The book is named after its discoverer, the eccentric Lithuanian-born Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, whose biography is anything but typical. But if judging a book by its cover were ever misguided, it’s particularly wrong to do so with this manuscript, which, as far as we know, has never been decoded, though not for a lack of effort. Roughly 10 by 7 inches, its 234 pages-some have been lost since its original composition-are bound by a limp vellum, the Renaissance counterpart to today’s paperback. But that kind of analysis would require someone to pull off a literary feat that has thus far proven impossible: reading it.Īt first glance, the Voynich Manuscript is rather unassuming it’s “unglamorous, even somewhat shabby,” writes Eamon Duffy in The New York Review of Books. This might well be true of the Voynich Manuscript Eco was so taken with-maybe its story is as old and banal as any other. Perhaps as he examined the Voynich Manuscript, turning its 600-year-old pages over in his hands, he recalled his own words from his 1980 novel: “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” Perhaps the late Italian novelist wanted to see the manuscript because it, like his masterpiece The Name of the Rose, is something of a literary puzzle requiring its would-be interpreters to be equally proficient in medieval history, semiotics and good old-fashioned detective work. When author Umberto Eco visited Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in the fall of 2013, he asked to examine only one text: Manuscript 408, popularly known as the Voynich Manuscript. A conference is planned to take place in Hildesheim this August for scholars to discuss the breakthrough.Print has been acquired by an independent group of collaborators-Deb Aldrich, Laura Des Enfants, Jessica Deseo, Andrew Gibbs, Steven Heller and Debbie Millman-and soon enough, we’ll be back in full force with an all-new look, all-new content and a fresh outlook for the future! In the meantime, we’re looking back at some of our favorite pieces from PRINT magazine, such as this one by Brandon Ambrosino. Since 1969, the manuscript has been kept in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. It had earlier belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and probably John Dee, the infamous astrologer at British Queen Elizabeth I’s court. The Voynich Manuscript came to light in 1912, after Wilfrid Voynich, a rare books dealer in London, bought the manuscript in Italy. Even the name of the manuscript’s author remains a mystery. However, without the ability to read the text, its true content has remained elusive. Scholars have used these illustrations to organise the manuscript’s content into six major sections: botanical, astronomical and astrological, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and recipes. The word-structure leaves only one possible explanation: the manuscript was not composed in an Indo-European language.”Ī page from the Voynich Manuscript Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale UniversityĪdding to the mystery, the manuscript’s 240 vellum pages bear illustrations of plants, floating heads, signs of the zodiac, fantastic creatures (including dragons), castles, women bathing, and astronomical symbols. “A lot of languages were proposed, such as Latin, Czech, or amongst others Nahuatl (spoken by the Aztecs), just to name a few. “Countless decipherment attempts were made,” Hannig writes in an article in German explaining his methodology. Now, after three years of analysis, the German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig from the Roemer -und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, believes he has cracked the code to translating the work, and found the manuscript's language to be based on Hebrew. Because of the many mysteries surrounding its content, it has featured in TV shows, books, music, and even video games. Will the Voynich Manuscript, an early 15th century document kept at Yale University and known as the world’s most mysterious book, finally reveal its secrets?Īny attempts to decipher the manuscript's unique text, made up of a mixture of handwritten Latin letters, Arabic numbers, and unknown characters, have so far failed.
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