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Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

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• Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  -JKP- > 14-09-2016, 05:07 AM

  I think it's pretty implausible because I know a few things about the text, and it would have been impossible to create it without considerable time and effort.

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  Tisquesusa > 14-09-2016, 05:30 AM

  (14-09-2016, 05:07 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it's pretty implausible because I know a few things about the text, and it would have been impossible to create it without considerable time and effort.

  
  In the first decade of the 20th century people didn't have time or couldn't make efforts?
  
  Wow, I didn't think of you a person who would be so young and spoilt by "modernity"...

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  ReneZ > 14-09-2016, 06:29 AM

  What is it a fake of?

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  -JKP- > 14-09-2016, 06:46 AM

  (14-09-2016, 05:30 AM)Tisquesusa Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (14-09-2016, 05:07 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it's pretty implausible because I know a few things about the text, and it would have been impossible to create it without considerable time and effort.

  
  In the first decade of the 20th century people didn't have time or couldn't make efforts?
  
  Wow, I didn't think of you a person who would be so young and spoilt by "modernity"...

  
  Tisquesusa, I know how much time and effort goes into running a business, traveling the world, engaging in correspondence, and searching for manuscripts to buy and sell.
  
  I also know how much time and effort goes into creating this kind of manuscript and I know things about the text that prove it's not random (or created with a grill to make it look less random)
  
  
  I doubt if Voynich had the skills or the time to create a 200-page forgery, so examining his handwriting to see if it matches might be a sensible thing to do simply because it can be done and all avenues should be considered, but I am doubtful in the extreme that Wilfrid Voynich forged it.

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  ReneZ > 14-09-2016, 08:25 AM

  (14-09-2016, 04:29 AM)Tisquesusa Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have some data to back that up? Statistics? Chance of forgery is x % and chance of "real medieval undecipherable badly painted manuscript" is y %?

  
  Some years ago I estimated that x % is probably of the order 0.0001 %
  But it was necessarily a rough estimate, and I believe it to be on the high side.
  
  For the MS to be a fake, three independent things had to be achieved by Voynich:
  
  1) Find an original ex libris of Tepenec in order to put it in the MS
  2) Find some original old parchment, including large foldouts.
  3) Read the Barschius letter that was actually hidden by the Jesuits.
  
  An original and usable copy of the Tepenec Ex libris was first found in 2008 by Andreas Suzler, as the result of an internet search of a digitised card catalogue of the Prague national library. There's no record of Voynich ever having been in Prague, but it is clearly not impossible that he could have seen it. I put the probability optimistically at 1%  (i.e. 1 in a 100).
  
  Original parchment may have been found by Voynich, but this MS has foldouts, one as wide as 5 panels of text, and one 3 panels wide and 2 panels high. As Rich's web site demonstrates, he could have sold the raw unused parchment for a good price, so I estimate the chance that he found this set and used it to create a fake as 1% (again 1 in a 100).
  
  The Barschius letter is the biggest problem of all. The Jesuits were continuing to hide their archive material in which it was included and it probably was stored in a different place. Remember, the Voynich MS doesn't actually exist in this scenario, so why look for the Barschius letter in the Marci-Kircher correspondence in the first place. A very optimistic 1% here (1 in a 100).
  
  The probability that all three independent things are true is the product of the three probabilities, so 1 in a million.

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  Koen G > 14-09-2016, 10:26 AM

  To further decrease the probability we can take into account that a hypothetical forger managed to fool not only contemporary investigations, but also modern techniques and knowledge. 
  
  For comparison, the authenticity of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - an actual fake - was heavily debated from the start. Less than twenty years later, "it was universally recognized that the text was a recent composition". What we also see in this case is that the forgers did not take centre stage like Voynich did.
  
  I'd say this easily adds another zero to Rene's percentage.

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  ReneZ > 14-09-2016, 01:25 PM

  Of course the numbers in my calculation can be ignored. The arguments are entirely qualitative.
  
  The three conditions I listed are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for the Voynich MS to be a modern fake by Voynich. They are just three of many "conditions", all of them unlikely, that all have to be met.

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  Emma May Smith > 14-09-2016, 02:06 PM

  The best argument is internal to the way Voynich dealt with the manuscript. He wanted it to be a lost work of Roger Bacon and stood to earn a great deal of money were it true. Voynich personally selected Newbold to study it, and he agreed with the attribution and spent years working to decipher it. If Voynich wanted his payoff he would have written a plain text that could pass as Bacon and enciphered it simply enough so Newbold would crack it quickly.
  
  The alternative is that Voynich spent a lot of time and money making a fraud which was even then only half-baked. To believe the fraud theory you must hold that Voynich was at the same time a brilliant man and an idiot.

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  -JKP- > 14-09-2016, 05:56 PM

  Ninety percent of the time forgeries are created to make money.
  
  Creating something as out-of-left-field original as the VMS (rather than the kinds of manuscripts that could be reliably sold for good money) would not only be creatively and logistically difficult but would be a gamble.
  
  As Emma pointed out, Voynich (and his wife) enlisted the help of many people in his efforts to solve it. Forgers tend to ask a "friend" (accomplice) to solve something that has been forged so they are not caught out.
  
  
  There are simply too many earmarks for the possibility of forgery to be likely. You need the right inks, the right parchment, EXTENSIVE knowledge of medieval life and documents, knowledge of plants (yes, many of them are real and accurate), significant time, calligraphic skills, drawing skills, and as I already pointed out, significant time to work out the textual system (I'm guessing this process alone took several months) before committing it to parchment.
  
  Do you think a forger would do something nonstandard like starting a series of zodiacs with Pisces instead of Aries? Do you think a forger would cut out pages of the document and forge letters from people in previous centuries about the cut pages? Would a forger draw cancer with double crayfish? There are clever forgers out there but imagination of this kind is not a common commodity.
  
  
  Also, from a purely psychological/logistical point of view, if I were TOLD this were a forgery (if experts had determined it was so without yet knowing who did it), I wouldn't be looking at Voynich's handwriting (other than a quick check), I'd be looking at that of his wife, secretary, and other associates. He was too busy traveling and running a business to spend the many months or years it would require to create this manuscript.

• RE: Where are the letters penned by Voynich?

  R. Sale > 14-09-2016, 06:11 PM

  Tisq, Tisq,
  
  I believe the VMs analysis was performed by McCRONE, not McCLONE. That would be toooo punny.
  
  Additionally there are two points that have been raised in the matter of possible forgery, which have never been addressed by the forgery proponents.
  
  1) The blue mushrooms in the recipe section (f91 or there about).
  The 'magic mushrooms' of European origin were always thought to be Amanita, which is red with white spots. The effects of Psilocybe species, which stain blue when cut or damaged, were not recognized until the research of Gordon Wasson in the 1950s in Mexico. Some decades later, Psilocybe species were discovered in the Balkan area.
  (Investigations by SteveD on VMs-list)
  
  Why are blue mushrooms in the VMs? They would not have have been know to modern science before WMV's death. If they were copied from another source. Where is that source? Wouldn't that source have more value than the forged copy?
  
  2) The Fieschi connection to Roger Bacon
  Based on armorial heraldry, ecclesiastical heraldry and a number of positional confirmations, I have made the argument that VMs You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a representation of the Fieschi involvement in the origin of the tradition of the red galero. Anyone can use the same illustration to make the same arguments. However, in order for appropriate material to be included in the illustration, someone who was familiar with the history of the origins of this tradition needed to take the relevant information and construct the images properly. History records that Ottobuono Fieschi and Roger Bacon knew each other. (Goldstones' "The Friar and the Cipher")
  
  So, given that WMV was promoting a connection between Roger Bacon and the VMs, that the illustration demonstrates valid connection to Roger Bacon, and that the construction of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. requires the knowledge of relevant information, *why* was there never a hint of any of this ever even suggested? No mention of heraldic possibilities whatsoever by WMV. Assuming that he knew what was in the the illustration, having put it there himself, would he never make the slightest reference to this historical connection when it would do so much to support the connection he definitely wanted to prove? It seems very unlikely.
  
  And, again, if copied from some unknown original source, doesn't a greater value reside with the original and not with the copy?
  .
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