The Voynich manuscript is a substantial document in what appears to be ciphertext, which has resisted decipherment since its appearance around 1600. It has long been suspected that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax; however, the linguistic complexity of the manuscript has previously been considered good reason for rejecting the hoax hypothesis. The manuscript also contains many unusual linguistic features, and previous research has failed to produce a plausible mechanism for generating substantial bodies of text with these features. This article describes how sixteenth century cryptographic techniques can be adapted to generate text similar to that in the Voynich manuscript. This method can be used either to generate gibberish for a hoax, or to encode plaintext in a decodable cipher. Preliminary results suggest that a document the size of the Voynich manuscript could be produced by a single hoaxer in two or three months. It is concluded that the hoax hypothesis is now a plausible explanation for the Voynich manuscript.