The Voynich Manuscript
Described as "the most mysterious manuscript in the world", the Voynich Manuscript is believed to have been written in the early 15th century. In 1912, a bookseller, Wilfried Voynich, bought it. It is named the Voynech Manuscript after him. Some of its pages have been lost, but the present edition contains about 240 pages, most of which are made up of illustrations.Many of the manuscript descriptions contain information on herbal manuscripts of the period, depictions of plants and their possible uses.
The Voynech manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptanalysts, including American and British cryptanalysts of World War I and World War II. No one has ever been able to decipher the text, and it became a famous event in the history of cryptography.
The mystery of the manuscript's meaning and provenance has fueled the popular imagination, rendering the manuscript novel and thought-provoking. None of the many hypotheses proposed over the past hundred years have yet been independently verified.