It was 1910, or maybe 1911 or 1912, when Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-born antiquarian, purchased a strange, medieval manuscript.
Similar in size to an average paperback, at around 6 inches by 9 inches, the book burst at the seams, brimming with words and pictures of peculiar plants, strange stars, and bathing female figures. At around 232 pages, the book bore no indication of its authors and lacked the luster — and the metal leaf — seen in many manuscripts from the “illuminated” age. Increasing its intrigue, its writing was wholly incomprehensible, causing Voynich to conclude that the tome was written in code.
That’s the traditional story told about the “Voynich Manuscript,” acquired in a Jesuit archive outside of Rome. But what are modern researchers actually revealing about the text, commonly considered the world’s most mysterious manuscript? Is the tome a true artifact of the Middle Ages, or is it a mere forgery — a medieval or a modern fraud?
Read More: The Mystery of Extraordinarily Accurate Medieval Maps
