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A book serves many purposes. It exists as an oscillation of current, moving between transmission and reception. The Voynich Manuscript is to be understood as a glitch in this ephemeral current, in which the signals have never been aligned.
The Voynich Manuscript was likely written somewhere in central Europe sometime in the late 15th to early 16th centuries. It was rediscovered in Italy and named after the last owner, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, in 1912. It has been housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library since 1969 when Wilfrid’s widow sold it to Yale. Consisting of 250 pages which have been carbon dated to the early 15th century, it is written in a unique language which has never been translated. Deploying distinctive colours and illustrative depictions, The Manuscript has been divided into six stylistic sections - herbal, astrological, balneological (the study of therapeutic bathing), cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes (source). Accompanying the illustrations which run throughout these sections is a cryptic script, this script seeming to hint at the manuscripts legitimacy, as though, together the script and the illustrations could form a new world where we can begin to understand the virtual. The effort to make this document is remarkable, even more remarkable is that it has remained untranslated, despite centuries of scholars trying to decode it.
The Voynich Manuscript was likely written somewhere in central Europe sometime in the late 15th to early 16th centuries. It was rediscovered in Italy and named after the last owner, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, in 1912. It has been housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library since 1969 when Wilfrid’s widow sold it to Yale. Consisting of 250 pages which have been carbon dated to the early 15th century, it is written in a unique language which has never been translated. Deploying distinctive colours and illustrative depictions, The Manuscript has been divided into six stylistic sections - herbal, astrological, balneological (the study of therapeutic bathing), cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes (source). Accompanying the illustrations which run throughout these sections is a cryptic script, this script seeming to hint at the manuscripts legitimacy, as though, together the script and the illustrations could form a new world where we can begin to understand the virtual. The effort to make this document is remarkable, even more remarkable is that it has remained untranslated, despite centuries of scholars trying to decode it.