Evidence from carbon-14 dating and chemical analysis have in more recent years shown that the work is indeed as old as Voynich claimed, but beyond this not much more has been resolved… that is, perhaps, until now. It is not surprising therefore that many scholars have taken the manuscript for a fraud, perhaps perpetrated by Voynich himself, who for his part long insisted it was an encrypted treatise of the medieval Oxford alchemist Roger Bacon. As if this were not mysterious enough, until now none of the dozens of botanical illustrations in the work have been successfully identified with any known species of plant. The Voynich Manuscript has long been held to have been written either in an unknown natural language or in an uncrackable cipher. This latter’s eponymous treasure is currently held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection of Yale University Library (MS 408), which has, to the great benefit of researchers, digitized the work and made high-resolution scans available online. It remained in Jesuit collections until 1912, when it was purchased by the London-based Polish antique bookdealer Wilfrid Voynich (1865-1930). The manuscript is first known to have been in the possession of the Czech collector and alchemist Jiří Bareš (1585-1662), from whom it passed in 1665, via the physician Jan Marek Marci (1595-1668), to the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) in Rome. The so-called Voynich Manuscript is -or is believed to be- a work treating of botanical, pharmaceutical, astrological, and balneological matters, written on calf vellum in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century.
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