“THE JULY 1921 ISSUE of Harper’s featured an article provocatively titled “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World,” written by one John Matthews Manly, a professor of English at the University of Chicago.”
““Few literary discoveries in our time,” wrote Manly, “have excited a keener or more widely spread popular interest than those connected with the mysterious volume brought to light nine years ago by Mr. Wilfrid M. Voynich.””
“The volume, which came to be known as the Voynich Manuscript, was an early 15th-century codex written in an entirely invented script, its pages adorned by illustrations of plants, stars, and astrological formations with no known analogues in the observable world.”
“Manly was able to convince Newbold’s supporters that his “unsystematic re-arrangement of letters” could not, in fact, be the long-awaited key. Newbold’s very public failure appeared to dissuade would-be cryptographers from entering the arena for some time. The mystery that had survived for five centuries would live on for another.”
“Despite its virtually never leaving the Beinecke Library, curator Raymond Clemens believes it to be “one of the most viewed and discussed artifacts from the medieval period, perhaps second only to the shroud of Turin.””
“The publication of Yale University Press’s The Voynich Manuscript — the first-ever authorized edition available to the public — allows a new generation of acolytes to gain access to this most mysterious of bequests.”
“Scholars have traditionally divided the book into four sections. The first is the aforementioned herbology, which comprises roughly half the text; while the plants might appear to be legitimate specimens to the untrained eye, not a single one exists in the natural world. The second section is astrological — a series of invented zodiacal circles on fold-out pages. Next, in the balneological section (related to healing baths), we reach what are perhaps the book’s strangest and most discussed illustrations: pages of naked women in blue and green pools or aquifers, connected to one another by a series of tubes that stretch around the pages’ borders and snake through the text itself, looking for all the world like medieval waterslides. These are believed to be related in some fashion to alchemical practice, though, as with so much else, they remain something of a mystery. The fourth and final section is referred to as a pharmacology, as it seems to comprise a selection of herbal recipes featuring the fictional plants from the book’s first half.”
“Of course, a mere description of the book’s enigmatic contents cannot answer the more interesting, if necessarily abstract, question: what does it actually mean to “read” the manuscript? That depends, I think, on one’s appetite for opacity.”
“I myself found that much like, say, Finnegans Wake, the volume’s incomprehensibility did not preclude it from providing a rich aesthetic experience.”
“The book was passed among the 17th-century Prague intelligentsia — mathematicians, lawyers, diplomats — and finally landed in the hands of an obscure alchemist named Georgius Barschius, who wrote, “there was in my library, uselessly taking up space, a certain riddle of the Sphinx.””
“Following Barschius’s death, the book dropped out of the historical record for 250 years, until Voynich himself procured it in 1912.”
“The story of Wilfrid M. Voynich adds a touch of glamour, intrigue, and even danger to the manuscript’s already colorful history. Arnold Hunt’s biographical essay, included in this edition, paints the portrait of an ambitious, erudite eccentric, a “lovable rogue” with “an undertow of deviousness.””
“In 1903, as the Jesuits were arranging the sale of roughly 380 manuscripts to the Vatican Library, Voynich somehow managed to come away with a small subset of the lot, “under conditions of absolute secrecy.” His share included the now-eponymous cipher text.”
“Today, the Voynich remains as impermeable as ever; indeed, it has seemingly foiled the armaments of modernity itself.”
“None have come close to arriving at a solution. The Voynich Manuscript Study Group, headed by Friedman, left its own opinion concealed in a complex anagram, the solution to which was not to be revealed until Friedman’s death. When he passed away in 1970, the message was published by Philology Quarterly: “The Voynich MS was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type.””
“Mystery, too, is a universal language — and is the true lingua franca of the Voynich Manuscript’s admirers.”
“For a modern reader, habitualized to Google’s painless and ever-present answers, incomprehensibility becomes a form of enchantment.”
“We revere the Voynich, I think, only insofar as it eludes us. The purpose of this new edition, then, is not to provide definitive answers. Instead, as the historian Deborah Harkness has it, the book is offered as an invitation “to join us at the heart of the mystery.””
“Despite its pages of cramped writing and sprawling illustrations, the Voynich is perhaps the ultimate carte blanche — the purest form of philological fantasy, a canvas vast enough to contain dreams, conspiracies, hunches, and prophecies. In the company of such rich human engagement, a solution — if one should exist — is merely incidental. May the mystery live on.”
“Dustin Illingworth writes about books and culture for the Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and many others sites and publications. He is the managing editor of The Scofield, a contributing editor for 3:AM Magazine, and a staff writer for Literary Hub.”