he Voynich manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. The book is named after the Polish-Lithuanian-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. The author, script, and language remain unknown; for these reasons it has been described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”. Generally presumed to be some kind of ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Yet it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a historical cryptology cause célèbre. Similarly, it has never been possible to find any plausible parallel with no known language, nor to recognize the syntactic structures that should anyway characterize an hypothetical lost language; at the same time the analysis of the structure of the text leads many to deny it is an invented language or a random compilation of symbols.
In 2009, University of Arizona researchers performed C14 dating on the manuscript’s vellum, which they assert (with 95% confidence) was made between 1404 and 1438. In addition, the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago found that much of the ink was added not long afterwards, confirming that the manuscript is indeed a medieval document (not excluding however it can be a medieval hoax). The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six “sections”, with different styles and subject matter: Herbal, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical and Recipies. The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fuelled many theories about the book’s origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.
Actually, besides the inner beauty of the manuscripts’ illustrations, its main attraction for anybody but an expert in medieval manuscripts or text decoding lies in the complex and fascinating history of studies and theories that have developed around the manuscript itself: the fame of unsolved mystery has attracted, during more than a century and especially in recent years, all kinds of people, generating hypotheses ranging from the scientific plausibility to the wildest imagination (without the firsts having ever scored the decisive points on the second due to the lack, even today, of any concrete result in document’s comprehension).
So, whether you’re fans of puzzles, mysteries, history of science or dark prophecies, not to mention aliens and historic hoaxes, I suggest you to start investigating the topic from the detailed Wikipedia page and its links.
