Ben Tue Jan 19, 2010 3:05 am
Does anyone know anything about this?
Voynich Manuscript
In 1912, the antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich bought a number of
mediaeval manuscripts from an undisclosed location in Europe.
Among these was an illustrated manuscript codex of 234 pages,
written in an unknown script.
Voynich took the MS to the United States and started a campaign to have it
deciphered.
Now, almost 100 years later, the Voynich manuscript still stands as
probably the most elusive puzzle in the world of cryptography.
Not a single word of this 'Most Mysterious Manuscript',
written probably in the second half of the 15th Century, can be understood.
Attached to the manuscript was a letter in Latin dated 1666 from
Johannes Marcus Marci of Kronland, once rector of the Charles University of Prague,
to the learned Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in Rome, offering the manuscript for
decryption and mentioning that it had once been bought by Emperor Rudolf II of
Bohemia (1552-1612) for 600 gold ducats. The letter further mentioned that
it was believed that the author of the MS was Roger Bacon (the Franciscan
friar who lived from 1214 to 1294).
Another early owner of the MS was identified by Voynich when, on the lower
margin of the first folio, under special illumination, the erased signature
of Jacobus de Tepenec was found. Tepenec was one of Rudolf's private
physicians and the director of his botanical gardens and he must have
owned the manuscript between 1608, when he received his title "de Tepenec",
and 1622, when he died.
The MS has changed hands sevetal times, and despite some minor gaps in
our knowledge its path from the court of Rudolf to its final resting place,
the Beinecke Rare book library of Yale University, can be traced fairly
accurately.
The MS became famous when, in the 1920's, William Romaine
Newbold proposed a spectacular decipherment with which he meant to
prove that it was indeed written by Roger Bacon, and that Bacon had
not only dreamt of, but actually built microscopes and telescopes.
When this 'solution' of the MS was disproven by John M. Manly in
1931, the MS gradually became a pariah in world of mediaeval studies.
In the 1940's and 1960's the eminent cryptanalyst William F. Friedman
made several valiant attempts at deciphering the MS, aided by groups
of experts, but also he did not find any solution.
In 1961 the book was acquired by H. P. Kraus (a New York book
antiquarian) for the sum of $24,500. He later valued at $160,000, but unable to
find a buyer he donated it to Yale University. Though officially registered
as MS 408, it is still best known as the Voynich Manuscript.