The Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown script.

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book with incomprehensible contents. It is thought to have been written between approximately 1450 and 1520 by an unknown author in an unidentified script and unintelligible language. Image File history File links Voynich. ... Image File history File links Voynich. ... Writing systems of the world today. ... Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith. ... For other uses, see Book (disambiguation). ... Writing systems of the world today. ...

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decipher a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols. Pre-19th century Leone Battista Alberti, polymath/universal genius, inventor of polyalphabetic substitution (see frequency analysis for the significance of this -- missed by most for a long time and dumbed down in the Vigenère cipher), and what may have been the first mechanical encryption aid. ... Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, hidden, and analýein, to loosen or to untie) is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information which is normally required to do so. ... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000... The history of cryptography dates back thousands of years. ... A hoax is an attempt to trick an audience into believing that something false is real. ...

The book is named after the Polish-American book-dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. As of 2005, the Voynich manuscript is item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.^[1] A Polish American is an American citizen of Polish descent. ... Wilfrid Michael Voynich (1865 – 1930) was a Polish bibliophile. ... Yale Universitys Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was a 1963 gift of the Beinecke family. ... “Yale” redirects here. ... Insert non-formatted text here For the machine that sends, receives, and produces facsimiles, see fax. ...

Content

By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each.^[2] About 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. There is strong evidence that at one point in time the pages of the book were rearranged into a different order.^[3] A quire of paper is used as a measure of paper quantity. ... Vellum was originally a translucent or opaque material produced from calfskin that had been soaked, limed and unhaired, and then dried at normal temperature under tension, usually on a wooden device called a stretching frame. ... A quill pen is made from a flight feather (preferably a primary) of a large bird, most often a goose. ...

The "biological" section of the manuscript has dense text and illustrations showing nude women bathing.

The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with "bullets" on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, as if the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being put on the page. Download high resolution version (500x700, 99 KB)page of Voynich Manuscript I have a question about the copyright of this image. ... Download high resolution version (500x700, 99 KB)page of Voynich Manuscript I have a question about the copyright of this image. ... In typography, a bullet is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list, like below, also known as the point of a bullet: This is the text of a list item. ... The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... Cursive is any style of handwriting which is designed for writing down notes and letters by hand. ... This is about scribe, the profession. ...

The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by thin gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. variant glyphs representing the character a (allographs of a) in the Zapfino typeface. ... For other uses, see Alphabet (disambiguation). ...

Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but others may not. Phonetic (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a custom voice mailbox for the purpose of receiving all incoming voice messages as actual transcribed text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS... The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of writing in that language. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ...

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural languages.^[4] For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf's law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts.^{[citation needed]} Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant. A graph of a normal bell curve showing statistics used in educational assessment and comparing various grading methods. ... Originally, Zipfs law stated that, in a corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. ... Claude Shannon In information theory, the Shannon entropy or information entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... For other uses, see Latin (disambiguation). ...

On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. For example, there are practically no words with more than ten "letters", yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within the word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section – an arrangement found in semitic languages, but not in the Latin, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. It should be noted, however, that there are various ways of writing the same letter in European languages: European languages are the object of Eurolinguistics. ... 14th century BCE diplomatic letter in Akkadian, found in Tell Amarna. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ...

• The Greek sigma or the now-archaic Latin long s have a different form at the end of words;
• English capitalized letters, which usually appear only at the beginning of words, may vary dramatically from their lower-case version (compare Q to q, R to r);
• Germanic languages may write either "ss" or "ß", and umlaut letters may be written as two letters (e.g., "ö" can be written as "oe").

The text seems to be more repetitious than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.

There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. In the last page, there are four lines of writing which are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th Century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.^[5] Also, a series of diagrams in the "astronomical" section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula.^[6] However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time. For other uses, see Alphabet (disambiguation). ... (14th century - 15th century - 16th century - other centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 15th century was that century which lasted from 1401 to 1500. ... The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. ... The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe, and includes modern day Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar. ...

Illustrations

The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on its contents, but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections, and their conventional names, are: Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith. ... A manuscript (Latin manu scriptus, written by hand), strictly speaking, is any written document that is put down by hand, in contrast to being printed or reproduced some other way. ... Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith. ...

The "herbal" section of the manuscript contains illustrations of plants.

• Herbal — each page displays one plant (sometimes two), and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the pharmaceutical section (below). None of the plants depicted are unambiguously identifiable.

Download high resolution version (591x890, 97 KB)page of Voynich Manuscript with what seems to be a sunflower I have a question about the copyright of this image. ... Download high resolution version (591x890, 97 KB)page of Voynich Manuscript with what seems to be a sunflower I have a question about the copyright of this image. ... A European is primarily a person who was born into one of the countries within the continent of Europe. ... An herbal is a book, often illustrated, that describes the appearance, medical properties, and other characteristics of plants used in herbal medicine. ...

A detail from the "astronomical" section of the manuscript.

• Astronomical — contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each symbol is surrounded by exactly 30 miniature female figures. Most of the females are depicted at least partially naked. Each is also holding what appears to be a labeled star, or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm (as a child might have a balloon tied to his or her wrist today). The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.

Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 574 × 599 pixels Full resolution (1120 × 1169 pixel, file size: 926 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Detail from page 70r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the astronomical section +/- File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 574 × 599 pixels Full resolution (1120 × 1169 pixel, file size: 926 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Detail from page 70r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the astronomical section +/- File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages... Sample flowchart diagram A diagram is a simplified and structured visual representation of concepts, ideas, constructions, relations, statistical data, anatomy etc used in all aspects of human activities to visualize and clarify the topic. ... A star system or stellar system is a small number of stars that orbit each other,[1] bound by gravitational attraction. ... A natural satellite is an object that orbits a planet or other body larger than itself and which is not man-made. ... STARS can mean: Shock Trauma Air Rescue Society Special Tactics And Rescue Service, a fictional task force that appears in Capcoms Resident Evil video game franchise. ... A giant Hubble mosaic of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant Astronomy (also frequently referred to as astrophysics) is the scientific study of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the Earths atmosphere (such as the cosmic background radiation). ... Hand-coloured version of the anonymous Flammarion woodcut (1888). ... The term zodiac denotes an annual cycle of twelve stations along the ecliptic, the apparent path of the sun across the heavens through constellations that divide the ecliptic into twelve equal zones of celestial longitude. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... For other uses, see Pisces. ... Taurus (IPA: , Latin: , symbol , ) is one of the constellations of the zodiac. ... 15th century French soldier wearing a helmet and a hauberk, carrying a crossbow/arbalest and a pavise. ... For other uses, see Sagittarius. ... Aquarius (IPA: , Latin: ) is the eleventh sign of the zodiac, situated between Capricornus and Pisces. ... Capricornus ( or , Unicode: ♑), a name meaning Horned Goat or That which has horns like a goats in Latin, is one of the constellations of the zodiac. ... Aries (IPA: , Latin: , symbol , ) is one of the constellations of the zodiac. ...

A detail from the "biological" section of the manuscript.

• Biological — a dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small nude women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns.

Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 542 × 600 pixels Full resolution (674 × 746 pixel, file size: 473 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Detail from page 78r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the biological section +/- File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 542 × 600 pixels Full resolution (674 × 746 pixel, file size: 473 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Detail from page 78r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the biological section +/- File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages... In biology, an organ (Latin: organum, instrument, tool) is a group of tissues that perform a specific function or group of functions. ...

A detail from the "cosmological" section of the manuscript.

• Cosmological — more circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has fold-outs; one of them spans six pages and contains some sort of map or diagram, with nine "islands" connected by "causeways", castles, and possibly a volcano.

Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 588 × 600 pixels Full resolution (1308 × 1334 pixel, file size: 1. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 588 × 600 pixels Full resolution (1308 × 1334 pixel, file size: 1. ... For the acronyms, see MAP and MAPS. A map is a symbolized depiction of a space which highlights relations between components (objects, regions, themes) of that space. ... The Hindenburgdamm rail causeway across the Wadden Sea to the island of Sylt in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany In modern usage, a causeway is a road or railway elevated by a bank, usually across a broad body of water or wetland. ... For other uses, see Volcano (disambiguation). ...

A detail from the "pharmaceutical" section of the manuscript

• Pharmaceutical — many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars drawn along the margins; and a few text paragraphs.

Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 302 × 266 pixelsFull resolution (302 × 266 pixel, file size: 86 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Detail from page 88v of Voynich Manuscript depicting the pharmaceutical section +/- File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 302 × 266 pixelsFull resolution (302 × 266 pixel, file size: 86 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Detail from page 88v of Voynich Manuscript depicting the pharmaceutical section +/- File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on... ROOT is an object-oriented software package developed by CERN. It was originally designed for particle physics data analysis and contains several features specific to this field, but it is also commonly used in other applications such as astronomy and data mining. ... Leaves are an Icelandic five-piece alternative rock band who came to prominence in 2002 with their debut album, Breathe, drawing comparisons to groups such as Coldplay and Doves. ... Interior of an apothecarys shop. ...

A detail from the "recipes" section of the manuscript

• Recipes — many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower-like (or star-like) "bullet".

Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 441 × 378 pixelsFull resolution (441 × 378 pixel, file size: 167 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Detail from page 107r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the recipe section +/- File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 441 × 378 pixelsFull resolution (441 × 378 pixel, file size: 167 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Detail from page 107r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the recipe section +/- File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on...

History

The illustrations in the "biological" section are linked by a network of pipes.

The history of the manuscript is still full of gaps, especially in its earliest part.^[7] Since the manuscript's alphabet does not resemble any known script, and the text is still undeciphered, the only useful evidence as to the book's age and origin are the illustrations — especially the dress and hairstyles of the human figures, and a couple of castles that are seen in the diagrams. They are all characteristically European, and based on that evidence most experts assign the book to dates between 1450 and 1520. This estimate is supported by other secondary clues. Download high resolution version (452x692, 79 KB)page of Voynich Manuscript I have a question about the copyright of this image. ... Download high resolution version (452x692, 79 KB)page of Voynich Manuscript I have a question about the copyright of this image. ...

The earliest confirmed owner of the manuscript was Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as we are today about this "Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years. On learning that Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic (Ethiopian) dictionary and "deciphered" the Egyptian hieroglyphs, he sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher, which was recently located by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest mention of the manuscript that has been found so far. For other uses, see Alchemy (disambiguation). ... Nickname: Motto: Praga Caput Rei publicae Location within the Czech Republic Coordinates: , Country Czech Republic Region Capital City of Prague Founded 9th century Government  - Mayor Pavel Bém Area  - City 496 km²  (191. ... The Great Sphinx of Giza, with the Pyramid of Khafre in the background For other uses, see Sphinx (disambiguation). ... Athanasius Kircher (sometimes spelt Kirchner) (May 2, 1601?–27 November 1680) was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who published around 40 works, most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology and medicine. ... Seal of the Society of Jesus. ... The North American College at the Gregorian The Pontifical Gregorian University is a Roman Catholic theological seminary in Rome. ... The Coptic language is a direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian language which was once written in Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts. ... It has been suggested that Hieroglyph (French Wiki article) be merged into this article or section. ... Nickname: Motto: SPQR: Senatus Populusque Romanus Location of the city of Rome (yellow) within the Province of Rome (red) and region of Lazio (grey) Coordinates: Region Lazio Province Province of Rome Founded 21 April 753 BC Government  - Mayor Walter Veltroni Area  - City 1,285 km²  (580 sq mi)  - Urban 5...

It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but apparently he was interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch apparently refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague; who promptly sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent. Marci's cover letter (1666) is still attached to the manuscript. Jan Marek Marci, in Latin Ioannes (or Johannes) Marcus Marci, (June 13, 1595 – April 10, 1677), was a Bohemian doctor and scientist. ... The Charles University of Prague (also simply University of Prague; Czech: Univerzita Karlova; Latin: Universitas Carolina) is the oldest and most prestigious Czech university and among the oldest universities in Europe, being founded in 1340s (for the exact year, see below). ...

There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood it was kept, with the rest of Kircher's correspondence, in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University). It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. According to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, just before this happened many books of the University's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty, which were exempt from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence was among those books—and so apparently was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the ex libris of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the University's Rector at the time. The North American College at the Gregorian The Pontifical Gregorian University is a Roman Catholic theological seminary in Rome. ... Pontifical Gregorian University (Italian: Pontificia Università Gregoriana) is a pontifical university located in Rome, Italy. ... King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy. ... Coat of arms Map of the Papal States; the reddish area was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1860, the rest (grey) in 1870. ... Ex libris (Latin: from books) is a phrase often used in an ownership inscription or a bookplate, usually found on the inside of a book cover or on one of the first few pages. ... Pieter Beckx, S.J. (February 8, 1795 - March 4, 1887) was the twenty-second Superior-General of the Society of Jesus. ...

Beckx's "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Collegio Ghisleri. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Nickname: Motto: SPQR: Senatus Populusque Romanus Location of the city of Rome (yellow) within the Province of Rome (red) and region of Lazio (grey) Coordinates: Region Lazio Province Province of Rome Founded 21 April 753 BC Government  - Mayor Walter Veltroni Area  - City 1,285 km²  (580 sq mi)  - Urban 5... Seal of the Society of Jesus. ...

Around 1912 the Collegio Romano was apparently short of money and decided to sell (very discreetly) some of its holdings. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his name. In 1930, after his death, the manuscript was inherited by his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (known as the author of the novel The Gadfly and daughter of famous mathematician George Boole). She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend, Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, Anne Nill sold the book to another antique book dealer Hans P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969. Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole (May 11, 1864, County Cork, Ireland - July 27, 1960, New York City) was a novelist and musician, and a supporter of several revolutionary causes. ... The Gadfly is a novel by Ethel Lilian Voynich (1864-1960). ... George Boole [], (November 2, 1815 – December 8, 1864) was a British mathematician and philosopher. ...

Theories about authorship

Many names have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript.

Roger Bacon

Marci's 1665 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his late friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor of Bohemia (1552–1612) for 600 ducats — around $30,800 as of 2005. According to the letter, Rudolf believed the author to be the Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon (1214–1294). Download high resolution version (700x694, 48 KB)Statue of Roger Bacon in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. ... Download high resolution version (700x694, 48 KB)Statue of Roger Bacon in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. ... Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky of Sebuzin and of Horstein (1580 – 1644) was a Bohemian lawyer and writer, who held various secretarial, diplomatic, and judicial posts under Rudolf II, Mathias, Ferdinand II, and, Ferdinand III. Mnishovsky was also a cryptographer, and is associated with the mystery of the Voynich manuscript. ... Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II Rudolph IIs personal imperial crown, later crown of the Austrian Empire Rudolf II Habsburg was an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, king of Bohemia, and king of Hungary. ... Flag of Bohemia Bohemia (Czech: ; German: ) is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western and middle thirds of the Czech Republic. ... The ducat (IPA: ) is a gold coin that was used as a trade currency throughout Europe before World War I. Its weight is 3. ... The United States dollar is the official currency of the United States. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Order of Friars Minor and other Franciscan movements are disciples of Saint Francis of Assisi. ... “Renaissance man” redirects here. ... For the Nova Scotia premier see Roger Bacon (politician). ...

Even though Marci said that he was "suspending his judgment" about this claim, it was taken quite seriously by Voynich, who did his best to confirm it. His conviction strongly influenced most deciphering attempts for the next 80 years. However, scholars who have looked at the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with Bacon's works have flatly denied that possibility. One should note also that Raphael died in 1644, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611—at least 55 years before Marci's letter.

John Dee

The assumption that Roger Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that the person who sold the Voynich manuscript to Rudolf could only be John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts. This theory is also conveyed by Voynich manuscript scholar Gordon Rugg. Dee and his scrier (mediumic assistant) Edward Kelley lived in Bohemia for several years where they had hoped to sell their services to the Emperor. However, Dee's meticulously kept diaries do not mention that sale, and make it seem quite unlikely. If the Voynich manuscript author is not Bacon, the connection to Dee may just disappear. It is possible that Dee himself may have written it and spread the rumour that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the hopes of later selling it. Portrait of John Dee. ... Portrait of John Dee. ... For the American college basketball coach, see John Dee (basketball coach). ... Elizabeth I Queen of England and Ireland Queen of France, nominal title Elizabeth I (September 7, 1533–March 24, 1603) was Queen of England and Queen of Ireland from November 17, 1558 until her death. ... Gordon Rugg was born in Perth, Scotland. ... It has been suggested that Crystal ball be merged into this article or section. ... For other meanings of medium, see medium (disambiguation). ... Edward Kelley, nineteenth-century portrait Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot (August 1, 1555 - 1597) was a spirit medium who worked with John Dee in his magical investigations. ...

Edward Kelley

Dee's companion in Prague, Edward Kelley, was a self-styled alchemist who claimed to be able to turn copper into gold by means of a secret powder which he had dug out of a Bishop's tomb in Wales. As Dee's scrier, he claimed to be able to invoke angels through a shewstone, and had long conversations with them—which Dee dutifully noted down. The angel's language was called Enochian, after Enoch, the Biblical father of Methuselah; according to legend, he had been taken on a tour of Heaven by angels, and later written a book about what he saw there. Several people (see below) have suggested that, just as Kelley invented Enochian to dupe Dee ^{[citation needed]}, he could have fabricated the Voynich manuscript to swindle the Emperor (who was already paying Kelley for his supposed alchemical expertise). Illustration of Edward Kelley by Michal Elviro Andriolli (1836-1893). ... Illustration of Edward Kelley by Michal Elviro Andriolli (1836-1893). ... Edward Kelley, nineteenth-century portrait Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot (August 1, 1555 - 1597) was a spirit medium who worked with John Dee in his magical investigations. ... For other uses, see Copper (disambiguation). ... GOLD refers to one of the following: GOLD (IEEE) is an IEEE program designed to garner more student members at the university level (Graduates of the Last Decade). ... Topics in Christianity Movements · Denominations Ecumenism · Preaching · Prayer Music · Liturgy · Calendar Symbols · Art · Criticism Important figures Apostle Paul · Church Fathers Constantine · Athanasius · Augustine Anselm · Aquinas · Palamas · Luther Calvin · Wesley Arius · Marcion of Sinope Pope · Archbishop of Canterbury Patriarch of Constantinople Christianity Portal This box:      This article is about a title... This article is about the country. ... The Archangel Michael by Guido Reni wears a late Roman military outfit in this 17th century depiction An angel is a supernatural being found in many religions. ... It has been suggested that Crystal ball be merged into this article or section. ... This article is about the Angelical Language recorded in the journals of Dr. John Dee. ... Enoch (Hebrew: חֲנוֹךְ; Tiberian: , Standard: ) is a name occurring twice in the generations of Adam. ... Methuselah or Metushélach (Hebrew: מְתוּשֶׁלַח / מְתוּשָׁלַח, Standard  / Tiberian  /  ; Man of the dart, or alternatively when he dies, it shall be sent) is the oldest person whose age is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Self-authorship

Voynich was often suspected of having fabricated the manuscript himself. As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means; and a "lost book" by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. However, by expert internal dating of the manuscript, and the recent discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher, many consider that possibility to have been eliminated.^[8] Still, it should be noted that internal dating is often highly speculative and depends on many assumptions which may, themselves, be lacking in hard factual support. There has also been debate over what date the internal evidence suggests, with some scholars perceiving a more modern date. Further, Baresch's letter (and Marci's as well) only establish the existence of a manuscript; not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one spoken of there. In fact, their letters might even be taken as the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript (assuming he was aware of them), rather than as proofs authenticating it. But if a fabrication, the question arises as to why neither Voynich nor his widow ever attempted to sell it. To fabricate a document for profit but never attempt to sell it would be highly unusual. Fame rather than fortune might be speculated as a motive, but that would not explain why Voynich's widow never attempted to sell the manuscript after his death. All things considered, most who have studied the history of the manuscript do not believe that Voynich fabricated the document.

Other theories

A photostatic reproduction of the first page of the Voynich manuscript, taken by Voynich sometime before 1921, showed some faint writing that had been erased. With the help of chemicals, the text could be read as the name 'Jacobj `a Tepenece'. This is taken to be Jakub Horcicky of Tepenec, who was also known by his Latin name: Jacobus Sinapius (1575–1622). He was a specialist in herbal medicine, Rudolph II's personal physician, and curator of his botanical gardens. Voynich, and many other people after him, concluded from this "signature" that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript before Baresch, and saw in that a confirmation of Raphael's story. Others have suggested that Jacobus himself could be the author. A small, much-used Xerox copier in a high school library. ... Jakub Horcicky of Tepenec, in Latin Jacobus Sinapius (1575--1622), was a Bohemian pharmacist and personal doctor of Emperor Rudolf II. He is believed to have been one of the first posessors of the Voynich Manuscript. ... The term Herbalism refers to folk and traditional medicinal practice based on the use of plants and plant extracts. ... Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II Rudolf II Habsburg was an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, king of Bohemia, and king of Hungary. ...

However, that writing does not match Jacobus's signature, as found in a document recently located by Jan Hurych, see The New Signature of Horczicky and the Comparison of them all. So it is still possible that the writing on page f1r was added by a later owner or librarian, and is only this person's guess as to the book's author. (In the Jesuit history books that were available to Kircher, Jesuit-educated Jacobus is the only alchemist or doctor from Rudolf's court who deserves a full-page entry, while, for example, Tycho Brahe is barely mentioned.) Moreover, the chemicals applied by Voynich have so degraded the vellum that hardly a trace of the signature can be seen today; thus there is also the suspicion that the signature was fabricated by Voynich in order to strengthen the Roger Bacon theory. Monument of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler in Prague Tycho Brahe, born Tyge Ottesen Brahe (December 14, 1546 – October 24, 1601), was a Danish nobleman from the region of Scania (in modern-day Sweden), best known today as an early astronomer, though in his lifetime he was also well known...

Jan Marci met Kircher when he led a delegation from Charles University to Rome in 1638; and over the next 27 years, the two scholars exchanged many letters on a variety of scientific subjects. Marci's trip was part of a continuing struggle by the secularist side of the University to maintain their independence from the Jesuits, who ran the rival Clementinum college in Prague. In spite of those efforts, the two universities were merged in 1654, under Jesuit control. It has therefore been speculated that political animosity against the Jesuits led Marci to fabricate Baresch's letters, and later the Voynich manuscript, in an attempt to expose and discredit their "star" Kircher. Jan Marek Marci, in Latin Ioannes (or Johannes) Marcus Marci, (June 13, 1595 – April 10, 1677), was a Bohemian doctor and scientist. ... George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906), British writer who coined the term secularism. ... The Clementinum (Klementinum in Czech) is the national library of the Czech Republic situated in Prague. ...

Marci's personality and knowledge appear to have been adequate for this task; and Kircher was an easy target. Indeed, Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher. Mueller concocted an unintelligible manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation, and Kircher, reportedly, produced one at once.

It is worth noting that the only proofs of Georg Baresch's existence are three letters sent to Kircher: one by Baresch (1639), and two by Marci (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence between Marci and Kircher ends in 1665, precisely with the Voynich manuscript "cover letter". However, Marci's secret grudge against the Jesuits is pure conjecture: a faithful Catholic, he himself had studied to become a Jesuit, and shortly before his death in 1667 he was granted honorary membership in their Order.

Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other things), and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was uncrackable (ca. 1618). This has led to the theory that he produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher—and made poor Baresch his unwitting "guinea pig". After Kircher published his book on Coptic, Raphael (so the theory goes) may have thought that stumping him would be a much better trophy than stumping Baresch, and convinced the alchemist to ask the Jesuit's help. He would have invented the Roger Bacon story to motivate Baresch. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected a lie. However, there is no definite evidence for this theory. Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky of Sebuzin and of Horstein (1580 – 1644) was a Bohemian lawyer and writer, who held various secretarial, diplomatic, and judicial posts under Rudolf II, Mathias, Ferdinand II, and, Ferdinand III. Mnishovsky was also a cryptographer, and is associated with the mystery of the Voynich manuscript. ... Pre-19th century Leone Battista Alberti, polymath/universal genius, inventor of polyalphabetic substitution (see frequency analysis for the significance of this -- missed by most for a long time and dumbed down in the Vigenère cipher), and what may have been the first mechanical encryption aid. ... This article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. ...

Dr Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong said that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling a herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Anthony would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge. In cryptography, plaintext is information used as input to an encryption algorithm; the output is termed ciphertext. ...

Nick Pelling has developed a theory in his book that the Voynich manuscript was written by Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), an Italian renaissance architect.^[3] According to Pelling's theory, Averlino tried to reach Istanbul around 1465, and enciphered in the Voynich manuscript some of his own works about various engineering topics to be able to export his knowledge to the Ottoman Turks past Venetian border guards. The theory is based mainly on circumstantial evidence. Nick Pelling (1964-) is a British-born computer programmer, best known for a series of 1980s computer games for the BBC Micro written under the nom-de-plume Orlando M. Pilchard. ... Antonio di Pietro Averlino (c. ... Istanbul (Turkish: , Greek: , historically Byzantium and later Constantinople; see other names) is Turkeys most populous city, and its cultural and financial center. ... Look up Ottoman, ottoman in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Pelling examines several characteristics of the cipher text and suggests means of encryption Averlino might have employed, but does not claim to have deciphered the contents. If Pelling is right, then the manuscript is enciphered with an extremely convoluted cascade of methods, including "fake" artifacts (odd characteristics of the cipher text which hint to an enciphering method which was actually not used.) He claims most of the marginalia are also fake, and were deliberately introduced to mislead code-breakers.

Renaissance Magazine published a theory (issue #53, March 2007) by H.R. SantaColoma which points out the similarity of several objects in the Voynich manuscript to early microscopes. Cornelius Drebbel is closely associated with the very earliest developments in microscopy. This led the author to notice similarities between the artistic style of Drebbel and various illustrations in the Voynich. In addition, Drebbel became the head alchemist to Rudolf II at about the time the Voynich is known to have been in Rudolf's court. The theory concludes that the Voynich may be Drebbel's notebook of observations and alchemy experiments, which he left in Prague after the coup of 1611. A microscope (Greek: micron = small and scopos = aim) is an instrument for viewing objects that are too small to be seen by the naked or unaided eye. ... Cornelius Jacobszoon Drebbel (Alkmaar, 1572 - London, November 7, 1633) was the Dutch inventor of the first navigable submarine in 1620. ... Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II Rudolf II Habsburg was an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, king of Bohemia, and king of Hungary. ... Nickname: Motto: Praga Caput Rei publicae Location within the Czech Republic Coordinates: , Country Czech Republic Region Capital City of Prague Founded 9th century Government  - Mayor Pavel Bém Area  - City 496 km²  (191. ...

Multiple authors

Prescott Currier, a US Navy cryptographer who worked with the manuscript in the 1970s, observed that the pages of the "herbal" section could be separated into two sets, A and B, with distinctive statistical properties and apparently different handwritings. He concluded that the Voynich manuscript was the work of two or more authors who used different dialects or spelling conventions, but who shared the same script. However, recent studies have questioned this conclusion. A handwriting expert who examined the book saw only one hand in the whole manuscript. Also, when all sections are examined, one sees a more gradual transition, with herbal A and herbal B at opposite ends. Thus, Prescott's observations could simply be the result of the herbal sections being written in two widely separated time periods. The United States Navy (USN) is the branch of the United States armed forces responsible for naval operations. ... Authorship redirects here. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language characteristic of a particular group of the languages speakers. ... Proper spelling is the writing of a word or words with all necessary letters and diacritics present in an accepted standard order. ...

Theories about contents and purpose

The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript suggests 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 fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. Back cover of the Chinese pharmacopoeia First Edition (published in 1930) Pharmacopoeia (literally, the art of the drug compounder), in its modern technical sense, is a book containing directions for the identification of samples and the preparation of compound medicines, and published by the authority of a government or a... Medicine is the science and art of maintaining andor restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of patients. ...

The first section of the book is almost certainly a herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those "herbal" pictures that match "pharmacological" sketches appear to be "clean copies" of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third. An herbal is a book, often illustrated, that describes the appearance, medical properties, and other characteristics of plants used in herbal medicine. ... Binomial name Viola tricolor L. The Heartsease, Viola triocolor is a common European wild flower, growing as an annual or short-lived perennial. ... Species See text Maidenhair ferns are ferns of the genus Adiantum, which contains about 200 species. ...

Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin. However, the resemblance is slight, especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the scale of the drawing is not known, the plant could be many other members of the same family — which includes the common daisy, chamomile, and many other species from all over the world. Sunflowers is also a painting by Vincent van Gogh. ... Diversity About 1500 genera and 23,000 species Type Genus Aster L. Subfamilies Barnadesioideae Cichorioideae Tribe Arctotidae Tribe Cardueae Tribe Eremothamneae Tribe Lactuceae Tribe Liabeae Tribe Mutisieae Tribe Tarchonantheae Tribe Vernonieae Asteroideae Tribe Anthemideae Tribe Astereae Tribe Calenduleae Tribe Eupatorieae Tribe Gnaphalieae Tribe Helenieae Tribe Heliantheae Tribe Inuleae Tribe Plucheae... Look up daisy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Binomial name Matricaria recutita L. German Chamomile (Matricaria recutita), also spelled Camomile, is an annual plant of the sunflower family Asteraceae. ...

The basins and tubes in the "biological" section may seem to indicate a connection to alchemy, which would also be relevant if the book contained instructions on the preparation of medical compounds. However, alchemical books of the period share a common pictorial language, where processes and materials are represented by specific images (such as eagle, toad, man in tomb, couple in bed) or standard textual symbols (such as circle with cross); and none of these could be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript. For other uses, see Alchemy (disambiguation). ...

Sergio Toresella, an expert on ancient herbals, pointed out that the Voynich manuscript could be an alchemical herbal—which actually had nothing to do with alchemy, but was a bogus herbal with invented pictures, that a quack doctor would carry around just to impress his clients. Apparently there was a small cottage industry of such books somewhere in northern Italy, just at the right epoch. However, those books are quite different from the Voynich manuscript in style and format; and they were all written in plain language. Pietro Longhi: The Charlatan, 1757 Quackery is a derogatory term used to describe questionable medical practices. ... The use of the term has expanded, and is used to refer to any event which allows a large number of people to lalalawork part time. ...

Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, blood-letting and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript (see, for instance, Nicholas Culpeper's books). However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions (European or otherwise). Nicholas Culpeper - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...

This three-page foldout from the manuscript includes a chart that appears astronomical.

A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which some have interpreted as a picture of a galaxy that could only be obtained with a telescope. Other drawings were interpreted as cells seen through a microscope. This would suggest an early modern, rather than a medieval, date for the manuscript's origin. However, the resemblance is rather questionable: on close inspection, the central part of the "galaxy" looks rather like a pool of water. Some of the images also look quite like sea urchins. Download high resolution version (1400x601, 199 KB)p. ... Download high resolution version (1400x601, 199 KB)p. ... NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, is about 17,000 parsecs in diameter and approximately 20 million parsecs distant. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Drawing of the structure of cork as it appeared under the microscope to Robert Hooke from Micrographia which is the origin of the word cell being used to describe the smallest unit of a living organism Cells in culture, stained for keratin (red) and DNA (green) The cell is the... Robert Hookes microscope (1665) - an engineered device used to study living systems. ...

Theories about the language

Many theories have been advanced as to the nature of the Voynich manuscript "language". Here is a partial list:

Ciphers

According to the letter-based cipher theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language, that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters. This article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. ... In mathematics, computing, linguistics, and related disciplines, an algorithm is a finite list of well-defined instructions for accomplishing some task that, given an initial state, will terminate in a defined end-state. ...

This has been the working hypothesis for most deciphering attempts in the twentieth century, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s. Simple substitution ciphers can be excluded, because they are very easy to crack; so deciphering efforts have generally focused on polyalphabetic ciphers, invented by Alberti in the 1460s. This class includes the popular Vigenère cipher, which could have been strengthened by the use of nulls and/or equivalent symbols, letter rearrangement, false word breaks and so on. Some people assumed that vowels had been deleted before encryption. There have been several claims of deciphering along these lines, but none has been widely accepted — chiefly because the proposed deciphering algorithms depended on so many guesses by the user that they could extract a meaningful text from any random string of symbols. NSA can stand for: National Security Agency of the USA The British Librarys National Sound Archive This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Pre-19th century Leone Battista Alberti, polymath/universal genius, inventor of polyalphabetic substitution (see frequency analysis for the significance of this -- missed by most for a long time and dumbed down in the Vigenère cipher), and what may have been the first mechanical encryption aid. ... William Friedman. ... In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encryption by which units of plaintext are substituted with ciphertext according to a regular system; the units may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. ... A polyalphabetic cipher is any cipher based on substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets. ... Late statue of Leon Battista Alberti. ... The Vigenère cipher is named for Blaise de Vigenère (pictured), although Giovan Batista Belaso had invented the cipher earlier. ...

The main argument for this theory is that the use of a weird alphabet by a European author can hardly be explained except as an attempt to hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography as a systematic discipline. Against this theory is the observation that a polyalphabetic cipher would normally destroy the "natural" statistical features that are seen in the Voynich manuscript, such as Zipf's law. Also, although polyalphabetic ciphers were invented about 1467, variants only became popular in the 16th century, somewhat too late for the estimated date of the Voynich manuscript. The German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II for encryption of very high-level general staff messages Cryptography (or cryptology; derived from Greek κρυπτός kryptós hidden, and the verb γράφω gráfo write or λεγειν legein to speak) is the study of message secrecy. ... Originally, Zipfs law stated that, in a corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. ...

According to the codebook cipher theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually be codes to be looked up in a dictionary or codebook. The main evidence for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution of those words are similar to those of Roman numerals—which, at the time, would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based ciphers are viable only for short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read. In the context of cryptography, a code is a method used to transform a message into an obscured form, preventing those not in on the secret from understanding what is actually transmitted. ... Categories: Cryptography stubs | Cryptography ... The system of Roman numerals is a numeral system originating in ancient Rome, and was adapted from Etruscan numerals. ...

James Finn proposed in his book Pandora's Hope (2004)^[9] that the Voynich manuscript is in fact visually encoded Hebrew. Once the Voynich letters have been correctly transcribed, using the European Voynich Alphabet (EVA) as a guide, many of the Voynich words can be seen as Hebrew words that repeat with different distortions to confuse the reader. For example, the word AIN from the manuscript is the Hebrew word for "eye", and it also appears in different distorted versions as "aiin" or "aiiin", to make it appear as though the words are different when in fact they are the same word. Other methods of visual encryption are used as well. The main argument for this view is that it would explain the lack of success that most other researchers have had in decoding the manuscript, because they are based on more mathematical approaches to the decryption. The main argument against it is that such a qualitative encoding places a heavy burden on the talents of the individual decoder, given the multiplicity of possible alternate visual interpretations of the same text. It would be hard to separate how much interpretation is of the genuine text, and how much simply reflects the bias of the original interpreter. “Hebrew” redirects here. ... The European Voynich Alphabet, or EVA was created by René Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini as a solution for representing the unknown graphemes of the Voynich Manuscript into Roman characters, facilitating modern methods of study, such as computerized data analysis. ...

Micrography

Following its 1912 rediscovery, one of the earliest efforts to unlock the book's secrets (and, indeed, the first of many premature claims of decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless itself, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings only discernible under magnification. These markings, based on ancient Greek shorthand, were supposed to form a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Using this knowledge, Newbold claimed to have worked out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before Leeuwenhoek. However, John Manly of the University of Chicago pointed out serious flaws in this theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all could be "read" in the microscopic markings, which in any case are themselves illusory. Although there is a tradition of Hebrew micrography, it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Upon close study, these turn out to be mere artifacts of the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum, and an example of pareidolia. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography theory is today disregarded. This article is about the private Ivy League university in Philadelphia. ... Magnification is the process of enlarging something only in appearance, not physical size. ... Ancient Greece is a period in Greek history that lasted for around nine hundred years. ... Shorthand is an abbreviated, symbolic writing method that improves speed of writing or brevity as compared to a normal method of writing a language. ... Anton von Leeuwenhoek Anton van Leeuwenhoek (October 24, 1632 - August 26, 1723) was a tradesman and scientist from Delft, in the Netherlands. ... The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. ... Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... A microscope (Greek: micron = small and scopos = aim) is an instrument for viewing objects that are too small to be seen by the naked or unaided eye. ... “Hebrew” redirects here. ... Micrography is a Jewish art form developed in the 9th century, utilizing minute Hebrew letters to form representational, geometric and abstract designs. ... The term pareidolia (pronounced or ), first used in 1994 by Steven Goldstein,[1] describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. ...

Steganography

This theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in inconspicuous details—e.g. the second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, called steganography, is very old, and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. Some people suggested that the plain text was to be extracted by a Cardan grille of some sort. This theory is hard to prove or disprove, since stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to crack. An argument against it is that using a cipher-looking cover text defeats the main purpose of steganography, which is to hide the very existence of the secret message. Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the content is obscured. ... Polygraphia (1518) — the first printed book on cryptography. ... In cryptography, a Cardan grille is an important tool in the reading of a message obfuscated through steganography. ... This article is about steganography (hidden writing), not to be confused with stenography (shorthand). ...

Some people have suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes. There are indeed examples of steganography from about that time that use letter shape (italic vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum. In typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them. ...

Exotic natural language

The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some exotic natural language, written in the plain with an invented alphabet. The word structure is indeed similar to that of many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai (Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, the "words" have only one syllable; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns. In cryptography, plaintext is information used as input to an encryption algorithm; the output is termed ciphertext. ... The Sino-Tibetan languages form a putative language family composed of Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia. ... The Tibetan language is spoken primarily by the Tibetan people who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering South Asia, as well as by large number of Tibetan refugees all over the world. ... The Austroasiatic languages are a large language family of Southeast Asia and India. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... The Tai languages are a subgroup of the Tai Kadai language family. ... A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes. ... A syllable (Ancient Greek: ) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ...

This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for Western visitors; which motivated the invention of several phonetic scripts, mostly with Latin letters but sometimes with invented alphabets. Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who could have done it—even before Marco Polo's thirteenth century voyage, but especially after Vasco da Gama sailed the sea route to the Orient in 1499. The Voynich manuscript author could also be a native from East Asia living in Europe, or educated at a European mission. Phonetic (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a custom voice mailbox for the purpose of receiving all incoming voice messages as actual transcribed text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS... Languages can be romanized in a variety of ways, as shown here with Mandarin Chinese In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language... Marco Polo (September 15, 1254 – January 8, 1324) was a Venetian trader and explorer who gained fame for his worldwide travels, recorded in the book Il Milione (The Million or The Travels of Marco Polo). ... For other uses, see Vasco da Gama (disambiguation). ...

The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as articles and copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another possible hint are two large red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, inverted and badly copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar (jie qi). The main argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing) could find any clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations. An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, incorporating elements of a lunar calendar with those of a solar calendar. ... The Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese: 中国科学院; pinyin: Zhōngguó KÄ“xuéyuàn), formerly known as Academia Sinica (not to be confused with Taiwans Academia Sinica currently headquartered in Taipei which shares the same root), is the national academy for the natural sciences of the Peoples Republic of... Beijing (Chinese: 北京; pinyin: BÄ›ijÄ«ng; Wade-Giles: Peiching or Pei-ching; IPA: ; literally Northern capital;  ), a metropolis in northern China, is the capital of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). ...

In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland proposed that the manuscript is plaintext written in the Manchu language and gave a proposed incomplete translation of the first page of the manuscript.^[10] The Manchu language is a Tungusic language spoken by Manchus in Manchuria; it is the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. ...

Glossolalia

In their book, Kennedy and Churchill hint to the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolalia, channeling or outsider art.^[11] Tongues redirects here. ... Channeling can refer to Channeling (physics) Channeling (mediumistic), a term used in reference to the process of receiving messages or inspiration from invisible beings or spirits This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Adolf Wölflis Irren-Anstalt Band-Hain, 1910 The term Outsider Art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for Art Brut (which literally translates as Raw Art or Rough Art), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created...

If this is true, then the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which somehow resembles stream of consciousness, either due to "voices" heard, or due to his own urge. While in glossolalia this often takes place in an invented language (usually made up of fragments of the author's own language), invented scripts for this purpose are rare. Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the illustrations she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine, and show parallels to the illustrations in the manuscript, namely the "streams of stars" found throughout, and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the biological section. In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a literary technique which seeks to portray an individuals point of view by giving the written equivalent of the characters thought processes. ... A medieval illumination showing Hildegard von Bingen and the monk Volmar Hildegard von Bingen or Hildegard of Bingen (September 16, 1098 – September 17, 1179) was a German abbess, monastic leader, mystic, author, and composer of music. ...

The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text; Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. One of the drawbacks of this theory is that it fails to explain the deliberate structure of the manuscript and the carefully crafted astrological and botanical sections.

Constructed language

The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" has led William F. Friedman and John Tiltman to arrive independently at the conjecture that the text could be a constructed language in the plain—specifically, a philosophical or a priori language. In languages of this class, the vocabulary is organized according to a category system, so that the general meaning of a word can be deduced from its sequence of letters. For example, in the modern constructed language Ro, bofo- is the category of colors, and any word beginning with those letters would name a color: so red is bofoc, and yellow is bofof. (This is an extreme version of the book classification scheme used by many libraries — in which, say, P stands for language and literature, PA for Greek and Latin, PC for Romance languages, etc.) William Friedman. ... Brigadier John Tiltman (1894–1982) was a British Army officer who worked in intelligence, often at or with the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) starting in the 1920s. ... A constructed or artificial language — known colloquially as a conlang — is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary have been devised by an individual or group, instead of having naturally evolved as part of a culture. ... In the art of language construction, there are two ways to build a usable vocabulary. ... Ro is an a priori constructed language created by Rev. ... Library of Congress reading room The Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is a system of library classification developed by the Library of Congress. ... For other uses, see Latin (disambiguation). ... The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ...

This concept is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the VM by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes; as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes — for example, all plant names would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript. John Wilkins. ... The chief of the numerous works of John Wilkins was An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668), in which he expounds a new universal language for the use of philosophers. ... It has been suggested that Ending (linguistics) be merged into this article or section. ...

In his book Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis (1987), Leo Levitov declared the manuscript a plaintext transcription of a "polyglot oral tongue". This he defined as "a literary language which would be understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to whom this language could be read." His proposed decryption has three Voynich letters making a syllable, to produce a series of syllables that form a mixture of medieval Flemish with many borrowed Old French and Old High German words. The Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown script. ... In cryptography, plaintext is information used as input to an encryption algorithm; the output is termed ciphertext. ... The term Flemish language can designate: the official language of Flanders, which is Dutch with only very small variations; any of the regional dialects of Dutch spoken in Belgium; these are more different from Dutch than the official language of Flanders; one of these dialects, the West Flemish. ... Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300 A.D. It was known at the time as the langue doïl to distinguish it from the langue... The (Late Old High) German speaking area of the Holy Roman Empire around 950. ...

According to Levitov, the rite of Endura was none other than the assisted suicide ritual for people already believed to be near death, famously associated with the Cathar faith (although the reality of this ritual is also in question). He explains that the chimerical plants are not meant to represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of the faith. The women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection: the cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm bath. The constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Catharism. ...

This theory is questioned on several grounds. First, the Cathar faith is widely understood to have been a Christian gnosticism, and not in any way associated with Isis. Second, this theory places the book's origins in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is considerably older than even the adherents to the Roger Bacon theory believe. Third, the Endura ritual involved fasting, not venesection. Levitov offered no evidence beyond his translation for this theory. This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Isis is a goddess in Egyptian mythology. ...

Hoax

The bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the doubled and tripled words), the suspicious contents of its illustrations (such as the chimeric plants), its lack of historical reference and persistent resistance to deciphering have led many people to conclude that the manuscript may be a hoax. A hoax is an attempt to trick an audience into believing that something false is real. ...

In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay. The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, slightly after but contemporary to the estimated creation of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that since the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments do not have the precise words and frequencies as the Voynich manuscript, its resemblance to "Voynichese" is superficial.^{[citation needed]} Gordon Rugg was born in Perth, Scotland. ... In cryptography, a Cardan grille is an important tool in the reading of a message obfuscated through steganography. ...

The argument for authenticity is generally that the manuscript is simply too sophisticated to be a simple hoax. As mentioned, many serious linguists and historians have found much of the manuscript to be very complex and thought-provoking. Hoaxes, especially from this era, tend to be sloppy and crude. If the manuscript is a hoax, it is still a very elaborate one, and the question of why it was created remains just as unclear. Language scholars have noted that the manuscript shares certain word statistics (Zipf's law) with natural languages that random text generally lacks. On the other hand, some research indicates that random text demonstrates such features as well.^[12] As even Rugg admits, the ability to hoax Voynich with early techniques does not necessarily imply that Voynich itself is a hoax. Neither is it impossible, even if unlikely, for random text to share some statistical similarity to natural languages. So neither position can be wholly dismissed. Originally, Zipfs law stated that, in a corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. ... Gordon Rugg was born in Perth, Scotland. ...

In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia supported the hoax hypothesis.^[13] Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic method such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts. However, the attempts at decipherment that have unequivocally failed suggest that the manuscript is not at all likely to be based on a Latin or German plaintext anyway (see "Letter-based cipher" and "Exotic natural language" above), and thus the analysis by Schinner adds considerably less insight than it might seem to. Stochastic, from the Greek stochos or goal, means of, relating to, or characterized by conjecture; conjectural; random. ...

Cultural impact

A number of items in popular culture have been influenced, at least in part, by the Voynich manuscript.

• Colin Wilson published a short story in 1969 called "The Return of the Lloigor", in Arkham House's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, wherein a character discovers that the Voynich manuscript is an incomplete copy of the Necronomicon, a grimoire in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Since then, other authors have also identified the Voynich manuscript with the fictional Necronomicon.^{[citation needed]}
• The Codex Seraphinianus is a modern work of art created in the style of the Voynich manuscript.^{[citation needed]}
• The composer Hanspeter Kyburz wrote a work for chorus and instrumental ensemble based on the Voynich manuscript, thus reading it as a musical score. It uses a number of phrases from attempted translations of the manuscript as its text.
• In the computer game Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, the Voynich manuscript is the center of a plot involving "Neo-Templars". The manuscript predicts catastrophes that will happen in the near future, such as floods and earthquakes.
• In the Esperanto-language comic strip "La Veksilologisto" (The Vexillologist), "Dr. Voynich" is the hero's arch-enemy. Gifted by aliens with the "Orb of Esperanto" which allows universal translation, Voynich discovers this to be intolerable (animals speak, humans tell the truth), and sets out in search of the "Orb of Babel" which has the opposite effect.

Colin Henry Wilson (born June 26, 1931) is a prolific British writer. ... A prop designed to look like the Necronomicon. ... This design for an amulet comes from the Black Pullet grimoire. ... Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author from Providence, Rhode Island of fantasy, horror and science fiction. ... Cthulhu and Rlyeh The Cthulhu Mythos encompasses the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and associated horror fiction writers. ... The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during the late 1970s. ... Hanspeter Kyburz (born 1960) is a contemporary Swiss composer of chamber music, known for applying electronic music techniques to his productions. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... The term Templar may refer to: Orders and societies Knights Templar, a medieval Christian military order that was very prominent in the Crusades, from the early 1100s until the early 1300s. ... An earthquake is the result of a sudden release of stored energy in the Earths crust that creates seismic waves. ...   is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. ...

Notes

Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 310th day of the year (311th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 311th day of the year (312th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, is the unique eight-digit number applied to a periodical publication including electronic serials. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 78th day of the year (79th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, is the unique eight-digit number applied to a periodical publication including electronic serials. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 234th day of the year (235th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

References

• Voynich, Wilfrid Michael (1921). "A Preliminary Sketch of the History of the Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript". Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 3 (43): 415–430. 
• Manly, John Mathews (1921), "The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World: Did Roger Bacon Write It and Has the Key Been Found?", Harper's Monthly Magazine 143, pp.186–197.
• Manly, John Matthews (1931). "Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS". Speculum 6 (3): 345–391. 
• McKenna, Terence, "The Voynich Manuscript", in his The Archaic Revival (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), pp.172–184.
• William Romaine Newbold (1928). The Cipher of Roger Bacon. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. 
• M. E. D'Imperio (1978). The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. Laguna Hills, California: Aegean Park Press. ISBN 0-89412-038-7. 
• Robert S. Brumbaugh (1978). The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich 'Roger Bacon' Cipher Manuscript. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-0808-8. 
• John Stojko (1978). Letters to God's Eye. New York: Vantage Press. ISBN 0-533-04181-3. 
• Leo Levitov (1987). Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis. Aegean Park Press. ISBN 0-89412-148-0. 
• Mario M. Pérez-Ruiz (2003). El Manuscrito Voynich (in Spanish). Barcelona: Océano Ambar. ISBN 84-7556-216-7. 
• Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone (2005). The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-7679-1473-2. 
• Francisco Violat Bordonau (2006). El ABC del Manuscrito Voynich (in Spanish). Cáceres, Spain: Ed. Asesores Astronómicos Cacereños. 

See also

• Artificial script
• Book of Soyga
• Codex Seraphinianus
• False document
• False writing system
• Fictional language
• Rohonc Codex
• European Voynich Alphabet

An artificial or constructed script (also conscript or neography) is a new writing system specifically created by an individual or group, rather than having evolved as part of a language or culture like a natural script. ... The Book of Soyga, alternatively titled Aldaraia, is a mediaevel treatise on magic, one copy of which is known to have been possessed by the Elizabethan scholar John Dee. ... The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during the late 1970s. ... A false document is a form of verisimilitude that attempts to create in the reader (viewer, audience, etc. ... False writing systems are artificially constructed alphabets or scripts used (sometimes within the context of a false document) to convey a degree of concealed verisimilitude. ... Quenya, written in Tengwar and Latin-based alphabets Fictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. ... Rohonc Codex sample The Rohonc Codex (pronounce like ro-honts) is a set of writings in an unknown writing system. ... The European Voynich Alphabet, or EVA was created by René Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini as a solution for representing the unknown graphemes of the Voynich Manuscript into Roman characters, facilitating modern methods of study, such as computerized data analysis. ...

External links

Wikibooks has more about this subject:

The Voynich Manuscript

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Voynich manuscript

• Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library description of the Voynich manuscript (catalog item MS 408)
• Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library gallery of high resolution digital scans of the Voynich manuscript
• Resources for downloading and using the high resolution scans of the Voynich manuscript
• Flickr photoset of the pages as low-resolution JPEG files.
• Voynich.nu: The Voynich Manuscript Comprehensive information and analysis
• Jorge Stolfi's Voynich Manuscript stuff
  • Bibliography of Voynich manuscript related works
• Voynich Manuscript Mailing List
• The Voynich Archives - A searchable history of the mailing list (currently featuring mails only up to autumn 2006)
• Voynich Central resources, gallery and personal research websites
• Archives of the Journal of Voynich Studies a more formal research mailing list
• Replicating the Voynich Manuscript Gordon Rugg's research paper, suggesting the manuscript is a hoax
• Nature news article: World's most mysterious book may be a hoax A summary of Rugg's paper directed towards a more general audience
• Wired article "Scientific Method Man" Discussion of Rugg's hoax hypothesis
• The Voynich Manuscript survey by John Baez
• Scientific American: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript
• Association between the Voynich Manuscript and the Necronomicon
• List of owners of the Voynich Manuscript
• Dr Vladimir Sazonov's Voynich manuscript analysis site
• Voynich Manuscript at the Open Directory Project
• Voynich/Drebbel Theory Explores a possible Drebbel authorship.

Image File history File links Wikibooks-logo-en. ... Image File history File links Commons-logo. ... Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2. ... JPG redirects here. ... John Carlos Baez (b. ... The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as dmoz (from , its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. ...