Re: Jacobus' signature

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Karl Kluge wrote:

> Rene wrote:
> 
> > Personally, I never saw anything suspicious in the Jacobus signature. Surely
> > enough, I have toyed with the idea that the whole MS was a modern fake, but
> > it would also mean that the Marci letter in the VMs, at least one more Marci
> > letter and the Baresch letters are all fakes as well. And the Baresch letter
> > does fit into the pagination. And it is included in the index of APUG 557 so
> > that would have to be a fake as well...
> 
> That was my initial reaction as well...but what if a forger read that letter
> and constructed a fake MSS to fit, then forged the Marci letter in the
> expectation it would lead back to Baresch?

No.  (I say with calm assuredness :-) 

Such a forger would have lived in the Jesuit community in the decades
prior to 1912. If he had access to Kircher's letters (a prerequisite) he
must have been a Jesuit of the Villa Mondragone, or before that at the
Collegium Romanum. If he forged the Marci letter, he must have known
that
Marci once inherited the alchemical library of the otherwise completely
unknown Georg Baresch. This is a detail contained in the Prague
civil records. It is just not credible that the forger could have known
this. 
So the Marci letter is real. And one can still see how it was folded 
and glued into the Voynich MS, therefore the Voynich MS is also real.

Besides, I think that this is one case where Occam's razor can
be applied with success. The proposed alternative scenario
is infinitely more inexplicable than that of a simple medieval
MS we happen not to be able to read, but the existence of which has
been recorded in a few places. 

The other question about the alternative scenario is:

Why on Earth ???


Cheers, Rene