Bittersweet Infamy - #40 - The Voynich Manuscript

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

Josie tells Taylor about the ancient unreadable text that has eluded cryptographers for centuries. Plus: a small New York village's controversial tribute to Lucille Ball.

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Wyndham rewards membership may be required. Restrictions apply. Welcome to Bitter Sweden for me. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in envy, shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. Truth may be bitter, stories are always sweet. Episode 40. Oh my gosh, we're in our 40s now.

I'm gonna steal a joke that I'm pretty sure every podcaster says in their 40th episode. I heard that 40 is the new 30. You think every podcaster? Probably, like I bet you can find on average if you were to like go out and Google it. Anyway, episode 40, folks. Really exciting. It is exciting. Yeah, we love round numbers, and what better way to celebrate than Josie? What if for episodes 41 and 42, you and Mitchell just flew up here

and we'll record them in person for the first time. Okay, sure. Let's do it. Let's bittersweet him for me for the first time. We're all going to be in the same room. Mitchell gets to tag along because I'd actually already invited him to tag along to one of the episodes we were going to be taping. So we were like, fuck it. What are we going to do? Make him fucking sit outside in my alley?

Well, Josie and I record the second episode. Some foreign cities never been in. So Mitchell will be joining us and we will all be in the same room. I'm really excited to kind of see, feed off each other's energy in person. We haven't seen each other in person in like three years since before. Yeah. No, I guess Royal Rumble 2020 is the last episode. Yeah, so two years. But we've never recorded in person.

No, because we started this during the Demi and we were already in different cities and a continent apart. The big panini. I'm excited to hold your chin while I whisper the podcast to you. And Mitchell can watch. Don't touch my face. Please don't. Dude, I won't. I won't. Listen. I know.

Hands with six feet apart. Social distance. Don't worry. I'm very excited. It's going to be really cool. I bet you've got a really good story to celebrate 40, turning 40. Before you get into that though, would you mind if I told you a second smaller story? Like we always do. You mean a Mimba? No, sure. I do. As a matter of fact, I am referring to a Mimba. Okay, I was prepared for that. I am ready.

Give it to me, baby. So I was thinking like old Hollywood. The 40s. Like that? Yes. Well, the 50s kind of. And well, this is kind of, it's the 50s by way of 2009. And this is one of my favorite stories. Really, this story holds a little warm place close to my heart. I've almost done it for the show a few times as a full episode or like a two part.

Like I've always tried to find a way to work it in. And it's in the awkward in between shaggy length, you know what I mean? I know that well. But you have to clip it and like. Yeah. Pin it back. Yeah, you see that one photograph and you're like, God damn it. This sucks. God damn it. This is not the look. Well, this is the look. This man from Mrs. The Luck. Here we go. I'm 40. I'm ready.

Few figures are more emblematic of the early days of television than Lucille Ball. Have you seen the movie? No, I forgot there was, I had no point while I was doing this today. I remember that there was a movie. It's Nicole Kidman, right? Yeah. Yeah. Apparently Oscar stuff, but it's not supposed to be good. That's the word on the. The word on the street? Low street. Yeah.

Well, let me tell you a little bit in case you haven't watched this movie. Let me tell you a little bit about Lucille Ball. The entertainment icon was born in 1911 in Jamestown in the western most county of New York State. Okay. From there, the family moved around to Montana to New Jersey to Michigan and then eventually back to New York. Whoa. Where maternal grandparents helped raise Lucille and her brother Fred in a small summer resort village called Celeron. Her brother was named Fred?

Yeah. Interesting. Cause then Fred and Ethel are across the hall. Oh, true. You know, I never thought about that. We'll unpack that on a, on a different show. Our pseudo therapy show. Their home was located at 59 West 8th Street, which was later renamed 59 Lucy Lane. According to Wikipedia, Ball loved Celeron Park.

Its boardwalk had a ramp to the lake that served as a children's slide. They had the pier ballroom, a roller coaster, a bandstand and a stage where vaudeville concerts and plays were presented. So it's this big outdoor, you know, whatever. Yeah. And she loves, she loves going there as with any young person. Well, it sounds also like Lucille Ball, Clean Park kind of vibes too. Exactly. Exactly.

When she was 12, Lucy joined the chorus line of a live production at her stepfather's suggestion where she developed an affinity for performing and the rest was history. In the 1930s, she moved to Hollywood to pursue acting. In 1940, she appeared as the lead in the musical Too Many Girls. Where she met and fell in love with Desi Arnaz, who played one of her characters for bodyguards in the movie. In 1948, she was cast as Liz Cooper in a radio combi called My Favorite Husband. Things had crazy titles back then. CBS asked her to adapt the show for television and she agreed on the condition that she could star alongside her real life husband, Desi Arnaz. The network was originally unimpressed with the pilot, worrying that America wouldn't accept a marriage between a white woman and her Cuban-American band leader husband.

Right. Yeah. But their accompanying vaudeville act, in which Lucy schemed to get into Desi's show, proved a massive success. And so the sitcom, known as I Love Lucy, was finally greenlit. Can't keep Lucille Ball down. Ball keep on rolling. I Love Lucy was wildly popular and established at stars as major celebrities. They'd later appear in spin-offs, films, solo projects.

Here on Bitter Sweet Infamy, we love the long, long trailer. In 1953, Lucy became pregnant and appeared on the show as such, though the network insisted on omitting the actual word pregnant, using synonyms like expecting. Bun in the oven. Yes. I am really happy that's over. That feels unnecessarily brutish to me. Was she the first pregnant female actress on the screen? If not the first one. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. In 1960, Lucy and Desi got divorced, but ended up remaining friends and kind of did business with each other. Lucy kept working until her eventual death in 1989. Naturally, since her death, Lucy has been endlessly memorialized with recognitions like the Presidential Medal of Freedom, postage stamps, tribute performances, etc. Unfortunately, not all of these efforts at commemoration have been positively received. Oh. In 1989, Pure Point Park in the village of Celeron, New York, population 1250.

Fave spot in the world. This is a different park from the one she loved, but it is a park in the same village where she grew up. This kind of summer side resort town in western New York. Yeah. Was renamed to Lucille Ball Memorial Park. This was all well and good for about 30 years, but in 2009, some great mind decided that a park memorializing Lucille Ball should probably include a statue of the woman herself. Oh. Yeah.

Yeah. Makes sense, right? Specifically, Mark and Jed Wilson donated a statue of Ball that they had received from the original sculptor Dave Hulan. The statue, which took five years to create, depicted Ball delivering her famous Vitamita Vegeman monologue, which comes from a scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy's filming a commercial for a miracle tonic that secretly contains alcohol becoming gradually more and more shit based over the course of the tape. It's great. Fantastic. I watched a little bit of Vitamita Vegeman before this just to kind of set the mood.

I actually really do love I Love Lucy. I think it's a riot. Like I think Lucille Ball is a gem. She's in any scenario. That show could have been anything as long as Lucille Ball was in it. Exactly. Quoting Roadside America. Quote.

According to the story published in the next day's Post Journal newspaper, statue donors Mark and Jed Wilson were extremely pleased and extremely happy. They declared the statue to be just perfect and praised Poulan's attention to detail and excellence. Qualities that they said were characteristic of Lucy herself. Poulan said he was thrilled to have created a statue that resonates with people. Apparently, everyone lied. End quote. Whoa. On August 7th, 2009, the statue was publicly unveiled and the citizens of Celeron got their first look at the statue that would become known as scary Lucy.

Oh no. In case you don't remember, Lucille Ball looks like this. Yeah. So. You're so cute. Is that from your wall? You little poster? Oh my God.

My friend, when I was a teenager, my friend Lise got me this on a trip to Universal Studios. And I guess I've just hung onto it waiting for this moment. Why not? It's gorgeous. Do you, I feel like you should keep it in the closet because every time you open the closet. It is in the closet. Yeah, that's exactly why. Lucille Ball, her hands up, her mouth open.

Nailed it. That's exactly what I do. Perfect. So. So that's Lucy. That's real Lucy. Gorgeous. She's gorgeous.

Yeah. And then here is scary Lucy. Oh my God. Oh my God. She's terrifying. So. What is happening? I'm getting the close up on her face.

Damn. The teeth. No. Oh my God. The way it's a bronze or some metal. Yes. It's bronze. It does look like she has braces on.

Her eyes are much too large. The pupils are so indented in her eyes. What is happening? They kind of look like black olives. Yes. Yes. So. Wow.

So this is scary Lucy. Scary. If you were wondering what I was building up to, this is the big reveal. Jeez. The statues appearance has been compared to actor Steve Buscemi. One TV comedian insinuated that it was a creature that controlled the people of Celeron through their nightmares. I saw a blog online that said it should be relocated to the middle of a corn field.

Scary. To me, looking at it, it's not a striking resemblance to Lucy, but it is dressed like her. So if you saw it, you would hypothetically understand that it was supposed to be. Yeah. I would have to read the small sign though. It says, roadside America quote Poulain as he would point out repeatedly was no amateur. He had created over a hundred public bronze figures and was known for his community work

with young artists, but he had the habit of making sculptures with unusual eyes, a combination of bulging irises and hollowed pupils. Okay. Yes. And overly articulated teeth. Uh huh. A particularly difficult approach to pull off appealingly in a bronze statue inviting close-up inspection.

I'm not clear this. I don't think this is an inept artist. I think this is just an artist who has a very stylized way of doing faces that was maybe not the right tool for the job here. Perhaps. For this sort of thing. Yeah. For the memorialization of an actor or public figure.

It wasn't supposed to be a memorialization eventually. It got donated and was reframed as such, right? Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Right. Right. You know how you can match that style of particularly facial features? Might not be the best idea. So this statue was erected and instantly it met with criticism from the many earnest Lucy maniacs in Celeron. And nearby Jamestown where Lucy was born and laid to rest. Um, someone in Jamestown started a Facebook group entitled, we love Lucy.

Get rid of this statue! Exclamation point! but the statue had been a free donation and would cost time and money to remove and it was receiving attention, however ironic or seething, so seller on mayor Scott Shrekengost decided to keep the statue in place at the park where it lived anonymously and peacefully to the derision of local lucy fans until 2015 when it suddenly went viral as these things do and received international media coverage. All of a sudden there were offers of purchase from both the comedy central channel and the national comedy center in jamestown but wise mayor Shrekengost

knew two things one selling the statue to a venue using it in bad faith could only further piss off the rabid lucy fans already waiting for him outside his office with buckets of red paint very wise public public servant there damn and two people were kind of obsessed with scary lucy and many found her bizarre features and comic backstory endearing so Shrekengost ultimately did something to split the difference and mollify the offended while still honoring scary lucy and her legacy first of all to quell the backlash the village commissioned another artist carillon palmer to create a more accurate replacement statue known as both new lucy and lovely lucy wait palmer carillon palmer paul paul in or paul who was the original artist a scary lucy uh poulin poulin

okay palmer yeah the new statue which cost 250 000 dollars and was funded through private donations was revealed on august 6 2016 which would have been lucille ball's 105th birthday okay let me see that one i want to see that one hold on here we go uh yeah that's a much better much more flattering representation of lucille ball but i would also argue it's a lot more boring i don't think it has any of the charisma the scary one okay but that's me like you know how i am i am rooting i'm i love my mac barges that's true that's true i want to as the world drains on them i want to hold my umbrella over scary lucy so that her vita meat of edgerman bottle doesn't get damned i hear that okay okay yeah but that wasn't the end of the road for all

scary lucy understanding the statue as a piece of local iconography however controversial streckengaust had scary lucy moved 75 yards away oh i don't know why go to that expense why not just put the other statue anyway yeah so visitors could see both statues in one day says streckengaust quote one time some people were boarding a bus after taking pictures with the new statue i was walking past and i said you know scary lucy is still right over there they nearly ran me over getting back off that bus unfortunately the original artist dav pulan was never really able to get out from under the scary lucy controversy uh he said that people were pretty aggressive and horrible with him and send him death threats which why is it always death threats stop sending

death threats people there's really no need calm down in 2019 he told syracuse.com i am so tired of the whole lucy thing i've been doing this for 27 years people like my work i do one piece admittedly it was not one of my best works and it just keeps coming up and coming up and coming up enough is enough let's look at some serious issues let's look at our graduation rates and crime and poverty we got a whole society that's all pumped up because of an image of lucy let's talk about our graduation rates folks let's talk about those rates yeah plan ended up giving bronzing although he said it was a good thing because he ended up spending more time with his young son he moved to south carolina and unfortunately he died in 2020 yeah kind of a sad end of that

story but as for scary lucy herself she's still hanging out in her remote corner of lucille ball memorial park in western new york within spitting distance of her more lovely replacement offering a sip of vitamita vegeman and a friendly grimace to passersby scary lucy you know what though i really think that lucille ball would have gotten the biggest kick out of scary lucy she would have shown up in costume as scary lucy making stupid faces the whole day yes i believe so i believe so oh man that is wild i have a real soft spot in my heart for old scary lucy i remember hearing about that story as it happened and then hearing that they were replacing scary lucy and being like very vociferously against this i can so imagine you

booking a ticket to western new york so you can i'm chaining myself to scary lucy and they're like we're just moving it 75 yards down the road man you're like no no i'm not you're not put it to you this way i don't know that i'm a big enough um what are lucille ball fans called like ball sacks i don't know i don't know that i'm a big enough lucille ball fan to go and make the the pilgrimage to celeron but if i happen to be passing through uh-huh you'd be stupid not to go and pay a visit to scary lucy in any of your long history of writing have you taylor ever written in your own shorthand or created your own type of language on the page i love shorthand i had a real ambition

to learn shorthand because when i played nancy drew the haunted carousel you had to figure out a bit of shorthand for one of the puzzles in that to figure out the name of a carousel horse it's a very important carousel horse and i thought you know what i'm gonna learn shorthand just because you know you've seen you've seen my apartment i like little relics of the 70s so fuck it i'm gonna put it in my body exactly i will become relic um but what i didn't what i failed to take into your account was that i was playing this game on a computer which is already a much more efficient way to take notes oh yeah so i quickly was like wait a minute i can just type and and so i my shorthand aspirations kind of ended in the cradle oh too bad well i suppose if you were

in the in the time pre-computer that may of course in the 70s you would have done that but maybe even you know 400 years ago you may have yeah also entered the the land the world of shorthand or perhaps your own script your own yes i would have language if you will i 400 years ago where does that put us uh or um uh this is this shouldn't be this hard no and i got the numbers wrong yeah no i got the numbers wrong so 600 years ago 1400s yes oh baby yes vintage taylor i'm gonna tell you the story of the most mysterious manuscript in the history of the world boring you say oh no oh no i didn't say that your face kind of like a no i was interested i was expressing interest this is a 240 page document that is written in an

undecipherable language decoding this language has eluded the one of the founders of computer science alan turing the united states fbi all modern ai technology cryptologists code breakers of any size shape and time since the early 1400s 600 years of scholarship have not been able to decipher what the language in this manuscript is okay so tonight taylor tonight i can't wait i love detective work nancy drew on the nancy drew the trial of the ancient text this manuscript is called the voynich manuscript i've never heard of it never never is near i'm surprised it's not in a nancy drew to be honest like it has a lot of specifically that yeah okay okay i can't wait it's an illuminated text from the early 1400s so that's medieval

time so illuminated texts you know they're typically handwritten in a beautiful calligraphy and then parts of the words and uh like the marginalia and then some spaces in the text themselves are devoted to just images yeah very nancy drew there was a lot of these like kind of ancient codicies that were indecipherable that had pictures that tell you that if you put the red gem above the fireplace then the wall will spin around yeah exactly you'd be surprised how many people have approached this manuscript in a similar way actually which is the right way to approach it i'm sure yes yes so like i said 240 pages back to front it's all written by hand and all the images are in color as well their mineral paints have been used 24 by 17 centimeters

so not not big not super small kind of journal like a tight journal size okay it took 14 full cow skins to put this book together the the pages are on vellum and uh that's wow 14 cow it's a lot of cows yeah no that that is that's more cows than i've used to make a book 14 more so the script that is in there the the language that is in there from what scholars can tell you do read it left to right there's about 20 to 25 distinct letters and that number kind of changes depending on what scholarship you're looking at um the ink like i said is in color what's used to make it is a different variation of oak nuts eggs fruit peels and wines yum right the manuscript from what they can tell of the physical object was most likely rebound pretty early on in its life

there's a really gnarly water stain in one big section of it so they think maybe it got this bad damage and they had to it had to be rebound it's rebound and what would be the equivalent of like a mid-evil paperback so it's like a harder card not cardstock because it's not that same material but in the way that we think of cardstock it's it's similar to the vellum so it's not quite like a wooden or or even like metal or stone hardcover it's another kind of malleable but it's a bit more brittle than paper yes yeah there were probably two to five hands that wrote the text most modern scholarships has five scribes and one to three illustrators throughout the piece it is really fucking wild looking the text is beautiful even though you can't tell what it looks

like it it feels somewhat similar to the latin alphabet like you feel like oh that's just a p upside down they're like oh yeah no you just added a little shashu to the h and then you're there a p upside down is a d where's all the wing there and it didn't work it's an oh upside down there so it looks like a very recognizable text and that might also be why people are so eager to like dive into it uh it feels like you should be able to to just like if you squint hard enough crack it it'll yeah it'll make sense so that's the script and the illuminations the images are brilliantly colored really beautiful it's been actually really well preserved this last

600 years but the drawings are they're not maybe as precise as you would see in other medieval manuscripts at the same time they look a little bit sketchier a little cruder okay i'm gonna send you yeah i can't wait i'm gonna send you the the whole thing actually if that's okay i we're doing we're reading it along live we're reading it out the whole thing okay yeah send her over well i want you to kind of like just browse browse through it a little bit yeah oh yeah yeah it's in the Yale library we'll go over that my friend so oh my god you can flip through and maybe try and describe a little bit more of what you're seeing for our viewers well i'm looking at some women bathers so let me zoom in here okay okay so yeah these are sketchy is a

good way to put it kind of stylized nude forms of women bathing and then the background has been colored this kind of brackish green and they're all how there's about i don't know somewhere between six and a dozen of these women the text looks like they're just talking about golfing every word looks like golf um or outlaw wow yeah i think maybe maybe these aren't women bathers maybe these are women golfers that's it that is it this is towards the end they're in the in the women's locker room after round this is it this is it i'm pulling up another page here it's uh page 140 and more more chat about golf and lots of images of i don't even know

it looks like so to just look at this one woman here and it looks like they're all kind of doing different things but they've all got these kind of weird horns where it's the same naked woman and she's standing in it kind of looks like a dr seuss contraption or something from the game most trap and she's sticking her hand into this pipe and it looks vaguely like maybe it will shred her hand and spit it out the other end i can't quite tell cool dude yeah and there's a lot of women with these little water slide pipe things that they're it's maybe like a showering scene it's it's they're like hard to decipher i think zuccian kind of water works is yeah your yeah your description there is is catching that for sure

what is this sorry that's what everyone says what is this you shouldn't have sent me the whole manuscript i know so if you go to page 50 in this manuscript it looks a lot like there's like a little dragon tails guy blowing out a giant weed leaf dude i can't believe that's where you went because that little dragon guy is talked about a lot i need see me in this dragon friend i recognize him stoner recognize stoner there there it is game recognize game yeah and then there's just if you kind of flip back a little earlier there's a lot of you know random botanical drawings and things like that exactly that's kind of the vibe and it's all in this paper that's a little lighter than put it to you this way if you were to make a aged weathered

manuscript for your first grade class and you soaked it in some tea and kind of did the lighter around the edges very that yeah oh totally well you know where does that come from it originates here in the it wasn't called the voynich the voynich manuscript yeah the voynich manuscript okay so you mentioned the botanicals throughout this book there's all these images of flowers and plants there's even some uh star charts and zodiac charts it seems to be you can solve puzzles with those for sure oh no totally the star charts are interesting because they're kind of what we see but they're just a little bit off of what we know of actual stars and what was actually known at this time as well so it's a little a little askew someone was making it up yeah

yeah uh there's all the bathing stuff the women and these kind of zoussian bathing contraptions there's what seems to be maybe like some pharmaceutical stuff but this image of the botanicals and the herbals but then it seems to be kind of making its way into these recipes or these medicinal instructions so this book for multiple reasons has eluded people left right and center one the language you cannot decipher it it looks very recognizable it sounds like I think it's about golf golf exactly could be the images are not what you would expect of a medieval manuscript I mean just imagine the labor that goes into the killing and skinning 14 cows but then also making these pigments committing them to the page you would expect maybe a little bit more

steady of a hand less sketchy drawing style and then the construction of the book is also not how medieval scholars would have put a book like this together there's like a very precise way especially when there's more than one scribe where you would get like your little batch of pages and they would all kind of match up but this is based on a whole different process so if you think about taking apart a book like page three and page 90 would be the if you deconstruct it would be the same thing right yeah so there's kind of a very typical medieval style of constructing a book like that and this according to who's attributed to describe it's all kind of out of whack in fact scholar lisa fagan davis calls it quote wacko is that a industry term I believe so that's very

specialized language so it sounds maybe right off the bat there's all these inconsistencies with it being medieval and of course there's a jump to this being an entirely hoax right yes absolutely no basis in reality yes interesting right which is always fun to just like throw the hoax bomb maybe it's fake maybe it's never even happened a brief historically known record of the voinich manuscript is that it is first in the historical written record as being owned by emperor rudolf the second of germany the holy roman empire okay he lived in prog he was very interested in the occult and kind of all these medicinal yet at the same time kind of magical elements since witch talk girl yeah yeah it was it's yeah yeah it's witch talk he hired this traveling doctor

who was known for his medical alcoholic mixtures vitamina vegeman named yacobas tenapias and yacobas he was so vital to the emperor to solve his issues of depression and melancholia with these strangely concocted alcoholic drinks that he was named the chief imperial distiller of the holy roman empire nice and when rudolf the second was dying he owed a lot of people a lot of money including yacobas so yacobas was given free reign of the library okay and said go and get your payment in there and so yacobas gathered a whole bunch of books this one included we know that because his name is written on the front page i love that if lost return to you can't see it with the naked eye you have to turn on a

black light to see it because the ink has faded so much compared to the compared to the other ink but this was like early 1600s so this is the first time that we that we see it and some people are like oh well then he wrote it his name isn't it but i write my name in books yeah doesn't mean i write yeah no i get that i get that or you yeah yeah so the manuscript changes a few hands it stays in prog so it goes to some other learned medicinal slash magical thinkers of the time it lands in the hands of a man named athensius kirksher and he's an egyptologist oh yeah nancy drew yes i do yes they're what tomb of the lost queen as a matter of fact this guy is attributed with the popularity of egyptology actually interesting egyptology is a very fraught totally rough

real rough yes he was known for his translations of egyptian hieroglyphs and then as time has gone on and we've done more research most everything that he claimed to be true has been debunked which of course makes him the perfect head of egyptology because love that yes who better to know everything about egypt than a guy who's just making it up exactly yeah he made everything else up but he could not solve the voynich manuscript he did not know what was going on with that text idiot what more on dummy it's about golf you dumbass it's an early ancient scottish text about women golfers okay they would get naked and they'd go lay down on the green beautiful what more do you need kirksher is actually in rome with the book it's sent to him

so it's left prog and it's gone to rome then it ends up in the colegio romano of roman desuette college at a villa just outside of rome called villa mandragone it stays there for quite a while until 1912 when wilfred voynich of the voynich manuscript i recognize the name yes he is a polish rare book and teaker he's a left-wing polish citizen a former pharmacist as well and he goes into the villa madragone and they're apparently down on funds and they're kind of like take what you want like a fire sale yeah yeah we got these readers digest condensed books we'd love if you take them off our hands yeah yeah ten for a penny you know one of those yes so he collects this book and a few short years later he finds himself in manhattan he opens a rare book

collecting store across from the new york public library and he has this book that nobody can read and nobody can understand and he's like this is a fucking gold mine yeah price tag on it ten thousand dollars puts it up in the front window he's like come on come here let's do it get in here shouldn't that thing be like in an envelope away from the light why are you putting it in the front window you know maybe not the front window but like uh a side window yeah exactly next the raccoons can read it all those manhattan raccoons yeah they're very cultured they all read the new york and so of course no one buys this fucking book because no one's ever heard of it they're like you yeah whatever so he realizes he needs to get some scholarship behind this book to drum

up some interest to drum up the fact too that it's not a hoax it's not a fake it's like a real a real book he got it and it can be attributed it has tenapias's autograph in the front right this is a real antique and a real ancient we'll call it that sure manuscript the provenance is in order yes he's at a dinner party and he's again trying to like drum up some excitement about this and he's like i have a manuscript that no one can read and everyone at the dinner party is like okay well i can probably read that this is probably in the 1920s i'd say and somebody at the party is like no i'm gonna be a good citizen and i'm gonna report this to the fbi gets up on little telegram situation to the fbi there's an immigrant here from poland and he has a book

that i believe might be a code for communist interaction to take over the oh no yeah oh no i forgot i forgot people the sinkhole that is humanity yeah yes so for years the fbi investigates boynich and of course nothing comes up it is most certainly not a code book for spying on the u.s government what it is we do not know but we do know that it is not that because the pressure is on in a new way boynich has to find more people to kind of back up his claim and he does he finds a handful of u.s professors who are willing to look at the text and say one it's not a communist code but two this could be all of these different theories start to spread one such theory is by a man named professor newbold out of chicago and he is the first to put forward a hypothesis

about the genesis of the boynich manuscript and to have that hypothesis be utterly debunked this begins a long long history i thought maybe his theory is that it's this like it's a cipher that's made with clusters of letters so he's playing the nancy drew game and he's like i've got this it's like move it up move it down yeah when you see this little cluster it actually just means this one character letter and then i'm gonna cipher this and da da da he attributes it to roger bacon who is a 13th century medical doctor but who also was known as dr mirabilis so a miracle doctor okay he was often in conflict with the church and often imprisoned that wasn't hard no no not hard whatsoever do you think maybe the the world revolves around the sun jail yes prison for he

so like i said newbold is debunked totally his claims but they kindly wait until he's dead to do so that's big nice of them love that the medieval academy of america does the bulk of the debunking in their journal that's called speculum yeah and the the medieval academy of america comes up again because they are pretty tied to this manuscript we'll say okay okay it's early 1930s wilfred voinex dies and his wife ethyl inherits the manuscript she again tries to sell it to no avail nobody wants to buy it though people are now more and more interested in looking at it she has to put it in a safe and pay for all the insurance until she dies and it gets inherited onto the voinex's business manager who then says fuck it i don't want to own this book so she sells

to a very well-known bookseller rare bookseller named hp cross on commission so the idea is that she would get this cut when the book sells got you cross can't sell the book fucking anywhere everybody is nobody wants everyone's calling up saying like can i see it can i see it can i have a visit with it can you take some take a selfie with the book some photographs yeah just let me let me check it out but no one is willing to buy it so hp cross is like listen this just isn't gonna happen we're going to have to sell this to a public entity or a university entity yeah so that people can study it so at a very discounted price i think something like three thousand dollars quite the cut from boinex's 10 grand it is sold to the benekie library at

yale university in 1969 which is where it is currently housed deep in the basement and the library has kindly digitized the entire thing so the link that i sent you yes you noticed yeah library yes that's where it lives and that's where it will probably live for a very long time if not ever awesome yeah which is very cool that they've digitized it too i'm a big supporter of archives and libraries digitizing their materials i think it makes them longer lived if god forbid something happens like the fire that was in lint that burned down that museum you know what i mean yeah yeah no totally and it also makes them more accessible to folks like you and me to chat about and kind of you know so i'm getting to the bottom of and yeah well listen there's you got these

motherfuckers out there solving the zodiac ciphers and shit why not me yeah it's what i gotta say why not me yeah it is known as manuscript 408 and we're talking about with digitization what's really cool about this is they do the whole thing they don't just do choice pages like isn't this cool you can have a look at it but they do the entire thing so there's complete context of it which i mean you can't read the goddamn thing so i don't know if you really need the full context but at least eliminates that they probably quells a lot of questions to just have the whole thing fucking digitized yeah of course so that's what we know of the manuscript but again there's about 200 years in there where we just have no clue and some very important 200 years because it involves

the origin it's the first 200 years yes arguably with some of the more important ones how do they know that it originates from 200 years before it was discovered is that like a they've used dating technology or is it like noted in the book somewhere in 2009 the Yale University had it carbon dated got here and there is about 95% accuracy that the caskin pages the vellum were created between 1404 and 1438 interesting okay which is a tight timeframe and a high accuracy rate too yeah no for sure that's that's really interesting people have so many different skill sets it is wild yeah so they think that it's most most likely might even be too specific here but looking at the lettering and the script that's most reminiscent of a

style in northern Italy at this time but that isn't really a helpful origin story because it really could have been from anywhere somebody could have written it in Prague but had studied in this style yeah or was from a different country than they wrote it in or whatever exactly yeah so there's some ideas that it's completely Italian medieval Italian but that there's absolutely no way to confirm that okay where am i now are you just paging through the manuscript where is the dragon i'm on the dragon here that just ripped a little we were describing it earlier kind of what it looked like the gulf text the laurax bathing situation yes yes scholars who have looked through it determined that there's probably like four to seven sections in the book and the way that they

can tell that is just from the images right there's botany there's naked ladies bathing i assume the dragon is part of it dragon has a little section yeah exactly so there's the astronomical star charts there's the botanical renderings of the images reminiscent of what we would see is like a botanical scientific picture where you have the roots and the leaves and stuff yes it's a diagram of the plant in order to facilitate identification is what it looks like what it looks like but when you look at some of those images even closer they are exaggerations of real plants so what some people think is that the drawings are actually trying to display where the plant's power might be like if the petals are part of this medicinal practice or whatever

then the petals have like extra detail and focus versus the roots and everything like that no that sounds fake okay well you don't draw leaves bigger because there's more power in them that makes sense um i don't know dude what if this is just someone who is maybe not a particularly skilled person when it comes to drawing things in perspective you would have to put so much time and effort into putting together this manuscript one two because of that not everybody had access to that not all art that takes time is good okay yeah fair okay scary lucy took five years fair enough although for the record i love scary lucy and i don't think scary lucy is bad art to be completely clear but you know what i'm getting at yes totally subjective

what is that and what is good all right i agree i agree i stand uh i stand corrected i'll take that no it's not even corrected i'm just spitballing this thing hundreds of years old there's some foldout pages in the manuscript they pull out so that it's like four times the size of the original book which is really cool cool yeah yeah like a centerfold like a centerfold exactly and they're filled with illustrations that are super detailed and wacky and kind of fantastical looking those pages because they're so big would have to take one full animal skin to make so there's again a lot of effort and intention put into this yeah there was a lot right there was 14 cows slaughtered to make this thing yeah yeah towards the end there seems to be a recipe section oh maybe this is

just a recipe maybe it's just a recipe book yeah yeah here's how you make sharp record right it's like like hunter elementary everyone share your recipes and here's how you make jello rebecca b here's your jello recipe on the very very last page there are a few lines of text that are up on the top there and they seem to be really faded and abraded and not super clear but they seem to be a mixture of german and what is called the voynichese this language that no one can decipher is called voynichese those last lines there are a mixture and so some people believe that this is kind of the the key to unlock the whole thing based on what based on the fact that it's at the end and it looks different and i see yeah do you see yeah let me let me see let me see if i can crack

this okay okay so here's what it says okay oh good oh i'm glad i'm glad you're here taylor applebee union fountain omicron al daba and then there's an eight tumbler uh that's good jump down to the second line fixed miranda forgot oh that's sad oh no yeah and then it's the bottom it says deutsch survey so this is uh this is a german survey and that's and that's what it says okay all right nancy drew is treated you well my dude yeah i cracked the case by the way i encourage everybody who's listening along to go to the the yale website and read along and and kind of flip through it it's a really interesting book and well i'm sure our instagram will show show a few

choice i want that dragon up there yeah so as taylor so expertly did just then read the manuscript read the unreadable manuscript out loud why on air miranda forgot this is just like the final season of sex in the city the naked ladies on the golf course are the characters from sex in the city this this is the prequel that's all yeah got it so there's a lot of different ways that people have gone about reading the text one i'm sure is just expertly reading it as taylor did another is to substitute the letter forms so every time you see like a little like hashtag looking thing that equates to a c a tweet or yeah or whatever you know whatever sound or typically it happens to the roman lettering the problem with that is

you see the little hashtag thing and you're like okay well that's one letter but why is it just one letter could it be two letters that are stacked on top of each other like shorthand could it be a shorthand could it be all these different things so even with this transcripted alphabet approach you have to make a lot of very learned guesses to make it work even with that and if your guesses stop hanging together then it means that you're going down the wrong track and need to start over yes yes and like i said there are loads of people who have attempted to unearth this meaning but there is a particular or i should say there are particular areas of study that have devoted a lot of time to this and as you can imagine they do coalesce at Yale because that's where it is

and so smarty pantsy over there right but there's a study called paleography the study of ancient writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts so that's like right in the fucking Voynich manuscript wheelhouse right there so deciphering and dating do you think that they have the book of the dead from uh mommy yes they do yes cool thank you taylor just dives in and starts hacking the mainframe i've been looking if i've been quiet it's actually because i've just been looking over random pages of this manuscript while we talk it's i think i found my next tattoo i'm like some of those images are beautiful very cool very cool stuff and the colors are insanely vibrant right it looks very puzzling a lot of the time too like

it looks like you're about to solve something yeah something big is that a carrot is that a wedding cake a carrot wedding cake yeah think about it there's the oh this is a little pullout section that you were talking about very cool of course linguists have have tried cracking this uh all types of librarian here high curation of of this document that steady paleography it's kind of broken down into three elements um attribution so trying to find where this manuscript has come from but you would do it by comparing it to other contemporary texts there is no such thing for the Voynich manuscript right so that's out for the paleographers uh literacies is another way that they approach their work which is how to read it so you would have to like maybe find the context of what's

happening by knowing certain words that again is out because nobody can fucking read the thing have they looked for a cipher for a contemporary cipher like something an accompanying document that might have been written to make sense of the other oh they have not found that the book did come with a letter in it the previous owner of the book sent it to Kirksher the crazy Egyptologist who was unfounded in all his thinking yes and so and that was i can believe in the mid 1600s so there's that that's included but there's nothing else that seems to be included with it yeah okay yeah there could be a cipher that's somewhere out there i'm gonna find it but all that these paleographers are left with is the description which is how those letters are made when we say that there's like

five scribes it's paleographers who are looking at the way that each letter in the entire manuscript is constructed and composed painstaking red bull red bull and vodka man maybe not the vodka get me a little loose all the all the d start to look like g's and so forth this is upside down but of course there are all different types of people who have tried to crack this oh at the internet detectives you can't keep them down no never and you know in a way we have entered their ranks taylor basso oh god no death threats i'm not sending any death threats no i would like to not send and not receive any death yeah please don't send us death threats i won't give them the d email this time so we too are voinectologists is that what we are now okay

i knew the word i knew it let's go i want to be a voinectologist let's make this happen before carbon dating there are a lot of people who are trying to attribute this manuscript to a few different people and we've heard we've heard about a few of them new bold was trying to attribute it to roger bacon always in jail science guy the uh the bill nice been off that didn't take right exactly so we know that rudolf the second was the first person to own the book yes and he had it in his like beauty in the beast library exactly yeah he thought the book was written by a man named john d who was an english occultist who transcribed languages that he had heard that kind of makes sense um rudolf the second thought that john d had written this john d

apparently had worked very closely with an occultist and well-known scam artist named edward kelly who claimed to know the language of angels i just lit up like christmas morning i love the language of angels i speak it myself exactly this guy started his career as a town scribe and he was fired for forgery and punished by having one of his ears cut off that stuff pretty intense that's a lot so for the rest of his life he wore very ornate hats and fluffy wigs to cover his yeah make it make it into a feature i agree yeah yeah i agree flip that around exactly so edward kelly and john d they worked together a lot until john d was transcribing this angel language from edward kelly and edward kelly said oh the angels have told us that we

should swap wives and john d was like oh nothing's bro no that really hit me just right thank you for that yeah don't don't once the angels start saying things about swap wives that's you know you know red flag territory did i talk about leonardo davinci you have in the past but not right now this episode nope not yet a lot of people thought because they're like oh it's old and who's a genius from that time yeah but leonardo davinci drew humans in perfect proportion they thought it was a text of his as a child though that's wretched zero out of ten theory i know right you didn't even think about it no points for creativity no just who's who's the most famous guy i know who generally lived around that time and drew some things and then it turned out with

the carbon dating that they were hundreds of years off so whatever in more contemporary theory there has been probably in the last like 20 years a research assistant out of a university in england named jared cheshire who posited that the voynich manuscript is written in a proto romance language so like early english or spanish and that it was written by dominican nuns and his theory is based on the fact that this was apparently a well-known language at the time but it was only orally spoken because latin is what was written okay and only what was written because of the church and higher education had it that way and so his argument then is this is an orally spoken language that is not typically transcribed and so the person who was writing it was like inventing the written

language or just that it was a seldom used written language and there are other examples of things that kind of look like this i believe what he was trying to say is that they were transcribing the oral language okay so i suppose inventing but as they were due they were like that sounds like a d or you know whatever that sounds like a loopy little th looking guy shasha yeah exactly okay but his university issued a statement that distanced themselves from him like that was his own research it was not very well taken to as a theory it just would have been a lot easier to understand what was being written the script that had been made would have made more sense people would have been able to recognize it right and how does something that was written by a group of dominican nuns come

into the hands of of emper Rudolf or you know right i mean there's a lot of different ways he was yeah witch talk oriented right yes i've forgotten about that aspect of his uh his online persona really really digging around etsy looking for the weird stuff yeah i want something that was made with some blood in it yep yeah yeah please thank you there were two canadian computer scientists out of the university of alberta professor chondrack and a doctoral student bradley howard so their theory was they constructed using artificial intelligence sophisticated algorithms and a little friend google translate always a help right a system of translating the entire text and what they concluded is that uh the whole thing is written in like an early hebrew that's the answer

it's hebrew okay and are they able to translate what it says then hypothetically the first line of the manuscript goes as follows Miranda forgot come on give it to me she made recommendations to the priest man of the house and me and the people it's a lot of recommendations it's a lot and yeah to a lot of people but maybe that's why she forgot so many i was making so many recommendations i don't even remember who i've been talking to got you that's why at the end moranda forgot and then she just played golf and it was all good took a bath had a great time got naked played some golf stuck her hand into a doctor's use tube and it shredded it that's it's pretty clear to me the story that we're being told here uh and a lot of people who

studied the linguistics of hebrew say what uh no and of course using google translate as a tool in this scenario is not very scientific google translate is built on modern languages yes there's just no way that it's going to take an ancient text and be able to decipher it it's better and you know what it was worth a shot i think that's an admirable someone's got to do it yeah yeah cross it off the list exactly did any i mean imagine imagine did anybody try google translate right exactly yes and it didn't work okay now we can now we can move forward so but they have but they claim to have something they claim to have translated a sentence are people just like know that no yes people are like no okay you're all fair including scholars of the Hebrew language

linguists of the Hebrew language okay okay so no even in that transcription if you're doing this and doing that it just that's a real stretch right to get to from the Hebrew to that to this to that and on top of that nobody would make that many recommendations at once so no what the early yelp proto a proto yelp that's what this is this is just uh this is just reviews of various types of like herb and root vegetable put it in the shredder take a bath you're good there is a family of Turkish descent who now live in the u.s the Ardeek family two sons and their dad their dad is a chemical or sorry a mechanical engineer by trade and they have looked through the whole text and have found a lot of similarities to Turkish to an ancient form of Turkish so their premise for that is the use

of kind of suffixes to words and the way that the Turkish language use suffixes i'm opening the book back up right i know they've compiled their own transcribed alphabet system and have translated a few things and they claim that by just looking at the text the text is actually poetically written that there's rhythm within the the lines and within the symbols that would become the language and so they're looking at it from this i guess poetic standpoint this Turkish poetic standpoint they've gotten some some positive feedback from research communities and then others not so much okay but interesting okay they're real cute i just love the idea of like a dad and his sons we're getting the bottom of this and like gonna do this we'd let's you know we never spend time

together anymore let's do a project there's the history researcher and tv writer Nicholas Gibbs who published in an article titled boy nix manuscript colon the solution oh wow that sounds official so you know it's right so you know that he has arrived at a solution uh he posits that it's a woman's health book and that it was like collage together from a few different types of publications from that era and that it was written in an abbreviated latin mm-hmm shorthand latin a shorthand latin exactly mm-hmm yeah i can kind of see that mm-hmm that of the theories that you've given me that kind of hangs together the best to me yeah yeah turns out he was commissioned to do that project by a tv show cool so i don't know they're gonna have my head up the detective

agency i got i got duped and a lot of medievalists don't buy this because if it weren't abbreviated latin it would be just much easier to crack if you knew medieval latin you would see it and say okay i can see okay we can start putting this together yeah but people who study medieval latin are like there's nothing there's nothing there dude uh-huh so um another theory at the window there's another one that it was written by italian renaissance feminists this one i had to do a little digging but i like it so i did get you where you took your time monica valentinelli uh she's an artist writer and blogger this was off her blog okay so we're getting the real sources today we're getting to the real stuff okay next is tmz

paris helton has a view on the voyage beautiful i'm sure he does i'm sure he does this theory is that in the early 1400s there was the italian renaissance kind of blooming at this time and there were women who were actively part of the academic echelon so they were highly educated they were teaching studying writing two section names dorotea buca christine christine dipetzan wrote a book called city of ladies it was published in 1404 nice perhaps another precursor to sex in the city think about it i have thought about it and you're right pandas bushnell she knew so the the idea that maybe they wrote this in a or not they but like perhaps one of them or perhaps some feminist from this era wrote this in code is that even

though they were working in a renaissance time and they had some type of ability to do this work it still was not smiled upon and so they did have to kind of hide what they were doing to dodge any blowback to a feminist movement and apparently later that century in the 1480s there was a book that was published maleus maleficiorum that became a very popular text and galvanized a witch hunt and kind of a big big blowback for women in that part of italy there's that theory i don't know but there's no solid hard evidence that the book was even written in northern italy so right that's hard i mean it could be a coven of witches i like that one yeah it could be that one feels good it could be a very popular theory of course one of my favorites

is that it's aliens so it's always fucking aliens huh well yeah you know there's star charts in there that are slightly off from what we know so maybe they know something we know maybe an alien got plopped down here in the 1400s and had no way of getting home because our technology is so basic and so all they could do was to share their knowledge in a manuscript of 14 dead cows think about it i've got it i figured it out the alien was supposed to get picked up at a certain time but moranda forgot and that was just like that was just a rant about that bitch moranda oh my god moranda i'm gonna stick her hand in the tube shredder next time i see her oh yeah big time i was just gonna ask you what uh is your theory moranda

i mean i've i've been a strong advocate of the moranda forgot theory throughout but yeah yeah the golf bath golf bath i forgot tube yes the one of those that struck me i mean it seems like like just kind of looking at it seems like an almanac of some kind baby yeah it's got these kind of diagrams of various root vegetables and things it's got these star charts yeah these naked women bathing like when the person said a women's health blah blah blah i was like oh maybe like that's not that's not so very crazy to me especially in concert with all of these various like roots and spices and herbs and things yeah my best crack at it is it's an almanac the language i don't know nearly enough about languages to tell you um it being a shorthand for some accident

language maybe makes sense to me or some sort of like you would think that if this language existed there would be some other document out there that right this could also just be like a piece of art too this could just be somebody's graphic novel like yeah who knows yeah a lot of effort was clearly there's a lot of little things like if you go to the end of the book there is someone has hand drawn stars with alternating black and white centers down the borders of every single page for pages and pages and pages so there's like a lot of care clearly put into just the presentation of this thing and stuff like that which leads me to believe that maybe it's just art yeah no it certainly could be and the text just part of the project i guess yeah

the text i don't know man i really i that i don't know i mean there's always june june for givens man that's true it could just be someone's diary it could be they created their own language they could do this is there any evidence pointing toward it being a hoax like you said for example that this person's name was written on the inside of the thing is there any way to do that like in a very skillful murder among the Mormons way that's just like a very very very good forgery that has even deceived professionals from the sky who wants to make 10 grand before it was carbon dated i think the hoax theory was was pretty solid there were just so many questions and so many things that were not the way that it should be and there was so much money at stake one being voinex himself

who wanted to sell this book so much in new york but even before that with rudolf the second him always paging through etsy trying to find the cool occult thing all of these scammers all of these occultists had the ability to perhaps the ability to create something like this and then a very willing buyer in in rudolf so in my thought of is this a forgery my thought was is this a contemporary forgery but yeah maybe someone just sold the good emperor a bill of goods and said hey this comes from some dominican nuns or whatever and they know all this shit about all these plants and that maybe explains why but do you kill 14 cows for a scam in the 1400s leave the skins around for 200 years and then make it that's that's a hard one right yeah true right yeah i'd forgotten

that there's that gap between when the thing came from and when it actually emerged and all the ink and the dye that's used to write everything that's made with materials that are consistent with the early 1400s not the 1600s and you would think that any forgery from 1600s to you know pre-carbon dating in the science we have now you didn't need to be that precise about it exactly so it's a hard one it's a really hard one yeah okay Nancy drew Nancy drew what you mean why do we do Nancy drew Nancy drew needs to get to the bottom of this you need to put the red jewel above the fireplace joe zi i keep getting pulled to the fact that it's women who are depicted in the drawings and that it's only women i think that's why i included that italian feminist

renaissance feminist viewpoint there because i keep thinking that it's written for or by women which i also really like that that idea yeah that idea would swoon you though do you know what i mean right yeah yeah i feel like probably and and much in the same way that i bet that nice turkish family loves the idea that this might be a turkish document exactly when something is this cryptic it's easy to kind of see what you want to see in it what you think the voinex manuscript is about says more about you than the actual history of the document yeah right i said it was art like i was like this just looks like somebody's graphic novel project to me yeah because that's what because i draw you know what i like exactly right yeah there's so many theories that have

recently i think since the carbon dating it's kind of come up in more popularity but there's so many theories that have just been published like like that you know mystery solved it's hebrew yeah it's drive from turkish it's written by witches it's aliens you know whatever it is yeah i forgot that we did a dip into aliens oh yeah the aliens were here yeah right yeah randa left them here and there's a lot of scholars you know all these very hard Yale smarty pants paleo graffers and linguists and stuff like that of course you know upset that everything keeps getting published without being properly peer reviewed and that all these claims are being made and and part of me is like okay well just sit it's fine you're okay your your stuff let's not take

the old cookbook so seriously that you can't even fucking read anyway you don't even know what it says so calm down but i i did read an article by this paleo graffer from Yale named lisa fagan davis who i i think i mentioned earlier too and she she's kind of become known in the last few years as a professional debunker of a lot of these claims because her line of work is completely devoted to the voinich manuscript she actually started working in the Yale library as a student and was given the job of overseeing any communication about the voinich manuscript so it's been in her life for a very long time and she's very involved and she had some good things to say about like listen the stakes are not that crazy but on the other hand too she was saying

it is dangerous to misattribute history and we definitely see that with white supremacists leanings that commandeer and whitewash parts of european history so that it fits into a nice little gross bubble yeah and i i definitely think that that's something to be careful of but the idea that maybe it's aliens i'm kind of like let's let that one ride i don't know you know because the manuscript is like such a wonderful site for creativity and you know if you take like the fanfic the fanfic approach it's like let's go baby yes yes yeah i agree you really like i say it's it's by being so elusive it's such a nice blank canvas to just project your psyche onto this weird manuscript full of naked ladies it's a rorschach test it really is yeah what is this to

you this is a project that i can take on with my kids yeah this is a great opportunity to use google translate whatever it is oh that's interesting i'm serious though i'm i'm i don't know those images are really cool i would love like a little like lady bathing in a weird tube just on my calf yeah they're very tattoo tattoo images i like that little dragon you never told me you said people have a lot of theories about that dragon but you never mentioned them oh i think it gets pulled to a lot because it's the most fantastical image that is included in the manuscript and so i guess there's not theories that are like specifically to that but it feeds a lot of theories that the manuscript is a fantasy right in interesting interesting yeah understood i like the little

dragon is cute i know he's so cute what if that's maranda and she forgot because she was smoking he's talking randa dude classic randa thanks for tuning in if you want more infamy go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find podcasts we usually release new episodes every other sunday you can also follow us on instagram at bittersweetinfamy if you like the show consider subscribing leaving a review or just telling a friend stay sweet for this episode i watched a video lecture available on youtube called the voinich manuscript with lisa fagan davis published may 7th 2021 it was made available by the necki library at Yale

and included guests curator rey clemons and Yale professor of linguistics claire bowen i took a peek at rey or reyman clemons book the voinich manuscript which is a wonderfully published vex simile of the manuscript itself it includes a few essays but if you want to see the manuscript in text look out for this book i used the Yale university digital collections to see the actual book and that's what i shared with taylor that's how we saw the entire thing i watched a youtube video from the secrets of nature the voinich code the world's most mysterious manuscript as well as a few videos from the youtube page voinich manuscript research that was put together by the ardych family i read an article on monica valentele's website

books of m dot com and her blog was titled why i believe the voinich manuscript was created by a woman i read scientists claim to crack an elusive centuries old code and it's hebrew from the times of israel published february 1st 2018 by amanda borcelle dan i read the article from bbc.com voinich manuscript translation claims raise concerns may 17th 2019 and i read the voinich manuscript the solution written by nicolas gibbs september 8th 2017 published in the times literary supplement and finally i read an article by lison fagan davis from the Yale lecture her article in the washington post published august 14th 2019 entitled why do people keep convincing themselves they've solved this medieval mystery lisa fagan davis she's the executive director of

the medieval academy of america the interstitial music you heard today was from the sitcom i love lisi and the song you're listening to right now is t street by brian steel