World's Most Mysterious Book

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated book written in an unidentified language and dated to the 15th or 16th centuries. It bears the name of Wilfrid Voynich, an antiquarian bookseller who bought it in 1912. When the manuscript was initially found, academics and researchers have tried to decipher it. It has been kept in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library since 1969.

Since the language has not yet been deciphered, the manuscript is divided into six sections based on the illustrations: botany, astronomy and astrology, biology, cosmology, pharmaceutical, and a section of continuous text with decoration marking the beginning of brief entries presumed to be recipes. The botanical section of the manuscript's illustrations, which make up the bulk of its content, consists of 113 elaborate, colourful drawings of plants and herbs that are carefully placed within the text. The following section consists of 12 pages of astronomy and astrology illustrations, including constellations of stars, the Sun, the Moon, and some pages with zodiac symbols. Drawings of bare-chested women connected by tubes and what appear to be flowing fluids can be found in the third section.Drawings of nine medallions filled with stars and other shapes make up the fourth section, titled Cosmology. The section on pharmaceuticals returns to plants and herbs and shows what are supposedly medicinal plants. In contrast to the botany section, this one features illustrations of elaborate jars and bottles on many of the pages, as well as multiple types of herbs on occasion. The text has contradicted the images, which are more or less readable (huge amounts of time and effort have been put into identifying the kinds of herbs and other plants). Numerous academics, linguists, cryptologists, and other interested parties have made numerous vain attempts to decode the unidentified script.

The manuscript's exact location and date are unknown, but extensive research suggests that it was made in central Europe, and radiocarbon dating dates it to the early 15th century. Radiocarbon dating performed in 2009 disproved a long-held theory that it was written by English scientist Roger Bacon in the 13th century. The manuscript's initial owner may have been Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who ruled from 1576 to 1611.If Rudolf did indeed own it, one hypothesis was that he purchased it for 600 ducats from mathematician and occultist John Dee, though this theory has not been thoroughly substantiated. The notion that the book was purchased by Rudolf came from a letter written in 1665 by Prague scientist Johannes Marcus Marci (to his friend, an alchemist and a later recipient of the manuscript, Georg Baresch of Prague); the letter was tucked within the pages of the manuscript when Voynich purchased it in 1912. It is known for certain that the manuscript was owned by Rudolf’s court chemist and pharmacist Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenec, who left his signature (detected with ultraviolet light) on folio 1r of the book. The Voynich manuscript’s next owner was the friend of the letter writer Marci, Baresch, who passed the manuscript on to Marci. In turn Marci, before he died (1667), sent it to the scholar and Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher.

The book was acquired by Voynich from a Jesuit college close to Rome in 1912. The bookseller organised a number of manuscript exhibitions, including one that took place in 1915 at the Art Institute of Chicago. He worked hard to decipher the text, enlisting William Newbold, a philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The manuscript was discussed in lectures given in 1921 by Voynich and Newbold, who referred to it as the "Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript" and claimed that it was found in a castle in southern Europe. Hans P. Kraus, a New York bookseller, bought the manuscript from Voynich's estate in 1961, and in 1969 he gave it to the Bienecke Library.Among the many people who tried to decipher the text were renowned World War II cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman, art historian Erwin Panofsky, intelligence specialists, and scholars of chemistry, law, mathematics, mediaeval philosophy, and other fields. Numerous fiction and nonfiction books as well as dissertations have been written about the enigmatic book. Some critics believe Voynich fabricated the book, but the radiocarbon dating of the parchment and in-depth linguistic studies like Marcelo Montemurro's, which revealed distinct linguistic patterns, seem to indicate otherwise. The Voynich's scrript has been investigated for hints as to its meaning and origin well into the twenty-first century.

EARLY History:

According to Marci's 1665/1666 cover letter to Kircher, his late friend Raphael Mnishovsky claimed that Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, had previously paid 600 ducats for the book (66.42 troy ounce actual gold weight, or 2.07 kg). (Mnishovsky passed away in 1644, more than 20 years prior to the transaction, and at the very least 55 years before Marci's letter, the deal had to have taken place prior to Rudolf's abdication in 1611. But in March 1599, Karl Widemann offered Rudolf II books.)

Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) conjectured that the letter's author was the eminent scholar and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, who lived in the thirteenth century. Wilfrid Voynich took Marci's statement that he was delaying judgement on it very seriously and made every effort to substantiate it. If Roger Bacon wasn't the author, Voynich wondered if Albertus Magnus might have been.

Voynich came to the conclusion that John Dee sold the manuscript to Rudolf based on the assumption that Bacon was the author. At the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England, Dee was a mathematician and astrologer who was rumoured to have amassed a sizable library of Bacon's manuscripts.

Dee spent several years in Bohemia with his scrier (spirit medium), Edward Kelley, where they hoped to gain the emperor's business. John Schuster, however, believes that this sale is quite unlikely because Dee's meticulously maintained diaries make no mention of it.

The Voynich manuscript's alleged relationship to Bacon would be considerably weaker if he did not write it. Prior to the manuscript's carbon dating, it was speculated that Dee or Kelley might have written it and spread the myth that Bacon originally wrote it in order to sell it.