Is It A Fraud?

Against: It’s such a simple, poorly sketched book.  If it were an important document then why isn’t it better illustrated or bound?

For: That argument cuts both ways.  If anyone were to go through the trouble to make up the volume to sell it to someone, then why didn’t they take the trouble to dress it up more: better bound, more realistic art work, more carefully drawn letters?   It would certainly have been worth much more with only a little more effort.  Why use a complex cipher on such a simple appearing manuscript.

Against: Emperor Rudolph II, the man who bought the manuscript was a fool who was obsessed with alchemy and was probably mad.  He had suffered from nervous breakdowns and made numerous suicide attempts before being forcibly deposed by his brother in 1612.  The man who probably owned the manuscript before him was John Dee, the Royal Magician to Queen Elizabeth I.  He held séances with angels and talked about an Enochian language of angels.  Johannes Marci sent the manuscript to Father Kirchner 1666 who was considered a gullible fool by many.  Who could expect a legitimate manuscript to come from these incompetent, greedy clowns?

For: Judging historical figures is difficult at best, but to get a sense of truth about relatively minor historical figures is nearly impossible—so little information about them is available.  This is both the charm and the curse of historical investigation.  For example, Isaac Newton was considered a religious fanatic and an alchemist by his contemporaries.  Yet today we think of him only as a great scientist—more on Isaac Newton later.

Against: Wilfred Voynich forged the manuscript in an attempt to sell it at a high price and become rich.  Voynich needed money because he was dying of cancer.
For: What is certain is that it is not a forgery crafted by Voynich’s multi-national hand, as carbon dating of the vellum, analysis of the ink by the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago and the discovery of historic references to the manuscript all clear Voynich of any shady dealings. 

Conclusion:  If we cannot solve a problem one way we must broaden our view to include other possibilities. Most of the efforts to make sense of the Voynich Manuscript have made the assumption that it is a cipher: that it is English language text that has been written in some cipher or code, perhaps using multiple methods.  What if the manuscript is written in a new language like hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt or Linear A from the Minoan period of ancient Crete?  Hieroglyphics have only been decrypted with the help of the Rosetta stone discovered by Napoleon in 1799 and Linear A still has not been deciphered.
Now suppose that the manuscript is not the original but a copy of an older one.  Maybe the copy was made and distributed at some ancient time so that someone might find a way to understand it.  Imagine making a copy of a language that you don’t understand.  Think of making a copy of the bible written in ancient Greek when you can only read Latin. Because of random copying mistakes the more times this happens the less comprehensible the text would be.  Instead of looking forward with computer technology to solve the manuscript, we might consider looking backward to the past for clues to what it is. The novel The Renaissance Manuscript makes these assumptions. 

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