Comment by emmelaich
21 hours ago
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.
You're right. I have just read a bit about this[0] and agree. I do still believe that it's possible for the expensive parchment to have been obtained by someone uneducated or "naive", or quack and used by them.
[0] https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispe...