Comments

Z.Lozinski December 5, 2016 5:24 PM

Interesting. I wonder how it compares to the French facsimile of the manuscript which was published about 10 years ago. (I’m away from my library, so I don’t have the reference immediately to hand).

Anyone seriously interested should also get the NSA’s monograph: “The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma” written by Mary D’Imperio in 1978.

https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/misc/assets/files/voynich_manuscript.pdf

Both William Friedman and Brigadier John Tiltman ran informal groups investigating the manuscript, and it these are one of the early (declassified) examples of computer assisted cryptanalysis.

tyr December 5, 2016 11:51 PM

If you want to go further down the rabbit hole.

http://www.archive.org/details/truefaithfulrelaOOdeej

This is a contemporary work with Voynich, and may be
the source of it being sold to the Alchemy Rebellion
boys. There’s a bit of thin evidence connecting Dee
and Kelley to the Voynich. Casuabon is the inventor
of philology. He’s the one who debunked The hermeneutic
corpus based on the language used and showed those ‘old’
works were christian era fakes.

Voynich has avoided decipherment because no one has found
anything that connects it to other artifacts of the era.
You’d expect an herbal/garden book to have matching plants
from that time.

The astrological charts aren’t matched to any others as
well. It’s not just the language that is indecipherable.

It is a truly fun object to tinker with and some of the
claims of deciphering are wonderfully bizarre, worth a
look for themselves.

It wasn’t too long ago that they found a complete walled
off lab in Prague with all of the alchemical equipment
intact.

Dee was apparently a secret agent for the british crown
and very interested in codes and ciphers in addition to
owning more books in his personal library than anyone
else in england. The Bodleian still has his scrystone
and books.

Dame Frances Yates has a pretty good book on the foment
of the times which triggered the 30 Years War.

It also was the scene of the young DesCartes recieving
the basis of modern science (number and measure) from
an angel in Einsteins birthplace (Ulm).

Herman December 6, 2016 12:48 AM

Well, Occam’s Razor indicates that it is a collection of drawings of Mexican plants and doodles written in Mayan text by a bored Catholic monk.

bjd December 8, 2016 6:48 PM

Cannot parse this ‘news’ item.
The entire document has been available in similar facsimile (pub intended) in several online sources for a number of years.

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