The Voynich Manuscript
by Unknown Unknown
On This Page
Description
This ebook is the complete reproduction of the preserved Voynich Manuscript, formatted for high resolution color ebook reader displays. The Voynich manuscript, also known as "the world's most mysterious manuscript", is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912.Much of the manuscript resembles herbal manuscripts of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information show more about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript's script and language remain unknown and unreadable. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. As yet, it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a cause célèbre of historical cryptology. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels. None of the many speculative solutions proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified.
Illustrations: The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. Following are the sections and their conventional names:
Herbal: Each page displays one plant (sometimes two) and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the "pharmaceutical" section. None of the plants depicted is unambiguously identifiable.
Astronomical: Contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.
Biological: A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them strongly reminiscent of body organs.
Cosmological: More circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has foldouts; one of them spans six pages and contains a map or diagram, with nine "islands" or "rosettes" connected by "causeways" and containing castles, as well as what may possibly be a volcano.
Pharmaceutical: Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars, ranging in style from the mundane to the fantastical; and a few text paragraphs.
Recipes: Many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower- or star-like "bullet".
. show less
Tags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Five stars "just cause" but I'm glad I didn't buy it, I liked the naked women in tubes, definitely a book for superfans.
Ambush Printing in Arizona advertises that they are "a historical document reproduction company".
Their web page is:-
http://ambushprinting.com/
They have produced numerous manuscript reproductions, including one of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Good reproductions of this manuscript are few and far between. Further details about the manuscript can be found at:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
I have just received my copy of the Voynich Manuscript from from Ambush Printing.
The book has been printed on thick, good quality pseudo-parchment paper.
The original manuscript appears to have been photographed rather than scanned, and there is slight blurring as a result, but this may be the condition of the original manuscript.
The show more book is tightly bound in a limp, thick coarse leather cover that has Voynich stamped on it.
The binding is by means of leather straps threaded through the binding thread.
The binding is so tight that the pages cannot be laid flat, in fact they cannot be opened at more than 90 degrees to each other. This makes viewing the pages difficult.
There are five concertina fold out pages included, as in the original manuscript.
Unfortunately each page shows the following pages as part of the printed page picture, so the reproduced page edges show following pages at the outer edge. This is rather distracting, and unlike high quality reproductions (eg. Folio Society). each page is not therefore quite true to itself. See picture below of the edge of a single page.
There is no title page, colophon, accompanying introduction or explanation, just the reproduced pages of the manuscript.
It cannot really be called a fine press publication, but at a cost of US$200 postage you get what you pay for.
More a curiosity to add to your collection than something to admire. show less
Their web page is:-
http://ambushprinting.com/
They have produced numerous manuscript reproductions, including one of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Good reproductions of this manuscript are few and far between. Further details about the manuscript can be found at:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
I have just received my copy of the Voynich Manuscript from from Ambush Printing.
The book has been printed on thick, good quality pseudo-parchment paper.
The original manuscript appears to have been photographed rather than scanned, and there is slight blurring as a result, but this may be the condition of the original manuscript.
The show more book is tightly bound in a limp, thick coarse leather cover that has Voynich stamped on it.
The binding is by means of leather straps threaded through the binding thread.
The binding is so tight that the pages cannot be laid flat, in fact they cannot be opened at more than 90 degrees to each other. This makes viewing the pages difficult.
There are five concertina fold out pages included, as in the original manuscript.
Unfortunately each page shows the following pages as part of the printed page picture, so the reproduced page edges show following pages at the outer edge. This is rather distracting, and unlike high quality reproductions (eg. Folio Society). each page is not therefore quite true to itself. See picture below of the edge of a single page.
There is no title page, colophon, accompanying introduction or explanation, just the reproduced pages of the manuscript.
It cannot really be called a fine press publication, but at a cost of US$200 postage you get what you pay for.
More a curiosity to add to your collection than something to admire. show less
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Published Reviews
ThingScore 63
By now, it was more or less clear what the Voynich manuscript is: a reference book of selected remedies lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval period, an instruction manual for the health and wellbeing of the more well to do women in society, which was quite possibly tailored to a single individual. The script had hitherto proved resistant to interpretation and presented several show more hurdles. 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. [...] It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and not a letter. show less
added by elenchus
Interestingly, what comes through most clearly in this volume is how much the story of the Voynich Manuscript resembles the histories of other forged or hoax texts of the Latin Middle Ages. Throughout the medieval period, authors of spurious texts surrounded their works with forged histories of lost translations, ancient and unknown languages, and chance encounters that were intended to show more bolster the claims of the text and its author(s). The story that emerges in the essays contains hidden letters, an invisible signature, and a secret cache of books in a walled-up library room; serendipitous discovery, flights of fancy, and public humiliation; and a cast of characters that includes mages, priests, a self-made émigré, and several of the most important figures of the twentieth century in cryptography and medieval history in the United States. The Voynich Manuscript may be a medieval hoax, but it comes by its history honestly. show less
added by AndreasJ
But if we can be fairly sure that the manuscript is not a modern forgery, it by no means follows that it is not in fact a medieval hoax. Four centuries of attempts to decode, decipher, or translate the text have all ended in bafflement. The finest cryptological minds of the twentieth century and sustained computer analysis alike have drawn a blank; the text refuses to yield meaning. Attempts show more to find parallels to the text in cabbalistical, hermetic, or alchemical code systems have all thrown up more disparities than resemblances. What if the book’s mysteries are in fact pure mystification, specious appearance that never had any real meaning? show less
added by elenchus
Author Information
280 Works 437 Members
All Editions
Some Editions
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Inspired
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- unknown, parchment dated to early 15th century
- People/Characters
- Voynich manuscript; Athanasius Kircher; Johannes Marcus Marci; Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia; Wilfrid Voynich
- Epigraph
- What fascinates me most about the Voynich Manuscript, above and beyond the historical puzzle and above and beyond how interesting it would to know what it actually says, is the idea of an unreadable book … We have cognizanc... (show all)e of the world by ordering all the information we come upon in relation to information that we have already accumulated – through patterns. An unreadable book in a non-English script with no dictionary attached, is very puzzling. We become like linguistic oysters, we secrete around it, we encyst it into our metaphysic. But we don't know what it says, which always carries with it the possibility that it says something that would unhinge our conceptions of things or that its real message is its unreadability. It points to the Otherness of the nature of information, and is what is called in structuralism a “limit text”. Certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the limit text of Western occultism. It is truly an occult book – one that no one can read.
From The Archaic Revival by
TERENCE MCKENNA (1946-2000),
American ethnobiologist and mystic - First words
- I
- Publisher's editor
- Calamia, Joseph (acquiring editor, Yale Univ. Press); Hodgson, James
- Disambiguation notice
- There are several books about The Voynich Manuscript. If your work has a specific author/editor/etc., please add it to that work. Please do not combine books with particular authors/editors with this work.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 78
- Popularity
- 404,227
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.20)
- Languages
- German
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 2
- ASINs
- 6
