![]() In other words, he had everything he needed to forge this thing-except perhaps the imagination. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of precisely this sort of thing, knew what could be (and what would not be) in a manuscript from the Middle Ages he was an expert in mediaeval ciphers he had his own supply of vellum (even sold it in his shop) and he was an unscrupulous con-man not above swindling a community of monks out of their priceless collection of books and illuminated manuscripts, in return for (his own phrase this) “a cartload of modern trash.” By the end of it, I’d myself come round to the conclusion that the thing definitely is a forgery-and Wilfred Voynich himself the likeliest forger. Kennedy and Churchill’s book has much about ciphers and decipherment about historical figures who may have written, owned (or forged) the manuscript and about all those theories: from the sensible-but-wrong ones, such as that it was written by Roger Bacon in the 13th century, to the wackier suggestions (that it is the work of aliens etc., etc). ![]() But what has attracted worldwide scrutiny, above all, is the indecipherable writing which fills much of this battered little book: far more beautiful than the illustrations-done in a sort of unidentified copperplate, and without a single crossing-out anywhere-this has so far defied all attempts at decipherment by, among others, some of World War Two’s top code-breakers, or by modern computers. This is what has become known as the Voynich Manuscript (after the Polish dealer in rare books who, supposedly, rediscovered it in 1912) and it could almost have been written in a different universe: among those hundreds of plants, for example, not one has ever been unequivocally identified by botanists a couple do look vaguely familiar (“that one could be a sunflower, that one…a violet?…maybe”) but only vaguely, like the botany of an alien planet. Well, alright then, it looks like nothing else you’ve ever seen. In fact, it looks like a lot of things: one section could be a traditional herbal-lots of illustrations of plants, sketched in ink then infilled with watercolour another section has what look like astrological charts…then there are those weird nude-bathing scenes…oh, and the text itself has never been deciphered. Hand-written on vellum sheets (radiocarbon-dated to the early fifteenth century), Beinecke MS408 does at least look mediaeval. » .Numerous reviewers (of this book and others) have outlined the main theories about the Voynich Manuscript, so rather than just repeating them all, I thought I’d give you mine instead. The mystery of its meaning and origin has excited the popular imagination, provoking study and speculation. The manuscript has never been demonstrably deciphered, and none of the proposed hypotheses have been independently verified. Codebreakers Prescott Currier, William Friedman, Elizabeth Friedman and John Tiltman were unsuccessful. The Voynich manuscript has been studied by professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Since 1969, it has been held in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-Lithuanian book dealer who purchased it in 1912. Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations or diagrams, some crudely coloured, with sections of the manuscript showing people, fictitious plants, astrological symbols, etc. Some pages are foldable sheets of varying sizes. ![]() The manuscript consists of around 240 pages, but there is evidence that pages are missing. Hypotheses suggest that it is a script for a natural language or constructed language an unread code, cypher, or other form of cryptography or a meaningless hoax. The origins, authorship, and purpose of the manuscript are debated. Stylistic analysis indicates it may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404?1438). According Wikipedia: «The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown script referred to as 'Voynichese'. ![]()
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