The Cipher Of Roger Bacon

The story of the discovery of the key of Bacon's system of ciphers and its application to the Voynich manuscript and other untranslated documents.

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.

This is a new release of the original 1928 edition.

Out of the Flames is an extraordinary story - providing testament to the power of ideas, the enduring legacy of books, and the triumph of individual courage. Out of the Flames tracks the history of The Chrisitianismi Restituto, examining Michael Servetus's life and times and the politics of the first information during the sixteenth century. The Chrisitianismi Restituto, a heretical work of biblical scholarship, written in 1553, aimed to refute the orthodox Christianity that Michael Servetus' old colleague, John Calvin, supported. After the book spread through the ranks of Protestant hierarchy, Servetus was tried and agonizingly burned at the stake, the last known copy of the Restitutio chained to his leg. Servetus's execution marked a turning point in the quest for freedom of expression, due largely to the development of the printing press and the proliferation of books in Renaissance Europe. Three copies of the Restitutio managed to survive the burning, despite every effort on the part of his enemies to destroy them. As a result, the book became almost a surrogate for its author, going into hiding and relying on covert distribution until it could be read freely, centuries later. Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone follow the clandestine journey of the three copies through the subsequent centuries and explore its author's legacy and influence over the thinkers that shared his spirit and genius, such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau, Jefferson, Clarence Dorrow, and William Osler.

A facsimile of an object of unknown authorship that has been the source of study and speculation for centuries and remains undecipherable to this day.

The Voynich Roger Bacon manuscript secretspresumably magical or scientific and possibly containing a formula for an Elixir of Lifecontinue to defy deciphering efforts after almost four centuries, as this amazing history shows. ""Bought about the year 1586 by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who had a keen interest in magic and science, the Voynich manuscript consists of some 200 pages, with many unusual anatomical, botanical, and astronomical illustrations. The work was thought to be that of Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century English philosopher, who had a reputation for being a magician, and whom legend credited with discovery of an Elixir of Life.The writing, presumably in cipher, defied decipherment by Rudolph s scholars, and the manuscript passed in the eighteenth century from Prague to Rome, and in 1912 to America, when it was bought by Wilfrid Voynich, a rare-book dealer. In 1921, William R. Newbold claimed to have solved the cipher, but his claim was disputed by John M. Manly, who gave the manuscript the sobriquet the most mysterious manuscript in the world. In the 1960s the manuscript was acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book Library, and Robert S. Brumbaugh, a philosopher at Yale who had served in military intelligence during World War II, became interested in it, and began what has turned out to be a decade of effort to unlock the secrets of the cipher. In the course of his investigations Brumbaugh brought together a collection of essays tracing the manuscript s history, which form the basis of the present book.Brumbaugh himself in 1972 identified the alphabet used in the cipher, and read plant and star labels, but the text has resisted application of the alphabet. Efforts to transcribe and decipher the manuscript continue, and this book is a contribution to the efforts to reveal the secrets of medieval science, philosophy, and linguistics still locked in the world s most mysterious manuscript. "