![]() She describes the antique physical book as “small, worn, and drab.” Many visitors report a similar feeling, as if meeting a movie star they thought would be taller. ![]() This association (though spurious!) eventually led Harkness to visit Yale University and hold the Voynich Manuscript in her hands. During her PhD, Harkness studied John Dee of England, a medieval alchemist long associated with the manuscript. Historian and novelist Deborah Harkness introduces the volume in a short essay. Churchill, 2006) and the comprehensive from René Zandbergen (whose article will be featured this Friday in The European Review). Those with larger appetites can use these essays as jumping-off points to books and web-based repositories of Voynichiana, such as The Voynich Manuscript: The Mysterious Code that has Defied Interpretation for Centuries (G. These essays are brief and to the point, satisfying casual readers. The current edition also includes six essays covering the ownership history and physical traits of the manuscript, as well as chronicles of attempts to decode its text and illustrations. So it remains a mystery, now captured in pleasing form by Yale University. If it is a cipher, it does not appear to be a simple one. Yet, there is also much that is un-language-like in the Voynich: long words are rare, short words are rare, and word pairs are rarely seen twice. Different sections are written in different dialects, prefixes and suffixes are clearly observable, and pages appear to have “topics.” A certain Voynich word will show up first on page 50, then occur a few times on page 51, then again on pages 52 and 53, finally to disappear again - the same behavior we might observe in an English word like “Kennedy” while reading the New York Times. But there is a myriad of patterns in the writing. Its 15th-century authors might have figured random nonsense to be the quickest path to a sale. “What do the flowing liquids signify? How about the carefully-plotted diagrams? What do the words and symbols mean?” They may even argue whether “fi” is a ligature consisting of the letters “f” and “I,” or whether it is a distinct letter in its own right.Ĭould the Voynich be a hoax consisting of nonsense letter sequences? Certainly. “What are these strange drawings of things that seem to be alive?” the aliens might say. Today, we look at the Voynich Manuscript as an extraterrestrial might page through one of our modern-day medical texts written in English. Another dealer acquired the still-undeciphered book in 1961 and donated it to Yale in 1969. ![]() Now, it turns out that Ivy League professors don’t know everything, and Newbold’s theory was proved wrong shortly after Voynich died. Voynich was unable to command a high price for the book, despite vigorously promoting a decipherment by University of Pennsylvania professor William Newbold. It re-surfaced in 1912, when Eastern European book dealer Wilfrid Voynich purchased it in Italy and brought it to the United States. If you visit Los Angeles, California, I recommend you stop by the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which maintains a Kircher exhibit). It was supposedly sold to the Holy Roman Emperor in the late 1500s, then made its way to the polymath Athanasius Kircher. The Voynich parchment carbon-dates from the early 1400s. It’s a visually appealing format, and perhaps the publishers also hope that an enthusiast or two will decide to fill the margins with notes and theories (“Good luck deciphering!”). The publisher has also included very wide margins. There are realistic fold-out sections that also mimic the original. The text and illustrations are sharp, with the same ink “bleed through” that one would see when holding the original. The Beinecke Library previously released high-quality scans on the internet this book captures them in physical form. Happily, the Yale University Press has now released a full-color, high-resolution facsimile of the Voynich in the form of a large (9” by 12”) and handsome book. I bit, and by the time I had paged through the low-quality scan, the hook was set. He wrote “Good luck deciphering!” inside the front cover. My first copy of the Voynich was a black-and-white Christmas present from my father. It baffled scholars 500 years ago, and it baffles them today. Stranger still are the 38,000 words of text, neatly written in a secret alphabet. The 235-page document is full of strange illustrations: nymphs in baths, star charts, grafted plants that do not exist on earth. ![]() What is the most mysterious book in the world? Type “most mysterious book” into your favorite search engine, and the answer is unequivocal: it’s the Voynich Manuscript, a 15th-century enigma that lives at the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |