The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book dating back to the 1400’s consisting of 250 vellum pages, containing illustrations of medicinal herbs, star constellations, and text in an unknown language that has not yet been deciphered.
The manuscript is named after Wilfred Voynich, an antique book dealer that bought it amongst various second-hand books in Italy. It had been one of the books in the library of Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century Jesuit polymath and scientist.
After the unification of Italy in 1871, the new state of Italy wanted to confiscate all Kircher’s books, during a stand off with the church, but they were rescued and ended up in the Vatican Library. Voynich somehow managed to buy a few of these books from Kircher’s collection.
Voynich claimed to have found a letter dated August 19, 1665 addressed to Kircher, from Johannes Marcus Marci, a Physician hailing from Prague. The letter explained that the manuscript was the work of the thirteenth-Century Scientist and Alchemist, Roger Bacon, and that more recently it had been acquired for the library of emperor Rudolf II, for the sum of 600 golden ducats. Marci’s reason for presenting the book to Kircher, whom was an expert in Oriental languages, was in the hope that he would be able to decipher it’s contents. Kircher attempted to decipher it, but was unsuccessful.
Today, the Voynich Manuscript sits in a rare books Library at Yale University, which since arriving there, has made it possible for researchers to carry out proper analysis. Researchers have deduced that, the Vellum pages are made from expensive, good quality, calf skin commonly used in book production across Europe in the 1400s. This rules out the possibility of the manuscript being a modern forgery as it is unlikely that 250 blank pages would have survived from that time period, but it does not rule out the possibility that it was a hoax created in the medieval times.
More recently, Stephen Bax, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England, claimed to have deciphered 10 words of the manuscript, such as the words for coriander, hellebore and juniper next to drawings of the plants. He says he's also picked out the word for Taurus, written beside an illustration of the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus.
He was able to so, by looking at medieval manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and theorises that the manuscript is probably a ‘treatise on nature’, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language, however, no further progress has been made by Bax, or anyone else, and the manuscript remains a mystery to this day.
After many centuries of trying to decode the manuscript, many have given up and said that none of the illustrations can be successfully identified as they do not exist and are therefore fantasy, consequently, the text must then be fantasy too.
What might be the reason for someone to create such an elaborate hoax then?
The only two possible reasons could be mania, perhaps the writings of a deluded person, or alternatively to make money, which is a likely possibility.
Until someone is able to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, we will never know the real origin and purpose of it.
sources
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/voynich-manuscript-secret-knowledge-or-hoax/
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsolvable-mysteries-of-the-voynich-manuscript