Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Voynich Manuscript "Decoded"?

Ian tweets out a Slashdot piece on our old friend the Voynich Manuscript (labeled an elaborate hoax in 2007); Edith Sherwood, who has previously suggested that the mss. was written by a young Leonardo da Vinci, now believes that the document "is probably a series of Italian word anagrams written in a fancy embellished script." The examples given are ambiguous, and it isn't at all clear this will hold up (or even if this theory applies to the entire document or just to the herbal sections), but it's another guess in a long string of them!