Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"This is a book about a book. More bizarrely, this is a book about a book no one can read or understand" (from the Introduction). The Voynich Manuscript, or MS408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, is this fantastic artifact, which if it appeared as the McGuffin in a work of historical-conspiracy fiction the reader would dismiss it as unbelievable even by Dan Brown standards, and yet there it is. About 250 pages long, written in an alphabet that "looks kind of like Tolkien's tengwar, and kind of like Arabic, and kind of like 13th century monastic Latin miniscule" (Ken Hite) in no known language, and with illustrations of plants (none of which can be positively identified), alchemical and astrological charts and symbols (ditto), naked ladies in bathtubs, and other stuff even less describable. Do a Google Images search on "voynich manuscript"--worth many thousands of words. A letter found with the manuscript and other circumstantial evidence indicate it must be older than 1608--unless the letter (and/or the entire manuscript) is a forgery, of course. The historical figures who star in the "mainstream" history of the book are an interesting enough collection: Roger Bacon, John Dee and Edward Kelley, Rudolf II, Athanasius Kircher; the more peripheral and/or speculative characters who get mentioned just make it a high-weirdness wampeter, like William Friedman, H.P. Lovecraft, Elizabeth Bathory, the Jesuits, and the Cathars. Wilfrid Voynich, the turn-of-the-last-century rare book collector who discovered the manuscript and for whom it's named, turns out to be quite a character himself.

The book is clearly written, though with some stylistic oddities (like, Kennedy sometimes writes in the first person and sometimes is spoken of in the third; Churchill never makes a first-person appearance until the very end), but does an especially good job of presenting the cryptological problems posed by the MS. The authors indicate along the way which theories are busted and which are at least plausible, and in the final chapter present a raft of theories by the current crowd of Voynicheros and, finally, each their own theory. No, I won't tell you here just what they are; I will say that the sad thing is, the most plausible-sounding theories are the ones that mean no translation will ever be possible. Which means, I suppose, that the most plausible are the ones that inherently cannot be proved, which is some kind of neat paradox.

This book was a page-turning introduction to the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript and I recommend it to anyone who wants a sober, thorough beginner's introduction. Like other anomalous phenomena, the Manuscript attracts all manner of lofty and unlikely conjecture, and I feared this edition might be another exercise in New Age speculation. Luckily, there is little mention of aliens, magic, Masonic conspiracy or Bible codes: the scholarly, skeptical authors survey the manifold legitimate disciplines that the Manuscript has been viewed through. The reader will be introduced to such varied studies as cryptography, outsider art, alchemy, medieval literature, the trade of rare books, botany, internet communities, and much more. But don't expect a pat answer as to the Manuscript's origins- the enigma only deepens as more light is shed on it.

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.

After discovering this enigmatic manuscript over wikipedia, this book was the natural step in satisfying my curiosity. I was not disappointed, for the authors did a great job in exploring the various aspects of this mystery, while cruising through much interesting stuff as medieval codes, historical linguistics, insane artists and the like. The mystery remains, but so much can be learned in the effort of solving it!
highly recommended.

This book is a very interesting read for persons of a certain education. Not easily understood by many readers.

The best and most well-written source about the elusive voynich manuscript. This book covers the alleged owners, possible clues to the cypher, the history of the manuscript itself, and so much more.