Editing Voynich manuscript (section)

== Authorship hypotheses ==
Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript, among them [[Roger Bacon]], [[John Dee]] or [[Edward Kelley]], [[Giovanni Fontana (engineer)|Giovanni Fontana]], and Voynich.

=== Early history ===
[[File:AACHEN, Hans von - Portrait of Emperor Rudolf II - WGA.jpg|left|thumb|upright|[[Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor|Rudolf II]], portrait by [[Hans von Aachen]].]]
Marci's 1665/1666 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his friend the late [[Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky|Raphael Mnishovsky]], the book had once been bought by [[Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor]] and King of [[Bohemia]] for 600&nbsp;[[ducat]]s, {{convert|{{multiply|54/480|600}}|ozt|kg|lk=on|abbr=on}}<!-- see calculation above --> of actual gold weight. (Mnishovsky had died in 1644, more than 20&nbsp;years earlier, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611, at least 55&nbsp;years before Marci's letter. However, [[Karl Widemann]] sold books to Rudolf&nbsp;II in March&nbsp;1599.)

[[File:Roger Bacon in his observatory at Merton College, Oxford. Oi Wellcome M0001840.jpg|upright|right|thumb|alt=Wellcome Library, oil|Ernest Board's portrayal of Bacon in his observatory at [[Merton College, Oxford|Merton College]]]]
According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was 13th-century [[Franciscan]] friar and [[polymath]] [[Roger Bacon]].<ref name="Bacon/Mnishovsky">
{{cite web |url=http://www.voynichcentral.com/users/philipneal/seventeenthcentury/raphael_sentence.html |title=Philip Neal's analysis of Marci's grammar |website=Voynich Central |access-date=8 June 2016<!-- 17 November 2011 --> |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111007181002/http://www.voynichcentral.com/users/philipneal/seventeenthcentury/raphael_sentence.html |archive-date=7 October 2011}}</ref> Marci said that he was suspending judgment about this claim, but it was taken quite seriously by Wilfrid Voynich, who did his best to confirm it.<ref name=Schuster-2009 /> Voynich contemplated the possibility that the author was [[Albertus Magnus]] if not Roger Bacon.<ref name=Zandbergen-solvers />

[[File:John Dee Ashmolean.jpg|upright|left|thumb|Mathematician [[John Dee]] may have sold the manuscript to Emperor Rudolf around 1600.]]
The assumption that Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that [[John Dee]] sold the manuscript to Rudolf. Dee was a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen [[Elizabeth I of England]] who was known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts.

[[File:EdwKelley.jpg|upright|thumb|right|[[Edward Kelley]] might have created the manuscript as a fraud]]Dee and his ''[[scryer]]'' ([[spirit medium]]) [[Edward Kelley]] lived in Bohemia for several years, where they had hoped to sell their services to the emperor. However, this sale seems quite unlikely, according to John Schuster, because Dee's meticulously kept diaries do not mention it.<ref name=Schuster-2009 />
If Bacon did not create the Voynich manuscript, a supposed connection to Dee is much weakened. It was thought possible, prior to the carbon dating of the manuscript, that Dee or Kelley might have written it and spread the rumour that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the hopes of later selling it.<ref name=Winter-2015 />{{rp|page=249}}

=== Fabrication by Voynich ===
Some suspect Voynich of having fabricated the manuscript himself.<ref name=Zandbergen-origin-of-ms>{{cite web |last=Zandbergen |first=René |title=Origin of the manuscript |website=Voynich.nu |url=http://www.voynich.nu/origin.html |access-date=8 June 2016|archive-date=11 February 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180211232255/http://voynich.nu/origin.html |url-status=live}}</ref> As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means, and a lost book by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. Furthermore, Baresch's letter and Marci's letter only establish the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one mentioned. These letters could possibly have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript, assuming that he was aware of them. However, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the June&nbsp;1999<ref name=Zandbergen-history /> discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher as having eliminated this possibility.<ref name=Zandbergen-origin-of-ms /><ref name=Schuster-2009 />

[[Eamon Duffy]] says that the radiocarbon dating of the parchment (or, more accurately, vellum) "effectively rules out any possibility that the manuscript is a post-medieval forgery", as the consistency of the pages indicates origin from a single source, and "it is inconceivable" that a quantity of unused parchment comprising "at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins" could have survived from the early 15th&nbsp;century.<ref name="EamonDuffy">{{cite magazine |last=Duffy |first=Eamon |title=Secret Knowledge – or a Hoax? |magazine=The New York Review of Books |volume=64 |issue=7 |pages=44–46 |date=20 April 2017}}</ref>

=== Giovanni Fontana ===
[[File:Feuerhexe.jpg|alt=One of Fontana's fantastical illustrations.|thumb|upright|One of Giovanni Fontana's fantastical illustrations, c.&nbsp;1420–1430]]
It has been suggested that some illustrations in the books of an Italian engineer, [[Giovanni Fontana (engineer)|Giovanni Fontana]], slightly resemble Voynich illustrations.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://philipneal.net/voynichsources/fontana_cipher_manuscripts |title=The enciphered manuscripts of Giovanni Fontana |last=Neal |first=Philip |access-date=31 January 2018 |archive-date=15 February 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180215201648/http://philipneal.net/voynichsources/fontana_cipher_manuscripts/ |url-status=live}}</ref> Fontana was familiar with cryptography and used it in his books, although he did not use the Voynich script but a simple substitution cipher. In the book ''Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum'' (Secret of the treasure-room of experiments in man's imagination), written c.&nbsp;1430, Fontana described [[mnemonic]] machines, written in his cypher.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/galleryofmemoryl0000bolz |url-access=registration |page=[https://archive.org/details/galleryofmemoryl0000bolz/page/102 102] |quote=Secretum de Thesauro |title=The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press |first=Lina |last=Bolzoni |publisher=University of Toronto Press |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-8020-4330-6}}</ref> That book and his ''Bellicorum instrumentorum liber'' both used a cryptographic system, described as a simple, rational cipher, based on signs without letters or numbers.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cYvjRuLbwRQC&q=Secretum%20de%20Thesauro&pg=PT160 |title=Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance |first=Pamela O. |last=Long |publisher=JHU Press |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-8018-6606-7 |access-date=4 November 2020 |archive-date=18 March 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240318210326/https://books.google.com/books?id=cYvjRuLbwRQC&q=Secretum%20de%20Thesauro&pg=PT160#v=snippet&q=Secretum%20de%20Thesauro&f=false |url-status=live}}</ref>

=== Other theories ===
Sometime before 1921, Voynich was able to read a name faintly written at the foot of the manuscript's first page: "Jacobj à Tepenecz". This is taken to be a reference to Jakub Hořčický of Tepenec, also known by his Latin name [[Jacobus Sinapius]]. Rudolf II had ennobled him in 1607, had appointed him his Imperial Distiller, and had made him curator of his botanical gardens as well as one of his personal physicians. Voynich (and many other people after him) concluded that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript prior to Baresch, and he drew a link from that to Rudolf's court, in confirmation of Mnishovsky's story.

Jacobus's name has faded further since Voynich saw it, but is still legible under [[ultraviolet]] light. It does not match the copy of his signature in a document located by Jan Hurych in 2003.<ref name="ngvideo" /><ref name="Sinapius">{{cite web |url=http://hurontaria.baf.cz/CVM/b12.htm |title=The New Signature of Horczicky and the Comparison of them all |website=Hurontaria.baf.cz |access-date=8 June 2016 <!-- 21 August 2008 --> |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090126223023/http://hurontaria.baf.cz/CVM/b12.htm |archive-date=26 January 2009}}</ref> As a result, it has been suggested that the signature was added later, possibly even fraudulently by Voynich himself.<ref name=ngvideo /> <!-- the following sentence hidden because, without a source, it represents original research or pure speculation: --- Yet the difference between the two signatures does not necessarily disprove Hořčický's ownership, because the writing on page ''f1r'' might well have been an ownership mark added by a librarian at the time. -->

[[File:Voynich Manuscript (158).jpg|thumb|Some pages of the manuscript fold out to show larger diagrams.]]
Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that [[Oriental studies|orientalist]] {{ill|Andreas Müller (orientalist)|lt=Andreas Müller|de|Andreas Müller (Orientalist)}} once played on [[Athanasius Kircher]]. Müller sent some unintelligible text to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt, and asking him for a translation. Kircher reportedly solved it.<ref name=Hurych>{{cite web |last=Hurych |first=Jan B. |date=15 May 2009 |title=Athanasius Kircher – the VM in Rome |url=http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/16-4-2009-05-17/ |access-date=11 June 2016|archive-date=23 August 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130823143143/http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/16-4-2009-05-17/ |url-status=live}}</ref> It has been speculated that these were both cryptographic tricks played on Kircher to make him look foolish.<ref name=Hurych /> <!-- the following has been hidden because, without a source, it represents original research or pure speculation: --- but the Voynich manuscript is on such a vastly different scale to a few signs in a letter that this seems somewhat out of scale for such an endeavour. -->

[[Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky|Raphael Mnishovsky]], the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of the Bacon story, was himself a cryptographer and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was uncrackable (c.&nbsp;1618).<ref name=Hurych2>{{cite web |last=Hurych |first=Jan B. |date=20 December 2007 |title=More about Dr. Raphael Mnishowsky |url=http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/10-4-2007-12-20/ |access-date=11 June 2016|archive-date=23 August 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130823144447/http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/10-4-2007-12-20/ |url-status=live}}</ref> This has led to the speculation that Mnishovsky might have produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made Baresch his unwitting test subject. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected some kind of deception.<ref name=Hurych2 />

In his 2006 book, [[Nick Pelling]] proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written by 15th-century North Italian architect [[Antonio Averlino]] (also known as "Filarete"), a theory broadly consistent with the radiocarbon dating.<ref name="Pelling" />

Jules Janick and Arthur O. Tucker, based on plant and animal identification, and the kabbalah map of central Mexico (folio 86v), argued that it was composed in Mexico between 1562 and 1572.<ref>{{Cite book |title=Unraveling the Voynich codex |date=2018 |publisher=Springer Science+Business Media |isbn=978-3-319-77293-6 |location=New York, NY}}</ref>