The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

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4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt Lewis continues his Mystery Month on Gone Medieval with another tantalising enigma of the Middle Ages - possibly the most mysterious manuscript that exists anywhere in the world. Carbon-dated to the early 15th century, the Voynich manuscript is hand-written in an unknown script, embellished with illustrations and diagrams, showing people, fantastical plants and astrological symbols.

Yet the origins, authorship, and purpose of the manuscript continue to baffle experts, which have even included British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Matt finds out more from Raymond Clemens, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Yale University.

This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. As part of our series on mysteries,
0:08.3	we're going to take a closer look at one of the period's greatest riddles. The foinich
0:13.2	manuscript has been bemusing, stumping and frustrating scholars for centuries. It's a book,
0:19.5	it's full of illustrations that can be hard to identify and nobody knows what the text of it says.
0:25.5	Does it hold secrets we might unlock? Is that ancient wisdom in the words, evidence of a lost
0:30.9	culture? Or was it an exercise, a bit of fun, or maybe even a prank? To try and get to the
0:36.0	bottom of what all this is about, I'm delighted to be joined by Ray Clemens, who is curator of
0:41.4	early books and manuscripts at Yale University.
0:44.2	Welcome to Gone Medieval, right? Thank you, Matt. Good to be here. Thank you very much for joining us.
0:56.0	So let's start off with what is the foinich manuscript? It's not a mystery that I know very well,
1:02.0	so I'm looking forward to finding out more. So when was it discovered and how did it end up
1:07.1	where it is today? So it was discovered in the modern period in the early part of the 20th century,
1:13.1	by a man named Willoughford Voynich, who was a bookseller, and he was in Rome, and he was sold a
1:19.8	collection of books from the Jesuits. The Jesuits had a library there, a private library, and they sold
1:25.7	a number of books to Voynich, which he came to the United States and then sold to universities all
1:30.0	around the country. So almost every major university in America has a Voynich manuscript of some sort
1:36.7	or another, but they tend to be Thomas Aquinas and other sort of known authors. The Voynich
1:42.2	manuscript itself is named after him, probably in large part, because he was never able to sell it.
1:47.4	It was a manuscript remained with him throughout his life. He then willed it to his wife, and eventually
1:52.8	it passed to the bookseller HP Kraus, who in 1970 donated it to the Byniki Library at Yale University.
2:00.0	So the book itself has never been sold, but in the 1970s it did come to live at the Byniki,
2:05.6	and we are its custodians. We don't know what it means ourselves, and we're happy to explore it,
	...

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