The Mystery of the Unreadable Book - Secrets About the Voynich Manuscript
The Mystery of the Unreadable Book - Secrets About the Voynich Manuscript
By a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
Dear Henry,
I’ve just learned about what may be the most mysterious book ever made, and now I want to travel to Yale University to see it for myself.
The trouble is, I can’t read it.
No one can.
The book is an illuminated codex known as the Voynich Manuscript, a text so thoroughly undeciphered that it has resisted translation for more than a century. Carbon dating places its creation somewhere between 1404 and 1438, but beyond that, its origins dissolve into speculation.
There are rumors, of course. The manuscript is thought to have passed through the hands of Emperor Rudolf II and later Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec, the imperial gardener. But the first confirmed owner does not appear until 1639, when the alchemist Georg Baresch sent samples of its strange script to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, hoping he might succeed where others had failed.
He did not.
After Baresch’s death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci and eventually to Kircher himself, after which it disappeared into the Jesuit archives for centuries. It remained there until 1912, when a collection of books was sold to raise funds for the order. Among them was this unreadable volume.
The buyer was Wilfrid Voynich, a rare-book dealer whose name the manuscript now bears.
Today, the Voynich Manuscript resides at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and despite countless internet claims, computer analyses, and amateur sleuths, it remains unreadable. No one knows whether it represents a lost language, an elaborate cipher, or an astonishingly persistent hoax.
Scholars are still studying it more than a hundred years after its rediscovery, and theories continue to multiply rather than resolve.
If you’re curious, reproductions are widely available, even on Amazon. It would make an excellent conversation piece.
Still, I would very much like to see the original, whatever secret it may or may not be keeping.
xoxo,
a.d. elliott
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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