Once upon a time, a brilliant (but disillusioned) Renaissance architect saw his chance to start a fabulous new life in the East. But he faced a problem: how could he carry his lifelong collection of secrets through a war-zone without being arrested as a spy? How indeed...Five centuries later, in a university library sits a strange book - one whose cipher-like words and bizarre pictures no-one can read or understand. This, the enigmatic "Voynich Manuscript", is a siren whose intricate song has long been a call to adventure: yet all who try to master her end up lost, their boats smashed by hidden rocks and whirlpools. It is as if her dark secrets are protected by a curse - you might call it the "Curse of the Voynich". Perhaps, fearful, we should turn back here while we still have a chance: but one question keeps haunting our thoughts...What if the manuscript and the architect were somehow interlinked? In fact...what if their stories were two sides of the same coin? Leading Voynich researcher, Nick Pelling now tells these two compelling stories, linking and joining them together in a rich historical tapestry to reveal their very surprising shared secret history.
What emerges in his book "The Curse of the Voynich" is truly stranger than fiction - a gripping real-life tale of power and poison, of invention and intrigue...and of ciphers and secrets.
While non-fiction is rarely both entertaining and powerfully
informative, "The Curse of the Voynich" rewrites the publishing rule-book
by ticking both of these challenging boxes.
On the one hand, it draws out many different strands of history and weaves
them into a narrative tapestry, to tell the story of one exceptional man's
journey against the tide of history - and how a Renaissance Cold War
brought "the world's most mysterious manuscript" into being.
On the other hand, readers with an interest in secret history will enjoy
being taken behind the scenes in early Renaissance Italy, to see power &
intrigue in action - and to glimpse the furtive world of early inventors,
at the time when many of the technologies we now take for granted were
first conceived and built.
From the Back Cover
With its cipher-like handwriting and curious drawings of naked
women, the bizarre Voynich Manuscript has for centuries fascinated and
frustrated all who have encountered it.
But now, by retracing one man's perilous journey East from Renaissance
Europe to the Ottoman Empire, "The Curse of the Voynich" opens up a door
into the lost world that brought this mystery to life...
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 - History of a Mystery
In 1912, when the ancient Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome was
running short of funds, its managers decided to sell off some of its rare
books. To do this, they called in an antiquarian book dealer they happened
to know, a colourful former Polish revolutionary called Wilfrid Voynich: he
set to work looking for anything of value. While rifling through one
particular old trunk, he picked up the thing that was to transform his life
and to make him famous - a paperback-sized manuscript, apparently written
entirely in cipher.
Immediately, he knew it was unusual: few manuscripts contain any
hidden text, fewer still have more than a few lines of ciphered text, while
hardly any are totally enciphered. Yet this book contained over 200 pages
of mysterious writing, which alone made it a rare (and possibly unique)
artefact. But as he turned its pages, an extra dimension of strangeness
opened out before his eyes: threaded through its text was a long procession
of bizarre drawings - improbable plants, tiny naked women, unrecognisable
circular diagrams, unknown maps.
Secretly convinced that this was a major find, Wilfrid Voynich snapped
it up (probably for next to nothing): and thus the modern history of the
manuscript began. In 1969, it was donated to the Beinecke Rare Book &
Manuscript Library (part of Yale University) where it still lives, under
the rather scholarly name of "Beinecke MS 408". But actually, nobody is
particularly fooled by this (not even the librarians there): it will
probably always be known first and foremost as "The Voynich Manuscript".
At first sight, it looks very old, like medieval 'herbal' manuscripts
(which were similarly filled with pictures of plants, accompanied by their
names and brief descriptions of their medicinal properties): its cipher
appears almost childishly simple, the kind of thing any competent
code-breaker armed with pencil and paper would expect to crack in a summer
afternoon. Yet for almost a century, its otherworldly pictures have haunted
the dreams of academics and amateurs alike: while the meaning of its
mysterious text has managed to evade the grasp of historians and
cryptographers.
Almost the first question Wilfrid Voynich asked himself was just who
could have created such a strange object. It is certainly true that few
people would have been able to: yet rather more radically, Voynich quickly
decided that it could have been only one person in the whole of history - a
medieval English friar called Roger Bacon, familiar to antiquarian book
dealers but (at that time) relatively little known. Why was Voynich so
sure?