VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT CRACK

Its next owner was apparently a Prague-based alchemist called Georg Baresch who, Marci tells us, “devoted unflagging toil” to the quest of deciphering the text and “relinquished hope only with his life”. The correspondence, written in 1665 by imperial physician Johannes Marcus Marci, claimed that the manuscript had once belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who reigned from 1576 to 1612. Unusual things found in medieval manuscriptsĪppended to the manuscript, and no doubt firing Voynich’s imagination further still, was a letter that appeared to shed some light on the document’s history.Voynich, it appears, instantly realised that he had chanced upon something very special. There, he established a second-hand book shop that was patronised by the man who would become Sydney Reilly, ‘Ace of Spies’.īut it was in a Jesuit seminary outside Rome in 1912 – during a book-buying expedition – that Voynich apparently discovered the manuscript to which he would give his name. Born in what is now Lithuania in 1865, he got himself arrested for his socialist activities and imprisoned in Siberia, only to escape and make his way to London. To say that he led a colourful life is something of an understatement.

VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT CRACK

The gifted William Friedman – chief cryptoanalyst in the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service – spent 30 years trying to crack the secrets, without success.Īt the heart of this wordy whodunnit was a Polish-Lithuanian book dealer with revolutionary tendencies and famous friends: a man called Wilfrid Voynich. they’ve all been left stumped by the Voynich Manuscript.

Brilliant wartime cryptologists including Alan Turing, FBI operatives (apparently fearing the text may contain communist propaganda), respected medievalists, mathematic and scientific scholars, skilled linguists.

Voynich manuscript