The manuscript first came to the attention of modern scholars in 1912 when Wilfrid M. Voynich (after whom it is now named) discovered it tucked away in the library of Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit college in Frascati, Italy. He purchased the manuscript and brought it with him back to America.
The first to announce a solution to the manuscript’s code was William Romaine Newbold in 1921. After microscopically examining the letters of the manuscript, Newbold decided that the letters were not themselves meaningful. The real meaning lay in the individual pen strokes that composed each letter and which, so Newbold claimed, corresponded to an ancient Greek form of shorthand. Newbold’s translation, however, now reads more like a work of madness than the work of a rational mind, since what he believed to be individual pen strokes were, in fact, simply cracks in the manuscript’s ink caused by age.
In the 1970s Robert Brumbaugh, using a complicated decoding scheme, decided that the manuscript was either a medieval treatise on the elixir of life, or a sixteenth-century hoax.
Since then, a variety of theories about the manuscript have been suggested. In 1978 John Stojko argued that it was an account of an ancient civil war written in an ancient, vowelless form of Ukrainian. In 1986 Michael Barlow suggested that Voynich himself had written the manuscript as a hoax. In 1987 Leo Levitor theorized that it was an ancient prayer-book, offering repetitive meditations on the themes of pain and death.
To this day the Voynich manuscript resists all efforts at translation. It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable cipher. It is thought that the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft might have used the Voynich manuscript as the model for the fictional work, The Necronomicon, which he refers to in many of his stories.
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