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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

  anejati > 27-08-2026, 11:45 AM

  What Koen said: "Forgery" only makes sense if there's a referent; some other genuine thing that's being imitated dishonestly. It's common to handwave and say "a forgery of a herbal" but that just shifts the question to: what herbal, and why.
  
  At least the "forgery of a 13th century Roger Bacon manuscript" theory makes sense on that front, the only problem with this theory is that it looks nothing like a manuscript from Roger Bacon.

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

  Jorge_Stolfi > 27-08-2026, 12:51 PM

  (27-08-2026, 09:48 AM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Forgive me for asking, but how can you say there was only one Scribe, when paleographers have allegedly discovered at least 3 (and up to 5) different hands writing the text?

  
  Charles Fort (1874-1932) was a publisher of Fortean Times, a British magazine of "anomalous phenomena", occult, etc..  He coined Fort's Law of Experts, parallel to Newton's Third Law:  "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert".
  
  In the 1940s, US Army cryptographer and humanities professor Albert Howard Carter examined the physical manuscript and claimed that it was in a single hand.  He based his conclusion on the uniform appearance of the ink and of the pen strokes.  
  
  Unfortunately his analysis was ignored and all but forgotten, for bogus reasons.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. barely mentions it in a footnote, only to comment "It’s curious to me that a calligraphic or paleographic expert in one of the writings I have seen (*) says that the writing is consistent throughout, and is obviously the work of one man. Well, it obviously isn’t, and I don’t see how anyone who had any training could make any such statement, but there it is!" (*) Some Impressions of the Voynich Manuscript,’’ unpublished notes by Prof. A. H. Carter (Former technical historian, Army Security Agency), 1946, p. 1. --Rene 
  
  The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does not even mention Carter when asked about past handwriting analyses. One must ask specifically "who was Albert Howard Carter".
  
  Currier's arrogant dismissal was probably due to his discovery of the two "languages" in the Herbal section, and the assumption -- still unconsciously made by some people today -- that the VMS was created "brain to vellum" -- that is, that the Author composed and/or encrypted the text right as he was writing it on the vellum himself.  
  
  Currier's "Brain to Vellum" assumption may have been reinforced by his discovery of the statistical anomalies at the start and end of lines, which he assumed were due to the encryption algorithm being somehow sensitive to line breaks -- a theory that he called "Line As A Functional Unit" or LAAFU.  A theory that is still widely believed today.
  
  But the VMS definitely was NOT created "brain to vellum".  Common sense and evidence say that the Scribe(s) who put pen to vellum copied the text from a draft.  Carter himself noted that the relative lack of corrections and hesitations was evidence for this claim.
  
  Then there is no reason to assume that the Author of the draft was the same person as the Scribe(s).  In fact, common sense and textual evidence say that they were different persons.  (And those who believe that there were N Scribes must admit that at least N-1 of them were not the Author.)
  
  Moreover, the two Currier "languages" are not different enough to be actually distinct languages.  They seem to be two slightly different spelling systems, at most two closely related dialects, plus different "technical" vocabularies -- as one would expect if Herbal was the union of two separate herbals by different authors.  But, anyway, statistical differences between the texts of various sections would not imply that they were clean-copied by different Scribes.  (Or even created by different Authors.) 
  
  As for the LAAFU theory, it is contradicted by the many pages where the line breaks were clearly determined by the figures or vellum defects.  The statistical anomalies around line breaks are real, but they could be explained as a normal consequence of the trivial line-breaking algorithm, that tends to break the line before longer words; plus the use of abbreviations, and possibly other effects not related to the contents or to encryption.  AFAIK there is still no study showing that these effects cannot account for all the statistical anomalies around line breaks.
  
  The "splitters" who claim five different Scribes have focused on differences in certain details of the shapes of the glyphs, ignoring the much more numerous, obvious, and characteristic details which are uniform throughout the book.  These include the degree and type of the "sloppiness" of the writing (like the bent baselines, uneven right margin, variation of "font" size), and especially the variation of those supposedly scribe-specific details within the same page, or within the same line.
  
  The Five Scribes theory would require that the Author recruited five persons and trained them not only on the Voynichese alphabet, but also on writing it in the same crooked and inconsistent way.  WHY?
  
  (By the way, I have seen statements that "Five Scribes" was the result of a computer analysis of the handwriting. It was not.)
  
  All the best, --stolfi

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

  JustAnotherTheory > 27-08-2026, 03:39 PM

  (27-08-2026, 11:01 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

  
  Are you asking me what the purpose of this particular forgery is (if indeed it is one)? The answer is: "I don't know". But that doesn't remove the possibility of the forgery being real.
  
  How is it, that among all the medieval experts, before the carbon dating was revealed, nobody seemed to agree on the date of creation of the VMS? There were people who said 14th, 15th, 16th, even 17th century origin.
  
  This much confusion among experts, in such a wide range, tells me that this is a possible sign of forgery. The forger was simply not good enough to make it unambiguously represent a single time period.

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

  LisaFaginDavis > 27-08-2026, 04:10 PM

  Uncertainty among experts is definitely not a sign of forgery. It is a sign that connoisseurship is inherently subjective. Paleographers and art historians rarely agree on anything. I was at a conference recently where the paleographers and the art historians were 150 years apart in their attribution of a particular manuscript. Unless there is internal evidence such as a colophon or name, assigning a date and place of origin is subjective. Disagreement happens quite often. 
  
  I have said it numerous times here but I will say it again for the sake of those who have posted to this thread. I have spent dozens of hours with the manuscript over at least a dozen visits to the Beinecke Library over the last thirty years and there is absolutely NOTHING about the manuscript that gives me ANY doubt that it is an authentic fifteenth-century object. Parchment is 15th c. Inks and pigments are consistent with that period. Much of the sewing is original and also consistent with the period. The different layers of provenance are consistent with the documentary evidence about the manuscript's history (the De Tepenecz signature and ex libris; Marci's handwriting on f. 1r; the 17th-c. style of the foliation; 19th-c. Roman limp-vellum binding). 
  
  And I'm going to say this in shouting capital letters because it is really important: NEARLY EVERY SINGLE MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT HAS UNCERTAINTIES IN ITS PROVENANCE. It is totally reasonable for a fifteenth-century manuscript to have an unknown origin or an unknown early provenance. I would be suspicious if it DIDN'T! 
  
  Also, to confirm what Jorge wrote: I did not use any kind of computerized analysis to distinguish the five scribes. I used an annotation program (a bespoke version of DigiPal that I called VoynichPal) to annotate and tag glyph-forms so I could perform the visual analysis manually.

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

  JustAnotherTheory > 27-08-2026, 04:36 PM

  Thank you @LisaFaginDavis for your valuable insights. I stand corrected.
  
  About the "five scribes" hypothesis: how sure can you be that the analysis indeed reveals five different scribes, rather than one (or multiple<5) person/people at various stages of their life?

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

  LisaFaginDavis > 27-08-2026, 04:52 PM

  I can't, of course. But given my decades of experience studying thousands of medieval manuscripts, I feel confident that my assessment is reliable.
  
  Again, as I have often said, nearly anything is possible, but not everything is equally possible. 
  
  Is it POSSIBLE that a modern forger could take the time and effort to meticulously create a manuscript such as the VMS with all of the consistent material elements and provenance recreations and fake documents that would fool everyone who has seen it? Sure. But it is significantly more likely that the manuscript is authentic. The number of people who have seen it in person is quite small, but I have never met anyone who has spent any significant amount of time with the manuscript who believes it is NOT an authentic medieval object. 
  
  Is it POSSIBLE that the manuscript could have been written by one person writing at five different periods or under five different set of  conditions? Sure. But it is significantly more likely that it was five different people writing at the same time. The differences between the five hands are not indicative of one person getting older - the ductus, the way certain glyphs are formed, can be quite different from one to the other. No matter how old you are, the way you write certain letters is not going to change, in terms of stroke-sequence and morphology. If you write an [o] by starting at the bottom and going clockwise, you aren't suddenly going to start writing it by begining at the top and going counter-clockwise. Your handwriting might get sloppier or slant differently as you age, but that is not what we see in the VMS. 
  
  Nearly anything is possible. But for a lot of reasons it is significantly more likely that the manuscript was created 600 years ago by five people working with low-end material using a writing system that is otherwise unattested for purposes still to be determined.

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

  proto57 > 27-08-2026, 05:39 PM

  Hi, JustAnotherTheory: Yes, and I agree with you... and your first two points are ones I have also noted and long written about. You can see how "Great Minds Think Alike" in my post, "The Voynich Has no Provenance":
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  I touch on all your points in there, including that they should have mentioned the naked ladies, and seen the signature:
  
  

  Quote:First of all, there are the obvious omissions of many Voynich features which would better identify it. Where are the naked women, the zodiac, the pipes, tubes and “cylinders”, and so much more. Also, there is no mention of the “signature” of Tepencz, which was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and therefore should have been even more visible to these men.

  
  Which links to my post about that "signature", which really is anything but... however, real or not, the men of the Letters of the Carteggio, yes, I agree, would have certainly mentioned it. I think this strongly implies they never saw it. Well, as you have also stated.
  
  There are many other issues, in addition to these. Among them are that the information in the 1665/66 Marci Letter does not only seem not to describe the Voynich, but that information... the Bacon Rumor, and other information that would have been of PRIMARY importance to explaining the nature of whatever manuscript they were seeing, was left out until the last couple of years of Marci's life? It makes little sense.
  
  In any case, and not even an issue of the genuine nature, or age or origin of the Voynich... I think it is very clear that Baresch/Marci/Kinner/Kircher were owning and/or looking at an entirely different manuscript than the Voynich. I've also spent a great deal of time trying to find it, or at least determine what it may have been... what language it may have been written in, and what content it may have had... I have a few candidates, but not settled on any up to now...
  
  One more interesting thing: This widespread insistence that the- what I call the "Baresh Manuscript", and what Jorge has dubbed "Book A"- the almost universal insistence that it is, in fact, the Voynich, has created a sort of fog in any attempts to discover what that manuscript actually was, or is. This is because, in the few instances when I've enlisted others, or others have went looking for it on their own, and so on, there is (what I consider) a mistaken belief that it would have to look something like the Voynich! No! Of course not! It is probably hiding in plain sight exactly because it looks nothing like the Voynich. It doesn't have to, of course... it just has to have stars, many and many plants, and a script and content which was unfamiliar to Baresch/Marci/Kinner/Kircher in their lifetimes, up to about 1678.
  
  Today, it probably would look hardly unusual to us, at all. We have probably all come across it in our manuscript searches, and thought nothing of it, in fact.
  
  Rich
  
  

  (19-08-2026, 09:55 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As the title suggests, I'm not convinced by our current understanding of the VMS provenance timeline. I've had this feeling for a while now, but hadn't dared to share it.
  
  I'm sure that at this point in the history of the VMS, certain events and letters are discussed as "facts", however I remain unconvinced. How is it that a 15th century manuscript divides so many medieval history experts to such a degree?
  
  My main argument can be split into three points. I hope, despite the "well-established" provenance of the VMS, it will cast a doubt on you, too.
  
  

  1. None of the alleged previous owners of the VMS mentioned any of the peculiar aspects of the VMS. Baresch, Marci, Kircher talked about an unreadable manuscript with herbal and cosmological diagrams. But everybody failed to mention the hundreds of naked nymphs, though. One would think that this distinguishing feature of of the MS would be the first thing to mention in any correspondence. After all, no other MS exists with so many weird naked ladies. Why didn't anybody write: "Hey, help me decipher this manuscript with... 300 b*tt naked ladies from the 15th century". Let's face it, the VMS is not "only" a herbal. There are thousands of herbals. Not one has this many nymphs. Also, nobody mentioned the tubes and bathing scenes either. If I would describe the VMS to someone, especially an expert, there is no way I would leave those details out. Would you?
     
  2. Voynich himself noted the (faded) signature of Jacobus Tepenecz on the front page of the VMS. Yet nobody in the entire known history of the VMS mentioned anything about Tepenecz. For Baresch, Marci, Kircher and others, it would have been obvious that there is a famous signature on the front page. These were not laymen. These were experts. Yet nobody, for some reason, mentions that the personal herbalist of the mighty Holy Roman Emperor himself, Rudolf II, visibly signed the manuscript on the front page.
     
  3. Kircher's letter to Moretus in 1639 says that: "I can let you know that the other sheet which appeared to be written in the same unknown script is printed in the Illyrian language in the script commonly called St Jerome's". But Voynichese is nothing like Illyrian (Glagolitic) language. It is totally different, they don't even have the same characters. Either Kircher/Moretus are totally misunderstanding basic linguistic features, of which they are allegedly era-defining experts, or... they are talking about another MS. Not the Voynich MS.
     

  
  In conclusion, I am not convinced by the currently understood provenance history of the VMS. Not a single link seems to indicate, unambiguously, that they are talking about the VMS. Crucial details are missing from each correspondence.
  
  Are they talking about some other manuscript instead?
  
  If you agree that 99 percent of manuscripts from the middle ages are lost today, then it is vastly more probable that these people are talking about another, lost MS, rather than the Voynich manuscript. 
  
  I think we need to revise the history of the VMS.

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

  proto57 > 27-08-2026, 05:58 PM

  Again, JustAnotherTheory, I have to agree with your points (below), as you reflect many of the elements of my Modern Forgery Theory... quite closely, in fact.
  
  The idea of multiple expert disagreement is an important one... and while it is often claimed, as it was here, that almost all documents do have disagreement, only in the case of forgery does it rise to the level we see here... for age, origin, meaning, style, and on and on.
  
  Also, those "... people who said 14th, 15th, 16th, even 17th century origin" were, and still should be, highly respected. Those who today say that this is certainly a 15th century manuscript are arguing with the likes of Charles Singer, Panofsky, Brumbaugh, Friedman, and more. And then, ironically, while dismissing the opinions of those greats, they need to elevate the Lehmann-Haupt, the cataloger, the one of two who "got it right" (according to believers in the 15th century origin theories). I wrote about this on this post, after being told it was I who did not "listen to the experts"... no, I am one of the few who actually DO listen to them: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  I think they were all correct. I think almost everything they saw in the Voynich is in the Voynich, in the jumbled mess that it actually is. Here is my expert chart, which others have seen, perhaps, but I don't think you have. Totally and razor sharp on target to your point here, and to the subject and content of this thread:
  
     
  
  As for your pointing out that the wide range of expert opinion is a problem, it was and is one of my "Red Flags of Forgery", the subject of a talk I gave at the NSA Historical Cipher Symposium back in the 'teens. Here is the slide I compiled, listing the red flags I found when studying the nature of forgeries. The Voynich hits on more of these points... yes, to varying degrees... but hits on more of them, by far, than any other known forgery:
  
     
  
  Actually, arguably, all but one of them...
  
  Anyway, again your bring up good points, and I agree with you.... and have long agreed with you, even before you brought them up!
  
  Rich
  
  
  

  (27-08-2026, 03:39 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are you asking me what the purpose of this particular forgery is (if indeed it is one)? The answer is: "I don't know". But that doesn't remove the possibility of the forgery being real.
  
  How is it, that among all the medieval experts, before the carbon dating was revealed, nobody seemed to agree on the date of creation of the VMS? There were people who said 14th, 15th, 16th, even 17th century origin.
  
  This much confusion among experts, in such a wide range, tells me that this is a possible sign of forgery. The forger was simply not good enough to make it unambiguously represent a single time period.

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

  oshfdk > 27-08-2026, 09:20 PM

  (27-08-2026, 05:58 PM)proto57 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here is my expert chart, which others have seen, perhaps, but I don't think you have. Totally and razor sharp on target to your point here, and to the subject and content of this thread:

  
  Just in case, here's a version of your chart with a bit more conventional range visuals, if I understand them correctly. I think it makes the ranges a bit more obvious. If needed, you can use this version in any way you want.
  
     

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

  ololololo > 27-08-2026, 09:35 PM

  (27-08-2026, 11:01 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A forgery of what?

  I think it would be appropriate to say “fake”. An imitation of a scientific document, nothing more.
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