The Voynich Manuscript

“For the first time, a complete reproduction [of] The Voynich Manuscript, has been published, featuring essays exploring what is known about the book and extra-wide margins so readers can record their responses to its beguiling, beautiful strangeness.”—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“For people who like a good historical mystery, this first authorized publication of the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Voynich Manuscript will fascinate.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate

“Handsome and well-produced. . . This facsimile and the accompanying series of essays give a clear sense of the current state of knowledge on the manuscript and reveal the findings of new research.”—H. R. Woud Huysen, Times Literary Supplement

“The Voynich MS has inspired generations of enthusiasts dedicated to deciphering it. . . . This beautiful facsimile will make it available for many more people to become enticed and entranced by it.”—David V. Barrett, Fortean Times

“The Voynich Manuscript, a volume edited by the library’s curator Raymond Clemens, revivifies this tantalising artefact. . . . Wide margins are deliberately provided for readers’ notes on their own ideas. ‘Bonne chance!,’ writes Clemens. I’ll second that.”—Andrew Robinson, Nature

“The publication by Yale University Press of an actual-size colored facsimile, with an informative set of specialist essays on the manuscript’s history, materials, cryptological puzzles, and public impact, will no doubt encourage wider engagement with its enigmas and set off a multitude of amateur as well as professional attempts to decipher it.”—Eamon Duffy, New York Review of Books

“Bibliophiles rejoice—one of the book world’s most fascinating and enduring riddles is now available for all to examine. The so-called ‘Voynich Manuscript’ is proof that, even in our increasingly demystified world, mystery is still alive. . . . For the first time, Yale has reprinted the manuscript in full, in a gorgeous new edition coupled with scholarly essays on the book. All told, the new edition should continue to stoke interest in the eternally mysterious artifact.”—New Criterion

“A mouthwatering facsimile of the incunabulum, complete with foldout pages—one origamied into six folios—and a handful of scholarly interrogations.”—Peter Lewis, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“[A] very high-quality reproduction of the manuscript . . . [and] the essays are valuable additions to the facsimile.”—Jesse Siragan Arlen, Comitatus

“This volume sets out clearly and succinctly the current state of knowledge about this remarkable manuscript.”—Toby Burrows, Parergon

“Absolutely no one completely understands the Voynich manuscript, . . . [but] now readers can explore a complete reproduction of this indecipherable text, accompanied by essays that seek to make sense of it all.”—Jennifer Byrne, Mental Floss



“This new book, reproducing the entire Voynich Manuscript, is a godsend. While the essays offer valid clues to the manuscript’s age and relation to late medieval science, the manuscript itself stubbornly refuses to yield its secrets.”—Roger S. Wieck, Department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Morgan Library & Museum

“A book worthy of its subject in every way. Clemens and his collaborators have done an extraordinary job teasing out some of the secrets and wonders of the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript in ways that will make this volume an invaluable resource for many years to come.”—Bruce Holsinger, author of A Burnable Book

“Many hands have held Voynich’s now-eponymous book over the centuries . . . yet none of them have managed convincingly to solve its mysteries.”—Deborah Harkness, from the Introduction