![]() ![]() The first supposed owner of the manuscript is believed to be the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who allegedly purchased it for 600 gold ducats ($90,000 today) sometime around the beginning of the 17th century, apparently under the belief that the manuscript was the work of the 13th-century English alchemist Roger Bacon. It entered the historical record centuries old and already unreadable. ![]() ![]() As far back as anyone has been able to track discussion of the Voynich manuscript, there is no history of it existing as anything other than a marvelous, indecipherable curiosity. No one knows who wrote the Voynich manuscript or for what purpose, but carbon dating places its origins between 14, despite Voynich’s claim that it was a 13th-century document. Where did the Voynich manuscript come from? Here are the questions posed by that Sphinxian riddle. Cryptologists across the world have tried and failed to decode the Voynich since at least the 17th century, when an alchemist described it as “a certain riddle of the Sphinx.” Gibbs may have failed to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but he joins a long and illustrious lineage of failures. Earlier this September, scholar Nicholas Gibbs published an article in the Times Literary Supplement claiming to have cracked the code, only to be pooh-poohed by medievalists across the internet. The text that came to be known as the Voynich manuscript is now housed at Yale, and dozens of medievalists and cryptologists study it every year. To this date, no one has successfully solved either problem. “Two problems presented themselves - the text must be unravelled and the history of the manuscript must be traced.” “The fact that this was a 13th century manuscript in cipher convinced me that it must be a work of exceptional importance, and to my knowledge the existence of a manuscript of such an early date written entirely in cipher was unknown,” Voynich said. It wasn’t in any known shorthand or variation of medieval Latin or English or French or any other known language. And not a word of the script was comprehensible. It was long - 234 pages - filled with pictures of plants and naked women and what appeared to be astrological diagrams, and line after line of script. It wasn’t gilded or beautifully illuminated, like the manuscripts with which it was bundled, but it caught his eye nonetheless: It was in code. Tolkien’s Elvish script, but researchers now believe there’s no real evidence for this theory.In 1912, an antiques dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a remarkable manuscript. The article speculated that the manuscript may have influenced J.R.R. I first learned about the Voynich Manuscript from this 2004 Scientific American article (now archived). Although the text could have been written long after the book itself was created, this makes theories that it’s a recent hoax less likely. It’s been carbon dated to the 15th century. Possible former owners include Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish bookseller who purchased it in 1912, but it’s centuries older than that. However, they show nonexistent-or at least unidentifiable-plants and animals. Its bizarre illustrations resemble medieval bestiaries and scientific or alchemical texts. This unique 15th century European document is written in an unreadable text that could either be an elaborate code or nonsense. The Voynich Manuscript is a singularly bizarre and cryptic book, now located in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. More of her work is at, Medium, and Ao3. Her stories and essays-including ones that she wrote as a college student-have been taught in college courses and cited in books and dissertations. Her essays and poetry have been published in Wordgathering. Grace Lapointe’s fiction has been published in Kaleidoscope, Deaf Poets Society, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and is forthcoming in Corporeal Lit Mag. ![]()
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