Now listen to part of a lecture on the topic you just read about.

None of the three people mentioned in the reading was probably the author of the Voynich manuscript.

According to the first theory, whoever wrote the Voynich manuscript thought they were conveying information so important or so powerful that they used a special code to keep it secret. That doesn’t fit what we know about Anthony Ascham. Ascham was just an ordinary physician and scientist whose books didn’t contain any original ideas. For instance, the Little Herbal mentioned in the reading was a description of common plants based on other well-known sources. So, given what we know about Ascham, his books, and the kind of knowledge he had, it seems unlikely he was the author of such an elaborately coded, secret document.

Second, although Edward Kelley was notoriously good at tricking people, it seems unlikely that he created the Voynich manuscript as a fake magical book to sell to some rich people. You see, the creator of the Voynich manuscript took a lot of care to make the text look like a real code; but people in the sixteenth century were quite easy to fool, so it was not necessary to make something this complex. If Kelley wanted to create a fake for money, there’s no reason he would’ve put so much work into creating a manuscript like this when a much simpler book would have suited his purpose just as well.

Third, we’ve been able to date the manuscript materials using modern methods—both the vellum pages and the ink on the pages. Both the vellum and the ink are at least 400 years old. That rules out Voynich as the author. If Voynich wanted to create a fake, maybe he could use vellum pages taken from some old manuscripts, but where would he get 400-year-old ink? So it seems the manuscript was created centuries before Voynich obtained it.