Rampling discusses the manuscript’s images and their possible connection with alchemical traditions. William Sherman reviews the many unsuccessful attempts to decode the manuscript in the twentieth century, including the work of eminent British and American code-breakers better known for their work on Japanese and German ciphers during the Second World War. René Zandbergen summarizes what is known about its history and provenance between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, while Arnold Hunt contributes a fascinating account of the antiquarian book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich (1865–1930), whose name is now inextricably linked to the manuscript he discovered in the early twentieth century. The images are high-quality, clear reproductions, with the exception of a slightly blurred folio 100 v.Īpart from the inherent value of having such a facsimile commercially available, this book is important for the accompanying group of authoritative essays, which deal with various aspects of this enigmatic manuscript. But this Yale-produced facsimile is the first such book to appear, featuring colour images of every page of the manuscript - and even including a re-creation of several foldout folios which appear in the second half of the codex. The Spanish publisher, Siloé, has announced a full-size replica edition, due to be published in 2018. There is already a digitized version of the Voynich Manuscript available from the Beinecke Library’s website, which is apparently responsible for 11 per cent of the overall traffic to that site and nearly 50 per cent of the traffic to its zoom viewer for images. Its history and origins are also mysterious, though it is known to have belonged to Athanasius Kircher and possibly to the Emperor Rudolf II in the seventeenth century. It has become something of a cult, with various websites devoted to it and a growing number of adventure novels built around it - including one in the Indiana Jones series. Numerous cryptologists, both amateur and professional, have failed to decipher it. Its script, language and text remain unknown and unreadable, and its many detailed coloured drawings of plants appear to relate to no known species. Instead, as New York Times best-selling author Deborah Harkness says in her introduction, the book “invites the reader to join us at the heart of the mystery.MS 408 in the Beinecke Library at Yale University (the Voynich Manuscript) has been dubbed ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’. The essays that accompany the manuscript explain what we have learned about this work-from alchemical, cryptographic, forensic, and historical perspectives-but they provide few definitive answers. For the first time, this facsimile, complete with elaborate folding sections, allows readers to explore this enigma in all its stunning detail, from its one-of-a-kind “Voynichese” text to its illustrations of otherworldly plants, unfamiliar constellations, and naked women swimming though fantastical tubes and green baths. The book’s language has eluded decipherment, and its elaborate illustrations remain as baffling as they are beautiful. The manuscript appears and disappears throughout history, from the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to a secret sale of books in 1903 by the Society of Jesus in Rome. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no clearer purpose now than when it was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich. Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the “Voynich Manuscript,” the world’s most mysterious book. The Voynich Manuscript is produced from new photographs of the entire original and accompanied by expert essays that invite anyone to understand and explore the enigma. The first authorized copy of this mysterious, much-speculated-upon, one-of-a-kind, centuries-old puzzle.
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