LITERATURE REVIEW

This review examines scholarly and pseudo-scholarly commentary related directly to the Voynich manuscript itself. It would be possible to expand the review into fields as diverse as philology, botany, cryptography, and medievalism, but a clear decision was made to narrow the scope to canonical Voynich references. Many redundant articles (those refuting Newbold, for example, of which there are many) have been ommitted.

It is noteworthy that research related to the Voynich manuscript has more or less ruined the careers of several prominent scholars (Grossman, 1999), and is widely regarded as a fringe avocation.

The facts surrounding the provenance of the Voynich manuscript are few. We know, for example, that it was sold to Rudolph II of Bohemia between 1584 and 1588, for the grand sum of 600 ducats - but we do not know who sold it to him. We know a few hands through which it passed before coming to rest in the Jesuit library of the Villa Mandragone, outside Rome, for 250 years - but there are large gaps in the ownership history. And we know that rare book collector Wilfrid Voynich snatched it up in 1912. (D'Imperio, 1977).

The manuscript itself is richly illustrated (the author seems to have had a fondness for sketching nude women) and written on good quality vellum. It measures six by nine inches. It originally consisted of at least 116 folios, but only 104 have survived. The manuscript is clearly divided into topical sections ("herbal", "astrological", etc), which can be ascertained by the nature of the illustrations (Landini & Zandbergen, 1998). The text is, of course, entirely unreadable.

The first scholar to seriously examine the Voynich manuscript was William Romaine Newbold, Professor of Philosophy the University of Pennsylvania. Newbold announced his successful decipherment of the manuscript in 1921. His translation was sensational - Newbold claimed that the manuscript was authored by the thirteenth century polymath Roger Bacon and contained miraculous accounts of Bacon's discoveries (Grossman, 1999). He determined that the cipher was composed of "microscopic shorthand signs" intermixed with a very subjective system of translation few but Newbold could repeat (Manly, 1931). His claims were at first accepted by the scholarly community, but later savagely ridiculed. His was the first career wrecked (albeit posthumously) by the Voynich manuscript. Bennett (1976, p.187) writes, "The works by Newbold . . . especially indicate the dangers of an ambiguous decoding method coupled with a vivid imagination regarding the picture content." It is worth noting that Newbold, a Roger Bacon enthusiast to begin with, saw exactly what he wanted to see in the Voynich manuscript.

The other prominent figure brought low by his obsession with the Voynich manuscript was Yale Medieval Philosophy Professor Robert S. Brumbaugh, who announced his own breakthrough in interpretation (Brumbaugh, 1974). While criticizing Newbold's failed attempt, Brumbaugh fell into the same trap. His method considered the text "an artificial language, based on Latin, but not very firmly based there..." Brumbaugh stated that the text was (conveniently) "phonetically impressionistic" (1975, p.354). It is astonishing that he could completely miss the lack of rigor associated with the material he was publishing - it is clear to the detached scholar that Brumbaugh, like Newbold, let his enthusiasms get in the way of his scholarship.

Others have "solved" the riddle of the Voynich manuscript over time, attributing it variously to Ukrainian Khazars (Stojko 1978), English mystic Anthony Askham (Strong, 1945), or interpreting it as "a liturgical manual for the Endura rite of the Cathari heresy, the cult of Isis" (Levitov, 1987). Others have argued that the Voynich manuscript is simply gibberish (Williams, 1999) or a deliberate forgery by Wilfrid Voynich (Barlow, 1986).

Literature review, continued