Publisher: Yale University Press, 304 pages, 268 color illustrations, $36.99.The first authorized copy of this mysterious, much-speculated-upon, one-of-a-kind, centuries-old puzzle Peter Lewis is the book review editor of the Geographical Review.
The Voynich likes nothing better than deepening its mystery. Also recently, the American Botanical Council published a paper suggesting one of its plant drawings intimates a Mexican connection. But listen: An applied linguistician recently claimed to have deciphered the words “Taurus” and “centaury,” an herb. So far, alluringly, the manuscript is keeping mum. Philologists are befuddled, but aren’t of the mind the manuscript is a hoax: The lettering has too many known textual exemplars and stylistic conventions. The cryptologists have made little headway, which doesn’t make their conjectures less engaging, from the Roger Bacon episode (parchment not old enough) to microscopic notation (“individual pen stroke within a single character, when magnified serve as shorthand symbols for other letters”), with plenty of academic beard pulling in between. Two more chapters discuss the manuscript’s spotty province and travels, from Prague to Hamburg, to Jesuit libraries and, finally, in 1920, into the hands of antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, a “lovable rogue,” with “an undertow of deviousness” - through whose hands it landed at Yale. Gratifyingly, these essays detour into parchment making - “disgusting” - and the source of pigments: oak gall, iron, azurite, copper, egg white, ocher. Joe Friday: “Just the facts, ma’am.” Two chapters introduce the book itself: its parchment, ink and pigments its rebinding the removal of folio pages (all unrecovered). The six essays that accompany the volume are absorbing squibs, as frank as Sgt. Not a word about its social circle, its cultural surrounds. What we have here is a book in an unknown language, filled with illustrations of plants and star maps unfamiliar on Earth: no title, no known author, unreadable. It is a crack, affordable reproduction of an uncanny nonesuch: a round of applause to Yale University Press and the book’s editor, Raymond Clemens, curator at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Who knows? The book could be a communication with our angelic hosts, or a fabulous work of alchemy.Īll this and more is laid out in “The Voynich Manuscript,” a mouthwatering facsimile of the incunabulum, complete with foldout pages - one origamied into six folios - and a handful of scholarly interrogations. A more enterprising someone, 150 years later, would sell the indecipherable whatever it is to Emperor Rudolf II, for 600 gold ducats, because the emperor enjoyed a good mystery, secret writing and alchemy. Well, I just passed on what would later become known as the Voynich Manuscript. Nice and quirky, but I want something to read, and move on.
The written hand is now crabbed, now undulant (more than one scribe, then), and the presentment of the illustrations with the text - no overlaps, no bleeding - is orchestral.
#Voynich manuscript yale press full#
True, the artwork is provincial, and the color washes - blues, reds, greens - are clearly cheap, though phantasmagorical and full of brio.
#Voynich manuscript yale press skin#
Still, the parchment is good stuff - this skin of a calf has been scraped to whiteness on both flesh and hair sides - and illustrated on almost every page. My medieval eye spots a limp vellum item, what you out there would call a paperback. The bookseller is there, his timeless green box crowded with books. The tradespeople line the banks of the great river. It is a fine morning in the Holy Roman Empire.