Comment by GolfPopper
1 day ago
Edward Kelly[1] was in the right place at the right time, and I recall reading many years ago (though I cannot now find the source) some evidence that he was familiar with the Cardan grille[2], which was sufficient to convince me that he was mostly likely the author, and that the book was intended as a hoax or fraud.
These days the manuscript is quite conclusively dated to the first half of the 15th century; the parchment it's written on is definitely from that period, since it's been carbon dated to 1404–1438 with 95% confidence. The general style is also consistent with that dating. For example, medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis writes in a recent paper: "[t]he humanistic tendencies of the glyphset, the color palette, and style of the illustrations suggest an origin in the early fifteenth century" [0].
Edward Kelly was born over a hundred years later, so him "being at the right time" seems to be a bit of a stretch.
[0]: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/keynote2.pdf
I think it's entirely possible the inks are much later. Possibly Kelly erased whatever was on the parchment previously. In fact the drawings might have made liberal use of the original, just to hide that fact.
Which is worse actually. Kelly may have semi-erased an existing valuable manuscript.
The hypothesis that the manuscript is a palimpsest (that is, written on an old parchment that was scraped clean of a previous text; such recycling was common because parchment was expensive) has been thoroughly rejected. That sort of thing is detectable, in fact there's an entire field of research dedicated to recovering lost texts from palimpsests, but the Voynich manuscript shows absolutely no signs of that.
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