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LisaFaginDavis · 29-05-2022, 04:05 PM

I'm not sure if I've weighed in on this before, but the actual physical evidence of the manuscript itself makes a modern forgery staggeringly unlikely. It's one thing to argue that Voynich could have found some old parchment and mixed ink and pigments using fifteenth-century techniques. Sure, that's possible, albeit remotely so. But then to also argue that he developed multiple ways of writing Voynichese so that the manuscript would appear to have been written by several different scribes; drilled wormholes that pass through the writing; added waterstains and other damage that overlay the writing and UNDERlay the later foliation; crafted the evidence of multiple bindings; added the provenance evidence in the manuscript (such as the effaced inscription on f. 1r); laid on the layers of early-modern annotations and additions (such as the foliation) in multiple - and correct - types of script that stretch over hundreds of years; etc. etc. It is truly unimaginable that he could have done so in a way that would continue to appear authentic after decades of scrutiny. There are so many physical features of a medieval codex beyond the writing on the substrate, that it is truly unimaginable to contemplate a successful forgery of an entire manuscript.