This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

On the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut, is the Bainiki Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

It's one of the largest of its kind, and its vast collection includes the Gutenberg Bible, the first text printed mechanically, as well as a 1,250-year-old Buddhist text and thousands of other folios. But hidden in the stacks is also a tome that

has baffled scholars for over a century, a 480-page work covered in calfskin, written in a

language unknown to any living person.

Its pages are filled with cryptic tables and illustrations of bizarre plants and astrological

signs. Carbon dating places it in the early 15th century, but there is no explanation for

its purpose or even a name for its author.

It's called the Voynich manuscript, and it has utterly baffled scholars for over a century.

UV imaging has shown a signature in the book from the 17th century of one Jacobus Horsicki de Tepenesh, the court pharmacist to the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, suggesting that

it was once held in their imperial library.

And from there, we know that it ended up decades later in the hands of a Jesuit scholar

named Marcus Berish, because of the small note that he left in the margins.

In it, he asked a colleague to help translate the script. He never found a

solution to the question of its meaning or its origin, though. The manuscript then disappeared

from record until 1912, when it reappeared at an auction at Sotheby's in London and was sold

...