Thomas Leigh posted a request on CONLANG-L for a review of The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World, by Lawrence Goldstone and Nancy Goldstone (New York: Double day, 2004). Those readers seriously interested in the Voynich Manuscript (which doesn't even make it into the main title) will be fairly disappointed. The book is mainly about Roger Bacon--the referent for "the friar" in the title--and it is more biography than analysis. There is even biographical material on Wilfred Voynich who purchased the manuscript in 1912 and gave it its name. The modus of the book seems to be to assume that the text is cipher, that Bacon produced it, and to offer digression after digression on Bacon's life and his contemporaries until we actually get a detailed discussion of the manuscript in the last few chapters. This will frustrate readers interested in the unknowable language of the text, especially since the chapter titles are largely uninformative.

I have no special reason for disliking the Bacon theory, except that I've read too many articles debunking Newbold's findings, and giving evidence of a later date for the manuscript. Also, what would Bacon's incentive be, and what was he writing about? And for whom? Just because Bacon is famous doesn't mean we have to pin it on him. Who knows what brilliant, weird mind, gifted in crypto-writing and lost to time, could have produced something that really looks more like it belongs to the late fourteenth, early fifteenth century? (I reject the "hoax by Edward Kelley" hypothesis as well.) The Goldstone book is so padded with information that is basically irrelevant to the matters that interest me that I was bored and frustrated by all the newsy digressions on people's lives. In another context I would have been able to stay awake, but trying to comb the book for information about the actual manuscript was torture.

The jacket blurb writes that "The Friar and the Cipher is a wonderfully entertaining and historically wide-ranging book that is one part The Code, one part Possession, and one part The Da Vinci Code," so you can see what audience the publishers are catering to. There are no bibliographical footnotes, and the final bibliography is top heavy with historical references, lacking references to the large number of websites devoted to this topic.

I strongly recommend Mary D'Imperio's scrupulous, beautifully set out (and hard to find) analysis of this curious book called The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma (Fort George G. Meade, Maryland: National Security Agency/Central Security Service, 1978). She is/was an NSA cryptographer, and she gives one of the most thorough analyses of the language and script, the theories surrounding it, and admirably concise discussions of relevant medieval and renaissance theories of language and code, with no attempts whatsoever to jazz it up or dumb it down for the lay reader. I have yet to read the latest study by Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill (The Voynich Manuscript. London: Orion Books, 2004, 2005) but reviews of it on Amazon.com suggest that it is open-minded in the way that The Friar and the Cipher is not.