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The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich "Roger Bacon" Cipher Manuscript

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The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious late mediæval text, written in an unknown script in an unknown language or cypher. It reads as if written fluently, not by someone who was painfully calculating each next character, but by someone who understood what he was writing. It looks like a curious herbal or alchemical treatise, full of diagrams of unknown plants, unknown constellations, and elaborate networks of plumbing inhabited by plump, naked, crowned women. The text seems to contain all the redundancies expected in a natural language and then some. It can be traced back as far as the hands of Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit polymath, who was but the first of many to have tried and failed to read the text.

For a time, this book was the best general overview of the history of the Voynich Manuscript. It still is a good one, though it has been superseded in that regard by Mary d'Imperio's -The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma.-

Brumbaugh proposes in this book a partial "solution" that yields texts like ILEXER ILUS YUS PURUS POURLY ILUY YJSUUS PURUS PLUS URICUS. These decipherments have the merit of seeming to read like the repetitious text of the manuscript itself. He interprets this text, though, as "The Elixir is a game, purely, purely a pure game; and European." Even if he has deciphered the script, no doubt you can probably think of other interpretations on your own.

His method of reading seems to involve first turning the script into Arabic numerals, reading those numerals as any of several possible letters in the Latin alphabet. He got this by forcing letters into the script based on his attempts to identify some of the plants in the diagrams, and then attempting to extract a method of reading the characters. His decypherments are occasionally tantalising, but if this is the actual text behind the symbols, there doesn't seem to be much point in further effort. The readings appear to be flawed by the polyvalence of the script he believes he sees.