A letter attached to it, dated 1665, claimed that the book had belonged to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (r 1576 to 1612). He found the Manuscript outside a Jesuit seminary in Rome, during a book-buying trip in 1912 – and that’s how it got its name. He escaped and went to London, where he set up a second hand bookshop. Wilfrid Voynich was a Polish-Lithuanian book dealer, who was arrested and sent to Siberia for socialist activities in the late 19th century. The astronomical symbols could be related to medical practices of the period but most of the celestial bodies are not known to date. Attempts to identify most of the illustrated plants have failed, not least due to the confounding nature of many of the plant drawings, which look like composites: the roots of one species are attached to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.
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The problem is that the puzzling text and illustrations have only fuelled countless theories about its purpose. It seems that it may have been a pharmacopoeia (book of medicine) to address issues and topics in medicine of that time. What was the purpose of the Voynich Manuscript? The aforementioned William Freidman led one effort in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card to make it machine-readable. Exclusive transcription alphabets were created to decode its language.
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In fact, William Freidman, the US Army Signal Intelligence Service’s chief cryptologist, spent 30 years trying to understand it.
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Even Alan Turing tried to decipher it, as did FBI operatives, linguists, mathematicians, and medieval scholars, with no success. Some drawings and text show retouching and the binding and covers were added later, but nothing further has been revealed of the secrets of its writing and illustrations. It has been subject to a wide range of 21 st century testing, leading to an understanding of the parchment, ink and paint. What makes the Voynich Manuscript intriguing is its unknown language (a left to right writing system), which has defied decoding by some of the greatest minds. Voynich Manuscript Text – Beinecke Library, Yale University