The Curse of the Voynich Manuscript

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The 500-year-old Voynich Manuscript is renowned as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript” and “the Everest of historical code-breaking”. With 200+ pages of unfathomable text, strange diagrams and numerous drawings of impossible plants and tiny naked women, some find it beguiling; others think it totally mad. The harder we seek for explanations for its countless oddities it seems the less we know. Is it insanely brilliant, or brilliantly insane? The only category it truly fits is Charles Fort’s “Damned Data” – phenomena for which science cannot comfortably account. A plethora of Voynich theories ranges across a reassuringly Fortean panorama from conspiracies to lost South American civilisations to time-travelling aliens. Might one of them be right? Or are we doomed to spin round in circles, forever unable to make sense of this most intellectually cursed of artefacts?

Nick Pelling, a Voynich Manuscript researcher for more than a decade and author of The Curse of the Voynich, will guide us through its wobbly history, unknown science and mad theories, and will happily answer any question we have on unsolved historical ciphers