Copies of mysterious Voynich Manuscript to be published for the first time

in hopes that someone will crack its code

8/22/2016

With its wild drawings and impenetrable script, the manuscript has tantalised experts for decades

A Spanish publishing house has won the right to publish a limited series of reproductions of the so-called Voynich Manuscript, whose parchment-like pages of strange letters and swirling images have bamboozled the world of medieval academe and cryptology for decades.

Indeed, by making copies of the tantalising tome available to a wider audience for the first time, its custodians at Yale University are hoping that perhaps someone somewhere in the world will glimpse its pages and step forward with the key to crack their strange and wonderful code. There are 20-25 unique symbols in the book’s text, all running in a jumble no one can grasp.

Originally thought to have been written by the English friar and philosopher Roger Bacon in the 13th Century until carbon dating methods seemingly ruled it out - it is now believed to have been penned in the early 15th century - the book is so named because it was acquired by Wilfrid Voynich, an American-Polish rare books dealer, in 1912 from monks in Italy.

It’s pages not only feature long flights of the indecipherable text - experts are mostly agreed it appears to be some kind of cipher based on Roman letters - there is a wealth of illustrations, not least among them images of naked women apparently wading through liquid, astral drawings and representations of more than a hundred plants, the species of which no one can recognise.

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