In 1912, rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich opened a small vellum codex in Italy and found a manuscript unlike anything he had seen before: strange plants, bathing women, foldout diagrams, star charts, and page after page of writing no one could read. More than a century later, the Voynich Manuscript remains one of the most famous unsolved texts in the world.

This episode traces Voynich’s discovery, the manuscript’s trail backward through Prague, Jesuit collections, and the court of Rudolf II, and the modern fight to explain what it is: cipher, lost language, hoax, or a real medieval book we no longer understand.

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