History and Provenance

The documented trail begins in seventeenth-century Central Europe. A letter of 1665 or 1666 by Johannes Marcus Marci, found tucked inside the volume, sends it to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome and reports a tradition that Emperor Rudolf II had once paid a large sum for it. Earlier owners named in the correspondence include the alchemist Georg Baresch and, by inference, figures at the Prague court. From Kircher the manuscript entered the library of the Collegio Romano, where it remained, largely unnoticed, until the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought it in 1912.

Voynich promoted the theory that the friar Roger Bacon (d. c. 1292) had written it, which drew wide attention. The manuscript passed after Voynich's death through his widow Ethel and the bookseller H. P. Kraus, who donated it to Yale in 1969. The 2009 radiocarbon dating of the parchment to 1404-1438 places its manufacture well after Bacon and settles at least the age of the physical support.