The Voynich Manuscript - by Yale ISBN 9780300217230

Yale will publish this new book by Raymond Clemens and Deborah E. Harkness on this 4 November.

The first authorized copy of this mysterious, much-speculated-upon, one-of-a-kind, centuries-old puzzle. The Voynich Manuscript is produced from new photographs of the entire original and accompanied by expert essays that invite anyone to understand and explore the enigma.

Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the "Voynich Manuscript," the world's most mysterious book. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no clearer purpose now than when it was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich. The manuscript appears and disappears throughout history, from the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to a secret sale of books in 1903 by the Society of Jesus in Rome.

The book's language has eluded decipherment, and its elaborate illustrations remain as baffling as they are beautiful.

For the first time, this facsimile, complete with elaborate folding sections, allows readers to explore this enigma in all its stunning detail, from its one-of-a-kind "Voynichese" text to its illustrations of otherworldly plants, unfamiliar constellations, and naked women swimming though fantastical tubes and green baths.

The essays that accompany the manuscript explain what we have learned about this work-from alchemical, cryptographic, forensic, and historical perspectives - but they provide few definitive answers. Instead, as New York Times best-selling author Deborah Harkness says in her introduction, the book "invites the reader to join us at the heart of the mystery."

Chawton suggests this might be a wonderful Limited Edition for The Folio Society in a few years' time.

It's already out. I received my copy on October 7th.

Wonderful! I'd be very interested in this. It's my private hope that when the Voynich Manuscript is finally deciphered it will be found to contain in coded form a complete explanation of the Turin Shroud.

>4 boldface: Fantastic, Jonathan!

>2 kdweber: Sewn binding. Just below Abbeville Press or Taschen in production values.

>1 Chawton:
Ordered! Thank you.
I have previously only had the rather unsatisfactory Ambush Press edition, this looks far better.

There's a new Voynich book coming out!

www.amazon.com/Voynich-Manuscript-Complete-Mysterious-Esoteric/dp/1786780771/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499563292&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Voynich+Manuscript%3A+The+World%27s+Most+Mysterious+and+Esoteric+Codex

Last week I was on holidays in my hometown and happened to visit an imprint specialized in facsimiles, this one being among them, of which they made a limited edition of 898 copies on a commission by Yale Univ. I did not dare to ask the price, being sure it would be quite high and not being very interested on the topic, but here you can see some photos and visit their website (in Spanish I am afraid):

http://voynich.siloe.es/galeria/

Shared by the Society itself, new ideas on the origin and author of the manuscript. Also a new facsimile is due to be released. More details at the the end of the article.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-mysterious-voynich-manus...

Edit: >8 NYCFaddict: has already provided the link to the new book, I didn't read the thread through.

>10 NLNils: Stephen Skinner has done solid work on Solomonic magic and the Western grimoire tradition — his hypotheses on this erstwhile mystery should be interesting.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript-solution/

A compelling argument that the Voynich Manuscript is a women's health manual, written in shorthand (and decipherable) Latin. An excerpt:

“Medieval lettering is notoriously fickle: individual letter variations, styles and combinations are confusing at the best of times. I recognized at least two of the characters in the Voynich manuscript text as Latin ligatures, Eius and Etiam. Ligatures were developed as scriptorial short-cuts. They are composed of selected letters of a word, which together represent the whole word, not unlike like a monogram. An ampersand is just such an example. The design combines the letters “e” “t”; and “et” is the Latin word for “and”. On the strength of this I consulted the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum of medieval Latin (1899) by Adriano Cappelli, sometimes referred to as the medievalists’ Bible. Systematic study of every single character in the Lexicon identified further ligatures and abbreviations in the Voynich manuscript and set a precedent. It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and not a letter.

From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry. The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc. So the herbarium of the Voynich manuscript must therefore be a series of (“simple”) recipe ingredients with the necessary measures.”

Found it persuasive. Remarkable that earlier this year, an article came out in the NYRB claiming the manuscript was a fake, but not a modern fake. (I posted a link under the Published Reviews section of the book in LT.) I found that earlier article less persuasive at the time, and in light of this new article, confirm that impression. But remarkable so much has been published recently on the Voynich MS.

Perhaps the biggest conclusion of this new argument: a key part of the MS is missing -- the index identifying specific maladies and plants useful for curing them.

>12 gmacaree:

Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

I also found it persuasive. It would explain, at a stroke, why no linguist has "deciphered" the text. If the characters don't form words because they already are words (in shorthand), it means all previous attempts have been barking up the wrong tree.

>15 NYCFaddict: There's also the fact that the history of women's health has not been a fashionable or serious subject of study before the last generation or so, so the clues mentioned in the article were more likely to remain unexamined by linguists and cryptographers.

A link to a response to Gibbs' proposed solution:

http://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2017/09/08/the-voynich-manuscript-...

On the second page there is a link to a short article outlining a test for claimed solutions of Voynich.

I always thought it was aliens - seems pretty obvious to me.

>15 NYCFaddict:
If the characters represent words rather than letters, wouldn't there still be some sort of underlying structure that could be analysed statistically or linguistically? Like a grammar or syntax?

>19 Cat_of_Ulthar:

There would be, but of course the frequency tables would be very different. If the analyst assumes letters not words, they would miss the pattern. For another, recipes would have much different frequencies than written (let alone spoken) language. That said, now that the claim is made they are words, I wonder what the frequency analysis reveals and whether it tallies.

The Guardian has an article today on a new theory regarding the manuscript:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/16/latin-hebrew-proto-romance-new-t...

They note that the author's fellow scholars are not convinced but, if you want to check his ideas out, the original paper is available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566

It's free access, which is nice.

I think I can debunk the hypothesis as follows.

Proto-Romance is Latin.

This is funny. The best bit is his quote claiming that because his theory was published, it's passed the test of rigour and acceptance. That's not how this works, grasshopper. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/17/university-backtracks-on-dispute...

I liked the modesty of his "using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity”.

>23 cwl:

Ouch!

Nice catch.

And: Sokal Hoax (publishing is an imperfect process, to say the least).

>24 cronshaw:

"using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity”.

That was my favourite bit, too. It's a bit vague as a methodology :-)

Ah yes, you may think you've seen modesty but his 'lateral thinking and ingenuity' is as nothing compared to this author's self-confessed "flawless, elegant...well executed and immensely entertaining" writing (from https://www.scifiandscary.com/this-is-not-a-review-of-hells-shadows/)
Edit to say - sorry that link is off topic, it just struck me as unusual to see two such, um, confident writers in one week.