The print was acquired by an independent group, including Deb Aldrich and Laura Des Enfants, as well as Jessica Desean and Andrew Gibbs. We’ll soon be back with a new look, fresh content, and a fresh outlook on the future. We’re looking back at some of the PRINT magazine’s most beloved pieces, like this by Brandon Ambrosiano.
Author Umberto Eco visited Yale University’s Meinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in the fall of 2013. He asked for one text to be examined. This text is commonly known as the Voynichese Manuscript.
The late Italian novelist requested the manuscript to view it. It is similar to his masterpiece The Name of the Rose in that it is a literary puzzle that requires its interpreters to be equally skilled in medieval history, semiotics, and good old-fashioned detective work. He may have recalled the words of his 1980 novel as he looked at the Voynichese manuscript, flipping its 600-year-old pages in his hands.
This could be true for the Voynichese Manuscript eco, which was so enthralled with – maybe its story is just as old and mundane as any other. This kind of analysis requires someone to read it, a feat that has proved impossible.
The Voynich Manuscript looks quite ordinary at first. Eamon Duffy, The New York Review of Books, writes that it is “unglamorous, even a little shabby.” It measures approximately 10×7 inches and has 234 pages. Some of these pages have been lost since the original composition. They are bound with a limp Vellum, the Renaissance equivalent of today’s paperback. This manuscript is a perfect example of how to judge a book’s cover. It has not been cracked, but it was certainly not easy.
Named after Wilfrid Voynich (a Lithuanian-born Polish bookseller), the book’s discoverer is a bizarre and unusual biography. Voynichese was a student of law and chemistry at Moscow University. He became sympathetic to the Polish Nationalist movement and joined the social-revolutionary party, which led to his imprisonment in 1885. After 18 months of imprisonment in Warsaw, Voynich was exiled to Siberia, where he served his five-year sentence. Voynichese fled prison in 1890 and made his escape. He travelled through China, Germany, and Mongolia and finally reached London. There, he used his political past to his advantage. Bonich quickly made friends with exiles like Sergey Kravchinsky (Stennian). This man was well-placed within British intellectual and cultural circles. He introduced the young Pole to the fascinating world of bookselling.
Voynichese, three years after Stennian’s sudden death in 1895, opened his first bookshop. Arnold Hunt, who wrote a biography about Voynichese that was included in Yale’s volume The Voynichese Manuscript, says that Voynichese quickly became one of the industry’s most well-read and knowledgeable booksellers. Although he began his career collecting books from the fifth and sixth centuries, he became more interested in high-end items like Bibles after several years.
Voynichese purchased the manuscript now bearing his name in 1912, but the exact circumstances are unknown. He wrote that he came across the manuscript on one of his frequent European trips. He referred to the manuscript as “a most remarkable collection” of illuminated manuscripts. He thought they must have been part of the private libraries of different ruling houses in Italy. Voynichese was compared to other manuscripts, which had arms and many hues of golden, and he found the Voynichese to be an “ugly duckling.”
Voynichese bought the collection in 1912. It was then in possession of Italian Jesuits, who had been hiding their books since the unification of Italy in the second half of the 19th century and the government’s subsequent confiscation of their libraries. The state took some texts from the College Romano and discovered other readers in the secret room. The order kept most of the manuscripts, including the Voynichese manuscript, under surveillance until it decided to sell 380 manuscripts to Vatican Library. Ren. In his essay “Earlier Owners,” Zandbergen states that the sale took nine years. Voynichese also acquired some books meant for the Vatican during this time. These included Cicero’s philosophical works as well as the now-famous ugly duckling.
He later wrote, “My interest was aroused immediately.”
The contents of the book are as interesting as the exterior. The manuscript is filled with whimsical drawings, star diagrams, and elegant scribblings in an unidentified language.
Like most medieval writers, the text was written using a quill pen. The parchment was made of skin from a calf. This writing surface is undoubtedly more expensive than stone or wood. Raymond Clemens, Yale librarian, explains how parchment was prepared for writing in his collection of Bonich essays. First, soak the skin in lime juice for several hours. This will make hair follicles more swollen and easier to remove. The parchment maker then used his hands to remove loose hair by placing the skin on a flat object such as a tree trunk. The parchment maker then put the pelt on a rack to stretch it taut and used a labellum (or curved knife) to scrape both sides. A skin that was more worked on became lighter and thinner. This meant that parchments with more value were almost white on both sides. After drying for several days, the skin was bleached with chalk or another substance and cut into sheets. The skin was now ready to be written.
The word ink is derived from the Latin encrusted, which translates to “having been burned”–appropriate, given what Medieval people believed about the writing process. Clemens explains that the iron-gall inks appeared light brown when first applied to parchment. The inks darkened over time due to chemical reactions. Clemens notes that MS 408 also contains brown. Other colors include white, yellow, green, and red.
Voynichese is the name of the manuscript, as it is sui generis. The writing style is elegant and pleasing to the eyes, much like the flowing cursive of a third-grade teacher. The text is laid out in paragraphs. Most begin with a character twice as large as the letter on the page. This is something that a modern reader might interpret to be a drop cap or capital letter. Experts refer to these characters as “gallows,” and there are four of them in the manuscript.
