The Voynich Manuscript crops up again

[essentialsaltes]

The Skeptical Inquirer also has an English translation of Klaus Schmeh's German article [with some nice full-color images] on the Voynich MS. As do I, Schmeh comes down on the side of old hoax as the most likely explanation, though other explanations are not ruled out. But I was a little surprised by the information that an (as yet unpublished) radiocarbon dating of the MS puts it at 1404-1438. I had been sort of pulling for Edward Kelly/John Dee as the hoaxers or hoax-instigators, but (barring the unlikely use of old vellum) that date makes that impossible. It also excludes Roger Bacon, the name probably most often associated with the MS, at least in the early years of its study. Plunking it down in the early 1400s makes the damn thing more mysterious still.

Comments

Re: Voynich lyrics

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

Whoa! Thanks for dropping by. I almost mentioned your hypothesis that Antonio Averlino was the author, since it (at the very least) gets the century right.

Always neat to find a fellow limerick/Voynich enthusiast. My own peculiar obsession resulted in my (and dark_of_night's) booklet of limericks summarizing the fictional works of HP Lovecraft. And it was Lovecraft, more or less, that led me to the Voynich Manuscript -- in Colin Wilson's Lovecraftian short stories, the Voynich MS shows up as an encyphered Necronomicon.