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The Friar and the Cipher
The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World | Nancy Goldstone, Lawrence Goldstone
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A compulsively readable account of the most mysterious manuscript in the world, one that has stumped the world’s greatest scholars and codebreakers. The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious tome discovered in 1912 by the English book dealer Wilfrid Michael Voynich, has puzzled scholars for a century. A small six inches by nine inches, but over two hundred pages long, with odd illustrations of plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women, it is written in so indecipherable a language and contains so complicated a code that mathematicians, book collectors, linguists, and historians alike have yet to solve the mysteries contained within. However, in The Friar and the Cipher, the acclaimed bibliophiles and historians Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone describe, in fascinating detail, the theory that Roger Bacon, the noted thirteenth-century, pre-Copernican astronomer, was its author and that the perplexing alphabet was written in his hand. Along the way, they explain the many proposed solutions that scholars have put forth and the myriad attempts at labeling the manuscript's content, from Latin or Greek shorthand to Arabic numerals to ancient Ukrainian to a recipe for the elixir of life to good old-fashioned gibberish. As we journey across centuries, languages, and countries, we meet a cast of impassioned characters and case-crackers, including, of course, Bacon, whose own personal scientific contributions, Voynich author or not, were literally and figuratively astronomical. The Friar and the Cipher is a wonderfully entertaining and historically wide-ranging book that is one part The Code Book, one part Possession, and one part The Da Vinci Code and will appeal to bibliophiles and laypeople alike.
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Because of the title, like a wheel, Roger Bacon and the Voynich manuscript should be at the center of this book while other subjects should radiate like spokes; a compilation of events and people mainly focused from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance with info relating to early universities, power changes with rulers and popes, and how that affected whose scholarship was credited as the truth where science meets religion. 👇

Palimpsest However, the reader learns as much about Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Grossetesste, John Dee, and Francis Bacon as well as Arab philosophers like Avicenna and Averroës as Bacon.This book is interesting as the history around scholarship pertaining to the Voynich manuscript, but the title doesn‘t align with the content and only the last few chapters are about cryptography. I enjoyed the history, but was truly looking for info about Roger Bacon. 2y
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