I hope you all had a great start to your week yesterday. I spent a lovely afternoon playing with my niece. I absolutely love seeing her imagination at work, the mind of a child is amazing. I also did some brainstorming to come up with new ideas for posts. I have some great posts planned for the rest of the week.
Recently I stumbled across a television show on the Travel Channel called Castle Secrets and Legends. I love history so I knew I would love learning the history of famous castles. I've visited a few castles in my life (Edinburgh Castle and Sterling Castle in Scotland) but that hasn't lessened my interest in them.
One of the castles mentioned is the Villa Mondragone in Italy. Now, Italy itelf has many beautiful castles. This castle is special because it's where the famous Voynich Manuscript was discovered. In 1912 book dealer Wilfrid Voynich stumbled across the manuscript while looking for books to add to his collection. He was known to have many books that no one had ever heard of so adding the mysterious manuscript to his collection made sense.
Voynich believed the manuscript must have been written in the 14th century by scientist Francis Bacon (I'm not completely sure about this so you may want to look it up). He also believed it held the secret to eternal life, or the formula for the philosopher's stone. Thanks to carbon dating it was discovered that the manusript dates to the 15th century, making it 600 years old. It may have been written in Northern Italy during the Italian Renassaince.
The manuscript is an illustrated codex that contains over 170,000 glyphs. It was written on vellum pages, some are missing but 240 remain. There are many theories as to what the manuscript actually contains. Here are a few of those theories:
-A pharmacopeia of medieval or early modern medicine
-A record of a highly advanced civilization that remains undiscovered
-An account of a person's travels in a language created by the author
-It's a hoax (but really, who would go through all the trouble for just a hoax?)
The manuscript has belonged to multiple people since its creation and disappeared for 200 years at one point. Today the manuscript is held at Yale University. If you're wondering why this is relevant I'll tell you. After years of the manuscript remaining completely untranslated an applied linguistics professor at the University of Bedfordshire has translated 10 words. Professor Stephen Bax has written a paper and filmed a video explaining his theories about the manuscript. If you want to know some of the translations watch the video here. Just to warn you, it's 47 minutes.
I'd like to think that the manuscript really does hold the secret of eternal life and that the reason for the unknown language is to keep the information from getting into the wrong hands. It's farfetched I know, but isn't it nice to dream about? My dream is to discover my own mysterious manuscript someday.
I know this post wasn't exactly about books but this was one story I just had to share with you guys. Have a great day everyone! Thanks for reading!
Sincerely,
Erin a.k.a. Bookworm
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