Okay, muthas, here's the skinny.
So much controversy and mystery surrounds this six-by-nine inch, 104-leaf (originaly 116), softcover vellum manuscript. That's because nobody knows what the hell language it's written in.
This mysterious illuminated manuscript was discovered in 1912, in a chest in the depths of Villa Mondragone, an ancient castle which had by then become a Jesuit college, in Frascati, near Rome. It was found by American collector Wilfrid M Voynich.
No one knows when the book was written.* Attached to the front of the manuscript was a letter, from Doctor Johannes Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scientist in Rome, c. 1666. In it, Marci explains to Kircher that it had been left to him by an "intimate friend," who had also apparently petitioned Kircher for his help. This friend was Georg Baresch, who had asked for Kircher's help in 1639. Although Kircher had been unable to make heads or tails of the sections Baresch had copied for him, Marci apparently believed that Kircher would be able to decipher it if given free access to the whole thing. Kircher was a renowned translater of ciphers and cryptic writing, but had fallen for hoaxes in the past.
According to Marci, someone** had brought the book to Rudolf II (Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire from 1576 to 1612), who payed 600 gold ducats for it (worth about $14,000 US at the time), believing it to have been written by Roger Bacon. Marci had apparently learned this from a Dr Raphael Missowski, who tutored Czech to Ferdinand III (Emperor from 1637 to 1657). It is corroborrated by the fact that Jacobus Horcicki de Tepenecz, director of Rudolf's gardens, signed it sometime between 1608 (the year he was named "de Tepenecz") and 1619 (when he left Prague). He died in 1622, leaving the book to Baresch.
In 1961 the book was bought by New York antiquarian HP Kraus, for $24,500 US. Though he valued it at $160,000 US, he could find no buyers and in 1969, donated it to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where it sits today, known only as MS 408.
The character is a neat, flowing, elegant cursive script, not clearly related to any known form of writing. Each word is a ligature (much like our cursive writing and also much like Arabic, but clearly neither of these), and words are grouped roughly into paragraphs. Because of the justification it's difficult to tell whether the script runs from left to right (like Latin) or from right to left (like Arabic). Based on the styles of the illustrations and the fashions depicted in some figures, scholars are pretty sure it's European in origin. If it's a code it's a good one – tables of Voynich character frequency don't conform to those of any other known language (least of all any language it would be reasonable to believe could have found its way into writing in Renaissance Europe). Words tend to be shorter than Latin, Romance or Germanic words. Rates of character occurrence show an abnormally low degree of entropy, more on par with the Polynesian languages than any Eurasian one, which may indicate that, if it's a cipher for Latin or another European or Asian language, individual letters may be spelled out or represented by more than one Voynich glyph. To make matters worse, there is evidence for two different dialects, both using the Voynich script but having different grammars, and two different scribes and few evident corrections – indicating a project of unprecedented coordination.
In addition, there are some snippets of later additions (such as notes), some non-Voynich character sequences which may be keys to decryption, and some other extraneous notes like pagination which may or may not have been made by the author(s). Almost every page is illustrated, and illustrations on similar themes tend to be found near to one another in the book, so researchers generally speak of the manuscript as having six distinct sections. First (or last, depending on how the damn thing is supposed to read), there is a chapter which, judging from the pictures, is on botany. Unfortunately, almost all of the plants are completely unrecognizable. They do not appear to be any real plants – perhaps they are fantastic, or perhaps fake, and some may or may not be New World plants. Next there is an astrology section, with Zodiacal drawings, followed by a bewildering section illustrated with little naked female forms dancing in green rivers. This section is called the "biological" section. After this is a section filled with circular drawings of an unknown nature, called the "cosmology" section. Next a pharmaceutical section, with pictures of plants and plant sections next to beakers. Finally there is a "recipe" section, consisting of many short paragraphs accompanied by marginal drawings of stars.
Many people have put forward their own theories about what this book is, some of which are plausible and some of which are silly. A couple of the more plausible possibilities would be that it is an actual alchemical text written in code; or that it is gibberish composed by someone, literate or illiterate, to fool or swindle a patron – and I wouldn't put this past the Dee/Kelly team. In fact, recent toying with a sixteenth century technique called the Cardan grille suggests that something like the Voynich manuscript could actually have been composed in relatively short order.† If it were meaningful, it could have been the work of Sir Francis Bacon, though it's far more sophisticated than his biliteral cypher. However, no one will be able to say with much certainty until the code is cracked. If the book was written by Roger Bacon (the elder Bacon) in a natural language, it is only likely to have been Middle English, Middle French, Norse, High German, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew – with extensive abbreviation and repetition, to account for the low entropy.
Sources:
http://www.crystalinks.com/voynich.html
http://www.nature.com/nsu/031215/031215-5.html
http://inky.library.yale.edu/voy/voy2.html
http://voynich.nu
http://www.voynich.nu/aes.html
http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich.html
http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/evmt.htm
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/2260/voynich.html
http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/scripts/voynich.html
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/kircher.html
The Voynich script was made into a True Type font, called Eva Hand 1. It used to be available at the following site, but it seems that this is no longer true:
http://www16.brinkster.com/dbink/Default.asp?cid=13
(Cheers to wertperch for finding it in the first place, and to thisfred for telling me it wasn't there anymore.)
* Radiocarbon dating has not been carried out because it would be necessary to destroy a small portion of the vellum; even then it could only give the date of death of the animal from which the vellum was made, not the date of the application of the ink, which could have been any time after; and also because radiocarbon dating isn't sufficiently exact – it could say whether the animal died in the thirteenth century, or between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries, but could not be any more specific than that (ie, it couldn't distinguish between vellum from 1912 or vellum from 1600).
** Some speculate that the mysterious seller was John Dee, spy and occultist, who was in Rudolf's court from 1582 to 1586 and who had lectured on Roger Bacon. While it is the sort of thing that a character like Dee would be involved with, Dee's son Arthur Dee once remarked that, when in Bohemia (Czechoslovakia), his father had had a book full of "Hieroglyphicks" that he had not been able to decipher. Some scholars have noted that the page numbering is in Dee's hand, which would indicate that he had at least studied it.
† Edward Kelley is known to have used Cardan grilles. Gorgonzola tells me that the July 2004 issue of Scientific American has an article proving that the whole text of the manuscript could have been generated with Cardan grilles, so this seems to be the prevailing theory.
–Voynich Manuscript–
—A Chronology—
Roger Bacon, 1214-1294
author?
—
Rudolf II, Reigned 1576-1612
Pays 600 gold ducats for book
John Dee, 1527-1608
in Prague 1582-1586
pagination?
Francis Bacon, 1561-1626
Jacobus Horcicki de Tepenecz
signs book sometime 1608-1619
dies 1622, leaving book to Baresch
George Baresch
solicits Kircher 1639
dies, leaving library to Marci
Johannes Marcus Marci
gives book to Kircher 1666
Athanasius Kircher
receives book in 1666
—
1666-1912
(246 years)
History unknown
Sitting to rot in Vatican basement?
—
Wilfred Voynich
discovers book 1912
HP Kraus
buys book 1961
donates book to Yale 1969
Yale University
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
receives book 1969