The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World "The Voynich Manuscript"

Description The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World "The Voynich Manuscript"

"The Voynich Manuscript, which has been dubbed 'The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World', is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome, which had been by then turned into a Jesuit College (closed in 1953)."
- Jacques Guy

"From a piece of paper which was once attached to the Voynich manuscript, and which is now stored in one of the boxes belonging with the Voynich manuscript holdings of the Beinecke library, it is known that the manuscript once formed part of the private library of Petrus Beckx S.J., 22nd general of the Society of Jesus."
- René Zandbergen, G. Landini, "Some new information about the later history of the Voynich Manuscript". See "Voynich MS history after 1600" for the most current info.

"The manuscript counted at least 116 folios, of which 104 remain. The folio size is 6 by 9 inches, but some folios are two or three times that size and are folded. There is one large composite of six times this size (18 by 18 inches). Both the illustrations and the script of the manuscript are unique. As long as the script cannot be read, the illustrations are the only clue about the nature of the book. According to these illustrations, the manuscript would appear to be a scientific book, mostly an illustrated herbal with some additional sections."
- Gabriel Landini and René Zandbergen, "A Well-kept Secret of Mediaeval Science: the Voynich manuscript,

"Wilfrid Voynich judged it [the Voynich Manuscript] to date from the late 13th century, on the evidence of the calligraphy, the drawings, the vellum, and the pigments. It is some 200 pages long, written in an unknown script of which there is no known other instance in the world. It is abundantly illustrated with awkward coloured drawings. Drawings of unidentified plants; of what seems to be herbal recipes; of tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs connected by intricate plumbing looking more like anatomical parts than hydraulic contraptions; of mysterious charts in which some have seem astronomical objects seen through a telescope, some live cells seen through a microscope; of charts into which you may see a strange calendar of zodiacal signs, populated by tiny naked people in rubbish bins."
- Jacques Guy

"Prof. Sergio Toresella wrote a paper on 'alchemical herbals' that resemble the VMs in having pictures of fantasy plants and written spells, enchantments, and incantations (although in easily understood plaintext)."
- Dennis Stallings, "Voynich mini-FAQ"

"Dating at least to 1586, the manuscript is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 170 pages. It is closely written in a free-running hand and copiously illustrated with bizarre line drawings that have been water-colored: drawings of plants, drawings of little naked ladies appearing to take showers in a strange system of plumbing (variously identified as organs of the body or a primitive set of fountains), and astrological drawings - or what have been interpreted as astrological drawings. Since the Voynich Manuscript is at the Beinecke Rare Book Room at Yale [catalogue number MS 408], it is accessible to any serious scholar."
- Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival

"Nobody knows, but the many illustrations suggest some kind of alchemy book, that somebody may have wanted to keep secret. The manuscript has several parts identified from the illustrations (although there is no guarantee that these are the subject matter of the sections):
1. a Herbal section (mostly unidentified and fantastic plants),
2. an Astronomical section (with most zodiac symbols),
3. a Biological section (with some 'anatomical' drawings and human figures),
4. a Cosmological section (with circles, stars and celestial spheres),
5. a Pharmaceutical section (with vases and parts of plants) and
6. a Recipes section (with many short paragraphs).
- G. Landini and R. Zandbergen, The European Voynich Manuscript Transcription ProjectHome Page

"An expert in alchemy, Adam McLean, has ruled out the possibility that the VMs is a primarily alchemical text."
- Dennis Stallings, "Voynich mini-FAQ"

"...At the time when the Voynich manuscript was thought to have originated - the late medieval or early Renaissance period-the craft of cryptography was still relatively unsophisticated. Many medieval ciphers were just exercises by idle monks in the margins of otherwise straightforward manuscripts: words written backward, or with the vowels replaced by dots."
"The evolution of European cryptograms was largely driven by the need to conceal sensitive information. The Italian city-states and the Vatican were pioneers in the genre; in 1379, Clement VII, the first of the Avignon popes, had separate cryptographic systems constructed for each of twenty-four correspondents. Other ciphers were used to conceal alchemical and magical writings, which their authors considered too powerful - or too incriminating - to fall into the wrong hands."
- Lev Grossman, "When Words Fail: The Struggle to Decipher the World's Most Difficult Book", Lingua franca, April 1999

"In a well-known text on medieval paleography, list members [of the Voynich list server] have found embellishments of letters in a note that are dead ringers for the VMs' 'gallows letters'. The date of the VMs is most likely the late 1400's because of the script's similarity to a "humanist hand" style that only saw use during several decades of the 1400's, and because the nymphs' hairstyles point to 1480-1520."
- Dennis Stallings, "Voynich mini-FAQ"