an unknown author. If you want to believe the forgery story, you would have to assume he messed up the forgery, yet also somehow accidentally created something that looked exactly like a 15thc manuscript in terms of art style, clothing style, script style, and so on, and also that radiocarbon dating (which hadn't even been invented yet!) would match the same time period (within 20-30 years!) of the art & clothing style.
  
  It's just incoherent nonsense, sorry. Yes Voynich was a "colorful" character, no the VMS isn't a forgery. Not by Voynich, not by anyone else. If it was a forgery, we'd know. Voynich was just another person who was completely perplexed by the VMS (like Marci, Baresch, and everyone else) and was trying to make sense of it.

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  JustAnotherTheory > 24-08-2026, 08:23 AM

  (24-08-2026, 04:04 AM)anejati Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The forgery story contradicts itself, because Voynich was trying to pass it off as a 13th century manuscript by Roger Bacon (which would have been a priceless find), not a 15th century manuscript by an unknown author

  
  I doubt he could tell apart a 13th centry blank parchment from a 15th century one, with any degree of certainty. After all, he wasn't a human radiocarbon machine.
  
  So even if he did find medieval-looking blank parchment, and wrote the VMS on it, he would have no reliable way of telling what era it came from.
  
  As for the Baresch/Kircher correspondences, as I've highlighted earlier, we don't know if they were actually talking about the VMS. They mention "alchemical symbols" (of which there are none in the VMS) and do not mention any of the special characteristics, like the 300+ nudes, tubes, etc...
  
  OK, maybe it wasn't "cool" to write about nudes back then, but that still doesn't prove that they were indeed talking about the VMS.

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  Koen G > 24-08-2026, 09:13 AM

  With all the emphasis on Zodiac and Q13, we'd forget that the VM is large collection of plant images with some other things on the side. The skewed perception is ours, not theirs.

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  Aga Tentakulus > 24-08-2026, 09:52 AM

  (24-08-2026, 08:23 AM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I doubt he could tell apart a 13th centry black parchment from a 15th century one, with any degree of certainty. After all, he wasn't a human radiocarbon machine.

  
  That’s not quite right.
  It’s not that difficult to find something with the correct date. Birth, marriage and death registers all contain a date for each individual entry. There are plenty of such registers that still have plenty of space left.
  Look up the date, and you’ll have the age.
  
  What’s considerably more difficult is finding the leaflets (such as the Rosette page and the others) from the same period. That’s because they aren’t dated.

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  anejati > 24-08-2026, 10:01 AM

  (24-08-2026, 08:23 AM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I doubt he could tell apart a 13th centry black parchment from a 15th century one, with any degree of certainty. After all, he wasn't a human radiocarbon machine.

  
  Yes this is the point, for the forgery theory to work you'd have to say he somehow found unknown parchment which he guessed might be from the 13th century but was actually from the 15th century, then wrote/drew various things on it that just by accident were all consistent in subject matter, composition, and materials with the 15th century. Even though he wanted the forgery to look like the 13th century. It's nonsense.

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  JustAnotherTheory > 24-08-2026, 10:25 AM

  anejati Wrote:Yes this is the point, for the forgery theory to work you'd have to say he somehow found unknown parchment which he guessed might be from the 13th century but was actually from the 15th century, then wrote/drew various things on it that just by accident were all consistent in subject matter, composition, and materials with the 15th century. Even though he wanted the forgery to look like the 13th century. It's nonsense.

  
  The whole point of a forgery is to deceive. If you are convinced that the VMS is a medieval document, then the forgery is a success.
  
  Let's not forget that before the carbon dating came out, most experts DID NOT conclude that the document was from the 1400s. Many medieval scholars thought, based on the drawings style and contents, that it was from at least after the 1500s.

• RE: I am not convinced by the provenance history of the VMS

  Oscroft > 24-08-2026, 10:38 AM

  (24-08-2026, 09:52 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Birth, marriage and death registers all contain a date for each individual entry. There are plenty of such registers that still have plenty of space left.

  
  There are surely not "plenty of such registers that still have plenty of space left" that exist from the period in question.
  
  I only know about the UK (from a genealogical perspective), but births, marriages and deaths back then were recorded and held by parish churches, and today there are very few still in existence even going back just 200 to 300 years - and we're only about 100 years on from Voynich. In genealogical searches, I've seen none at all dating back even close to the 13th century (which is what Voynich would have been trying to forge if that theory is true).
  
  What was the chance of Voynich being able to find a dated document still in existence from the 13th century, and then gain possession of it from the church (or whoever else had it) to reuse the parchment? Enough parchment for all the pages of the VMS? I'd put it at at close to zero.
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