The first of these owners was a pharmacist named Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenec, who wrote his signature on the manuscript’s first page. While it is unknown who sold the manuscript to the emperor, at least three individuals in Prague possessed it after Rudolph II, Zandbergen writes.
Marci reports that the manuscript was sold to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II for 600 ducats and that Roger Bacon, the 13 th-century English philosopher and Franciscan friar, was believed to be its author. Johannes Marcus Marci, a Prague physician and scientist, wrote the letter to Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scientist who lived in Rome. Nobody knows who created it or where it came from.Īn essay accompanying the facsimile by René Zandbergen, an independent scholar who runs a website devoted to the manuscript, documents what is known about the manuscript’s provenance.Ī 1665 letter that Voynich obtained along with the manuscript provides the starting point of Zandbergen’s historical investigation. The mysteries surrounding the Voynich Manuscript extend beyond the books contents to its very origins. “We’ve tried to put it in various historical contexts to help historians recognize that it is a product of the medieval period and to get them thinking again about why someone would have produced it.” Unknown origins “The book frustrates medievalists because, like everyone else, they can’t read it,” said Clemens, a medievalist who was not familiar with the Voynich manuscript when he arrived at the Beinecke Library in 2012. It was once believed that 13th-century philosopher Roger Bacon authored the volume. This will be the next best thing to actually sitting down with the manuscript at the library.”Ĭlemens said the facsimile edition is also intended to spark interest in the manuscript among scholars of the medieval period, who have tended to ignore it despite, or perhaps because of, the attention it attracts in popular media. “We’re hoping the facsimile will give people a sense of the size of the book and the way its structures fit together. “Our website provides wonderful high-resolution images of the Voynich, but it doesn’t provide a sense of the book as a physical object,” Clemens said. According to the Beinecke’s web data, about half of all the traffic to the “zoom viewer” tool for its online collections involves pages of the Voynich Manuscript, which was digitized in 2004.
Enthusiasts across the globe puzzle over its contents, attempting to make sense of a text, often called “Voynichese,” that has bewildered some of the 20 th century’s most accomplished cryptologists. The manuscript has appeared in novels and inspired orchestral compositions, including a symphony being written by Yale composer Hannah Lash. Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Library, said the public’s sustained interest in the manuscript inspired the facsimile edition. The Yale University Press and the Beinecke Library have published a photo facsimile edition of the manuscript with explanatory essays providing historical context, including information about the manuscript’s provenance and prominent attempts to decipher it, and describing the results of scientific analyses performed on the manuscript’s materials over the past seven years. The public now has a new way to engage with this enigmatic manuscript. Today, the so-called Voynich Manuscript resides at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it continues to capture people’s imaginations. A final comparison of the Voynich Manuscript and the photo facsimile edition.
#Decoded voynich manuscript code#
While the mysterious manuscript contributed nothing to Voynich’s bank account, its contents have tantalized and confounded scholars, professional code breakers, and amateur sleuths. Several of its pages are foldouts - an unusual feature for a medieval manuscript. Strange illustrations of unidentifiable plants, mystifying astrological charts, and scenes of nude women bathing in green pools, accompany the inscrutable script on nearly every page. Its 234 parchment pages are filled with an intricate and unreadable text, either a cipher or imaginary language. There was one manuscript - a small volume bound in plain vellum - for which Voynich never found a buyer. Voynich’s trove included several prized volumes that he sold for tidy sums to American institutions, such as the Morgan Library, the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and Yale University. The books Voynich acquired came from a collection of 380 manuscripts, mostly 15 th-century humanist and classical works, that the Jesuits had earmarked for sale to the Vatican Library.
Voynich, a rare-book dealer based in London, purchased a cache of medieval manuscripts from the Jesuit order in 1912.
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