Today we take a peek at (a most excellent facsimile of) the Voynich manuscript, an inscrutable, unreadable book in the collection of Beinecke Library at Yale University. It has sections that are found in other manuscripts - herbals and astrological materials - but the script is not found elsewhere and it's just very strange. If you want to see more, watch our hour-long Coffee With A Codex recording here:
Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Pe
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Bonus 106: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript - Interview with Claire Bowern
In the 1600s, an antique book is recorded in an alchemist's library in Prague, containing intriguing but puzzling drawings, like plants with unnatural cuboid roots, as well as a strange writing system, with some familiar letters and some utterly unfamiliar. This book became known as the Voynich Manuscript, after a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912, and the meaning (or lack thereof) that lies on its 240 parchment pages is a puzzle that's intrigued cryptographers, historians, linguists, and more for centuries.
In this episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern, who's a professor at Yale University, researcher of language documentation and historical linguistics, and creator of a class about the enduring enigma that is the Voynich Manuscript. We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn't created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn't look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven't succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we've actually succeeded in cracking it one day.
Listen to this episode about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
Ulrik Heltoft’s “The Voynich Botanical Studies and The Origin of Specimen 52v” artworks at Andersen’s Contemporary art gallery in Copenhagen (20.04.2013 to 11.05.2013)
working on the
voynich-page-project-collages
for zines artfusion …
(the original voynich manuscript
is a document that is notable
for its strange text, that to date
hasn't been decrypted. theories
range from a secret language or code
to an old sort of joke or hoax.)
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The thing that gets me the most about the Voynich manuscript that seems rarely talked about is how much it would cost to make.
You can only get 4 pages per calf.
There are about 240 pages in the manuscript.
So I don't think this was just some random dude who put it together as a joke. Or, it could have been a joke, but only by someone to whom the several hundred thousand dollars wouldn't have meant much.
Episode 2: Lisa Fagin Davis on a Fragment, a Forgery, and a Fiend
Women bathing in the Voynich manuscript
In Episode 2 of Inside My Favorite Manuscript, Dot and Lindsey talk to manuscript scholar Lisa Fagin Davis about three of her favorite manuscripts, all of which happen to be in the collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale University:
The Gottschalk Antiphonary, now a collection of fragments
Epistolary, Cistercian Use, a 15th century manuscript with substantial forged illustrations added in the 19th century
Cypher Manuscript aka The Voynich Manuscript, a fiend of a manuscript that has proven itself impossible to decipher
Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!
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Below the cut are photos of some of the specific things we discuss in this episode.
Beinecke MS 481.51: Gottschalk Antiphonary:
Beinecke MS 283: Epistolary, Cistercian Use:
Beinecke MS 408: Cypher Manuscript aka The Voynich Manuscript
Page from the herbal section:
Page opening from the astrological / zodiacal section:
Page from the bathing section:
Large fold-out:
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