![]() But no living person has ever, as far as we know, understood it. ![]() ![]() We know, thanks to carbon dating, that it was put together in the early fifteenth century. The Voynich Manuscript is a special kind of original. It cannot be standardized any more than a thing can be unburned. This is not what’s happening, physically, but it makes sense as a metaphor: a medieval manuscript, because it was made by hand, is necessarily an original, even when it is a copy of something else. The word “ink” is a child of the Latin incaustum, which means “having been burned.” In the Middle Ages, people thought that ink burned its way into parchment, because iron-gall inks go onto the page pale, then darken. Photograph Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University / Wikimedia Commons The manuscript was made in the ordinary medieval way, but the script was apparently invented by whoever made it.
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