Gerry Kennedy
Forfatter af The Voynich Manuscript: The Mysterious Code That Has Defied Interpretation for Centuries
Værker af Gerry Kennedy
The Voynich Manuscript: The Mysterious Code That Has Defied Interpretation for Centuries (2004) 305 eksemplarer
Associated Works
The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries (2008) — Co-Author: What is the Voynich Manuscript?, nogle udgaver — 106 eksemplarer
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Hand-written on vellum sheets (radiocarbon-dated to the early fifteenth century), Beinecke MS408 does at least look mediaeval. In fact, it looks like a lot of things: one section could be a traditional herbal—lots of illustrations of plants, sketched in ink then infilled with watercolour; another section has what look like astrological charts…then there are those weird nude-bathing scenes…oh, and the text itself has never been deciphered. Well, alright then, it looks like nothing else you’ve ever seen.
This is what has become known as the Voynich Manuscript (after the Polish dealer in rare books who, supposedly, rediscovered it in 1912) and it could almost have been written in a different universe: among those hundreds of plants, for example, not one has ever been unequivocally identified by botanists; a couple do look vaguely familiar (“that one could be a sunflower, that one…a violet?…maybe”) but only vaguely, like the botany of an alien planet. But what has attracted worldwide scrutiny, above all, is the indecipherable writing which fills much of this battered little book: far more beautiful than the illustrations—done in a sort of unidentified copperplate, and without a single crossing-out anywhere—this has so far defied all attempts at decipherment by, among others, some of World War Two’s top code-breakers, or by modern computers.
Kennedy and Churchill’s book has much about ciphers and decipherment; about historical figures who may have written, owned (or forged) the manuscript; and about all those theories: from the sensible-but-wrong ones, such as that it was written by Roger Bacon in the 13th century, to the wackier suggestions (that it is the work of aliens etc., etc). By the end of it, I’d myself come round to the conclusion that the thing definitely is a forgery—and Wilfred Voynich himself the likeliest forger. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of precisely this sort of thing, knew what could be (and what would not be) in a manuscript from the Middle Ages; he was an expert in mediaeval ciphers; he had his own supply of vellum (even sold it in his shop); and he was an unscrupulous con-man not above swindling a community of monks out of their priceless collection of books and illuminated manuscripts, in return for (his own phrase this) “a cartload of modern trash.”
In other words, he had everything he needed to forge this thing—except perhaps the imagination. There is, though, one other character in this story: his intelligent and extremely talented wife Ethel, and she was everything he wasn’t: while he was a flamboyant and roguish charmer, a liar and jack-the-lad, she was calculating, intellectual and artistic. A few years earlier she had been smuggling copies of Marx and Engels into pre-revolutionary Russia; a few years later she would be writing novels (the first an international best-seller no less) and composing operas. They were the perfect combination: his knowledge, her imagination. Moreover, the two of them lurched along from one financial crisis to the next, making money then losing it all again. The price Voynich put on his manuscript after its “rediscovery” was $160,000 (in 1912!) and I reckon this was a (failed) attempt to solve all their financial worries, for ever, in one go. He devised the script and wrote the text in his spidery scrawl; she (and this bit is my theory) copied it on to the vellum in her more meticulous handwriting (and, I reckon, did the illustrations as well).
In fact, I can easily imagine it being her idea in the first place. They’re sitting at home in front of the fire one evening, flat broke yet again, him thumbing through a dealer’s catalogue, when Ethel suddenly looks up from her needlepoint:
“Hey. You know what we should do…”
You heard it here first.… (mere)