The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which has Defied Interpretation for Centuries [Hardcover]

Gerry Kennedy (Author), Rob Churchill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2005

In 1912, Wilfrid Voynich, an antiquarian book dealer, stumbled upon a strange volume, its vellum pages covered in a beautiful but unrecognisable script accompanied by equally mystifying pictures. The codex has remained undeciphered from that day to this. Voynich believed the codex to be the work of medieval philosopher Roger Bacon, others that of the Elizabethan mathematician and occultist John Dee. Whoever created the book—which now resides at Yale University—it remains to this day a singular enigma which continues to defy the best efforts of linguists, cryptologists, and scholars. With the benefit of the authors' exhaustive research, readers can hazard their own guesses as to the meaning and provenance of this most beguiling of mysteries.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'This brilliant, page-turning story makes 'The Da Vinci Code' seem like a slightly lame round of Hangman... Kennedy and Churchill's style is certainly very accessible... this will surely give the Voynich Manuscript an audience beyond cryptologists and internet conspiracy theorists, and that is an important achievement.' -- Scarlett Thomas INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'This book is not, as one might have feared, the bearer of another wacky hypothesis; rather it is a fair-minded, lucid and enjoyably written guide to the various theories.' -- Blair Worden SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchull conduct the reader with straight faces and fair minds, and... an admirable amount of relevant detail, and a more admirable absense of the "My Quest" local colour which has disfigured literary investigations since Corvo.' TIME LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'There's nothing like a good mystery, and here's one that's as impenetrable now as it was when the world first encountered it nearly a hundred years ago... Their [Kennedy & Churchill] exhaustive research... helps readers to make their own guesses.****' WESTERN DAILY PRESS 'They [the authors] are fair-minded and inclusive about the ideas of others, and include a final section in which different experts give their ideas... [a] fascinating introduction to the mystery.' THE TIMES OF ACADANIA (US) 'A facinating paper chase across time and space... [The authors] convey well the eerie draw of the book in a meditation onf the power words have to enlighten or confound.' NOTTINGHAM EVENING POST 'a fair-minded, lucid and enjoyably written guide to the various theories.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'This brilliant, page-turning story makes 'The Da Vinci Code' seem like a slightly lame round of Hangman' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

About the Author

The authors are producers and film-makers. Gerry Kennedy is a relative of Voynich and has been researching the manuscript for many years and has amassed a unique archive of material. He has made a number of BBC Radio 4 programmes, including one on the Voynich Manuscript. Rob Churchill has written scripts for the BBC, Thames Television and numerous independent production companies in Britain and abroad.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Orion Publishing (February 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 075285996X
• ISBN-13: 978-0752859965
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,698,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Centuries of Puzzlement, September 28, 2004

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which has Defied Interpretation for Centuries (Hardcover)

At Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, if you have the credentials, you can be allowed to take a look at one of the world's strangest manuscripts. It looks like nothing else you have ever seen, 250 pages of paintings of weird plants and naked bathers and commentary in a language and letters that cannot be found anywhere else. This is the Voynich Manuscript, a document well known among cryptographers, linguists, scholars of the Middle Ages, and those simply curious about genuine oddities. It has been the subject of intense study by experts and amateurs since it came to light in 1912, and though there have been claims that it has been deciphered, the claims have always been shown to be completely overoptimistic. In _The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which Has Defied Interpretation for Centuries_ (Orion Books), Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill examine the document's contents, history, and would-be expositors and their theories, to show how little we know about the book. It is an enticing, puzzling story, well told to bring the enigma to a broader audience than the specialists who are consumed by it.

Wilfrid Voynich was a rare book dealer who reported that he found the manuscript in a Jesuit college outside Rome in 1912, along with a letter connecting it to Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century British friar and scientist. Bacon's authorship got a fine boost from the first scholar to take a crack at the manuscript, whose ideas the public and academics welcomed, before they were subsequently debunked. Since that debacle, professional historians have seldom ventured to work on the document, leaving it to an army of code-breakers and armchair theorists, who are now active on the Internet. Certainly there is a great deal to think about and speculate upon in the document. The pictures around which the text is written are distinctly strange, and this book has a good sampling of color plates to illustrate them. They consist of plants and herbs, with details of flowers, leaves, and roots, which no one has been able to identify. There are astrological charts that make no sense in any known astrological system. There are naked ladies dancing, or bathing in a green liquid, which flows from fantastic piping that looks as if it could have been designed by Dr. Seuss. The text consists of obvious letters and words, but few have been able to agree on exactly how many letters there are in the document. This is a real stumbling block to decipherment, as is the complete ignorance of what might be its original language. Neither text nor pictures seem to relate to anything in this world. Consequently, there have been many interpretations.

The authors do not have their own hypothesis for the book to carry. They are fair-minded and inclusive about the ideas of others, and include a final section in which different experts give their ideas. Among the experts is Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist, whose most recent work on the decipherment is only suggested here. Last winter he looked for low-tech tools available in the sixteenth century that could make mysterious text. He used a "Cardan Grille" device and found he could generate a page of Voynich-looking gibberish quite easily. He published his theory earlier this year in the journal _Cryptologia_. Tables and grilles can account for the statistical anomalies of the text like its repetition of certain words. Rugg is not the first to simply say that the text is a meaningless hoax, only the most recent. Even he believes it is an ancient hoax, not a modern one. Many experts have agreed with his explanation, but it is at heart an unsatisfactory one, since the manuscript is said to be mere gibberish. That's not going to stop further theorists, as Kennedy and Churchill show in this fascinating introduction to the mystery.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Riddle Within an Enigma, June 20, 2007

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Robert Carlberg (Seattle) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which has Defied Interpretation for Centuries (Paperback)

The Voynich manuscript remains one of the most puzzling artifacts handed down to us from antiquity. It is in an unknown language, using an unknown script, and not so much as a word has been successfully translated (though many have tried). It is filled with whimsical illustrations of plants that cannot be identified, stars that do not exist, and astrological diagrams unlike anything seen elsewhere. It is also filled with drawings of naked women cavorting in vessels of green liquid for purposes which cannot be fathomed. The author is unknown, the date is unknown (although figured to be between 1250-1450), and how the manuscript came to be preserved for the past 650 years is also a mystery.

It has been suggested by some researchers, and the authors of this book tentatively agree, that the whole thing might be an elaborate Medieval fake. Yet the sheer magnitude of it -- 272 pages, 211 illustrations, 170,000 characters, all carefully arranged and consistently produced -- would seem to argue against that. Add to that the statistical analysis of the text, which indicates that it probably *is* a legitimate language, and you have a real puzzle on your hands.

Since so little has been gleaned from the manuscript itself, the authors take the reader on a tour through Medieval scholarship, alchemy, astrology, astronomy, religious history and cryptology (since many have speculated it could be in some kind of code). The lives of several of the proposed authors are studied, along with many people who may have had a hand in preserving it. Thus the book is about a lot more than the manuscript itself, and indulges in many fascinating digressions along the way.

In the end, the riddle remains unsolved. The Voynich is probably a minor alchemical text of no particular import, perhaps the last surviving text in this language after the Crusades destroyed nearly 80% of the world's non-Christian libraries. For a fascinating glimpse into the superstitious Medieval world and the learning lost through subsequent winnowing by rampaging zealots, this book offers an excellent read.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Elegant Enigma, May 6, 2007

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S. K. Harrell (NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which has Defied Interpretation for Centuries (Paperback)

I was very excited to read this book, as I very much enjoy learning the path of mysterious texts. This book presents many possibilities for the origins of the codex. I personally don't have patience to cipher the many options the authors gave in cracking the text, but I appreciated the layers of work they put into presenting them. Also, I was pleased that they did not shy away from esoteric possibilities. The description of it being a written account of glossolalia was particularly interesting. All the same, this book is more about the figures around the manuscript. Whatever you come away believing about the source of the text, it's path has been colorfully impressive.