The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which has Defied Interpretation for Centuries Review

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The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which has Defied Interpretation for Centuries ReviewAt Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, if you have the credentials, you can be allowed to take a look at one of the world's strangest manuscripts. It looks like nothing else you have ever seen, 250 pages of paintings of weird plants and naked bathers and commentary in a language and letters that cannot be found anywhere else. This is the Voynich Manuscript, a document well known among cryptographers, linguists, scholars of the Middle Ages, and those simply curious about genuine oddities. It has been the subject of intense study by experts and amateurs since it came to light in 1912, and though there have been claims that it has been deciphered, the claims have always been shown to be completely overoptimistic. In _The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which Has Defied Interpretation for Centuries_ (Orion Books), Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill examine the document's contents, history, and would-be expositors and their theories, to show how little we know about the book. It is an enticing, puzzling story, well told to bring the enigma to a broader audience than the specialists who are consumed by it.
Wilfrid Voynich was a rare book dealer who reported that he found the manuscript in a Jesuit college outside Rome in 1912, along with a letter connecting it to Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century British friar and scientist. Bacon's authorship got a fine boost from the first scholar to take a crack at the manuscript, whose ideas the public and academics welcomed, before they were subsequently debunked. Since that debacle, professional historians have seldom ventured to work on the document, leaving it to an army of code-breakers and armchair theorists, who are now active on the Internet. Certainly there is a great deal to think about and speculate upon in the document. The pictures around which the text is written are distinctly strange, and this book has a good sampling of color plates to illustrate them. They consist of plants and herbs, with details of flowers, leaves, and roots, which no one has been able to identify. There are astrological charts that make no sense in any known astrological system. There are naked ladies dancing, or bathing in a green liquid, which flows from fantastic piping that looks as if it could have been designed by Dr. Seuss. The text consists of obvious letters and words, but few have been able to agree on exactly how many letters there are in the document. This is a real stumbling block to decipherment, as is the complete ignorance of what might be its original language. Neither text nor pictures seem to relate to anything in this world. Consequently, there have been many interpretations.
The authors do not have their own hypothesis for the book to carry. They are fair-minded and inclusive about the ideas of others, and include a final section in which different experts give their ideas. Among the experts is Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist, whose most recent work on the decipherment is only suggested here. Last winter he looked for low-tech tools available in the sixteenth century that could make mysterious text. He used a "Cardan Grille" device and found he could generate a page of Voynich-looking gibberish quite easily. He published his theory earlier this year in the journal _Cryptologia_. Tables and grilles can account for the statistical anomalies of the text like its repetition of certain words. Rugg is not the first to simply say that the text is a meaningless hoax, only the most recent. Even he believes it is an ancient hoax, not a modern one. Many experts have agreed with his explanation, but it is at heart an unsatisfactory one, since the manuscript is said to be mere gibberish. That's not going to stop further theorists, as Kennedy and Churchill show in this fascinating introduction to the mystery.
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