The Voynich manuscript is considered the most mysterious book of the world and also the Holy Grail of codebreakers.
It appeared first publicly in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague around 1600, and the emperor purchased it for 600 gold ducats (approximately 2kg of gold) from an unidentified vendor. During the mid-17th century, it was sent to Rome, to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher for decryption. Then, it disappeared for about two and a half centuries. In 1912, antiquarian Wilfrid M. Voynich discovered it at Villa Mondragone, near Rome in Italy. This year marked the beginning of the modern-day Voynich research. [D’Imperio78] Today it is located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the Yale University and catalogued there as Cipher Manuscript 408 [Voynich_Beinecke].
The Voynich manuscript posed a long-standing, elusive enigma that baffled scholars and defied numerous decryption attempts of preeminent codebreakers as well.
During this century-long research period, numerous hypotheses were created about its origin, writing system, and possible contents. Unknown natural language, artificial language, ciphertext, meaningless hoax, and glossolalia constitute the main branches of hypotheses. As possible authors, the English polymath Roger Bacon, the Renaissance artist giant Leonardo da Vinci [Sherwood02], the English polymath John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelly were considered along with some other candidates. Some scholars assumed that the Voynich manuscript was a latter-day forgery, constituting a hoax. [D’Imperio78]
Its radiocarbon dating clarified that the Voynich vellums were created in the first half of the fifteenth century, most likely between 1404 and 1438 [Sherwood15]. These dates and the date of its first public appearance (~ 1600) delimit a time window of two centuries for its possible creation.
Before this present work, it has not been established yet whether the Voynich manuscript constituted an original document, a ciphertext, or a (meaningless) hoax, and nothing certain was known about its authors and possible contents either.
References
- D’Imperio, M. E. 1978. The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. National Security Agency Report.
- Sherwood, E. 2002. Leonardo da Vinci and the Voynich Manuscript. – https://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_author_da_vinci/
- Sherwood, E. 2015. Radiocarbon Dating of the Voynich Manuscript. – https://www.edithsherwood.com/radiocarbon_dating_statistics_part3/index.php
- Voynich_Beinecke: – https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/voynich-manuscript ; https://pre1600ms.beinecke.library.yale.edu/docs/pre1600.ms408.HTM ; and https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002046