[Book] New book

[nablator]

That's actually more interesting than the science fiction novel. What's in the historian's toolbox about the VM?

A summary of the Golden Fleece book:

Is the Voynich Manuscript a Hoax?

In 1912, a Polish antique book dealer living in London, Wilfred Voynich (1865–1930), announced the discovery of a strange new manuscript (MS), allegedly originating in the thirteenth century with the English polymath and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. The text was written in an indecipherable code, unbroken by William Friedman and other world-class cryptographers to this day. The illustrations of botanical plants and flowers seemed unique. Some were unknown. No one could find a similar manuscript anywhere. Nobody had recorded anything like this strange book before 1912. Could the MS be authentic? Or was it a hoax?

Voynich claimed the manuscript’s provenance ran from Bacon through the Elizabethan seer and con man John Dee to Habsburg emperor Rudolf II in Prague, ending up in a Jesuit library outside Rome or a “castle in Europe,” as Voynich described it. More likely, Voynich acquired a warehouse of medieval and early modern manuscript materials from a Florence book dealer in 1908 and put the strange book together himself before moving to the US and setting up his own book dealership in New York before World War I. Failing to sell his “ugly duckling” manuscript for an inflated asking price in the 1920s, he bequeathed it to his widow Ethel Boole Voynich, daughter of the famous logician George Boole, and to her committee. The manuscript finally ended up at the Yale University library in New Haven in 1969, where it currently resides. In our time, thousands of Voynicheros worldwide spend their days trying to follow the intricate historiographical debate and source materials related to the manuscript. Their online websites are full of claims, counterclaims, evidence, and clues. If you wish to, you can lose yourself in the Voynich MS debate online for as long as your eyesight holds out.

Was the Voynich manuscript a hoax or a forgery? Since 1986, many scholars have thought it was both. Voynich, as a young Polish revolutionary, was versed in codes, conspiracies, and ciphers. The appearance of the MS parallels the faked discovery of Piltdown Man, the “missing link,” between apes and humans, and the Dreadnought battleship spoof of Virginia Woolf and her friends in 1910, disguised as a royal delegation from Zanzibar to Great Britain. The manuscript’s provenance as alleged by Voynich follows closely the trail of books published in England after 1890 and well known to him. There is no mention of the manuscript before January 1912, when Voynich tried and failed to sell it to an American pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Henry S. Wellcome, who lived in London and planned to open a museum of medical history there (he did in 1913). Published sources of the day provide a vast amount of material related to Roger Bacon, John Dee, and Emperor Rudolf II that resemble the alleged Voynich provenance. There is circumstantial but convincing evidence that Voynich put the manuscript together himself, using authentic paper, inks, and pigments and employing his friends and family to assist him in the project. His provenance was consistent with current scholarship.

Task: Using online research, see if you can find any evidence that a Voynich manuscript existed before 1912.

For Further Reading

You can see the entire book online now if you wish. Don’t bother traveling to Yale. Join the discussions regarding the Voynich manuscript. Or check out my own investigations in my book Golden Fleece. The Voynich Manuscript and British Intelligence, 1890–1960 (Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishers, 2024). The debate over the authenticity of the Voynich manuscript continues and shows no signs of ending soon.

"circumstantial but convincing evidence", "authentic paper"