Thread by @wydna00

The Voynich Manuscript is worthless actually, he was never able to sell it. His widow sold it decades later for $25,000, less than 1/4 his asking price. The buyer was unable to resell it and donated it to Yale. It’s value is only in the fictitious mystery constructed around it

The legend of the manuscript was only ever a marketing ploy, which a perpetually cash strapped Voynich cooked up with amateur Roger Bacon scholar Robert Steele, a friend from the Savage Club, and Steele’s friend A.G. Little to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Bacon’s birth

19th century positivists and amateur scholars had, in the final decades of the century, constructed a highly distorted image of Roger Bacon as a martyr for science, ignoring the complexities of his thought to bolster their ideology of scientific and Comtean social progress

A massive international commemoration of Roger Bacon’s 700th birthday was organized in 1914, led by A.G. Little, Steele, and J.P. Gilson, who was Keeper of the Manuscripts at the British Museum, to triumphantly cement this strained positivist instrumentalization of Bacon forever

It’s poetic that the celebrations were interrupted by the onset of WWI. Immediately after the war, Voynich start trying to publicize and sell the “Bacon cipher manuscript” again, using the mentally ill speculations of UPenn philosophy professor William Newbold

By this time though, in the wake of WWI, the inflated enthusiasm surrounding the idealized positivist version of Roger Bacon had collapsed. Unbeknownst to Voynich dissatisfaction with amateur Bacon scholarship of the 19th century had been festering among scholars for years

The feverish claims of Newbold emerged as an opportunity to put the positivist reading of Bacon down for good, and serious scholars led by UChicago philologist John M. Manley demolished the Voynich-Newbold publicity campaign, shattering Voynich’s hopes for financial salvation

The providence which Voynich had tried to establish in his lecture before the Philadelphia College of Physicians, which linked the manuscript to from Rudolf II to Roger Bacon by way of John Dee, ridiculously exaggerated Bacon’s influence beyond all historical evidence

This narrative though isn’t just one about the manuscript, as a physical object, but transforms the “cipher codex” into a symbol of Science itself, which is passed like a torch down through the ages by way of a line of martyred visionaries in defiance of reactionary repression

Voynich has Dee fleeing to the continent to escape persecution for his scientific ideals as an angry mob burned his evil witchcraft books. In reality Dee fled with Albertus Laski to escape his creditors and conduct political intrigues in Poland. The angry mob story never happened

This positivist fairy tale of suppressed scientific ideals being heroically smuggled across centuries of superstition simultaneously serves not only as the manuscripts providence, but as historical propaganda in service of the pseudo-socialist values of late Victorian England

It is this ideological core which served as the center of gravity around which Voynich’s social circles turned, linking together the Russian nihilist-anarchist emigre community London with the milieu of Fabian socialism and the medieval modernism of the Arts and Crafts movement

These groups converged in the reading room of the British Museum, the storehouse of British imperial intelligence, where the knowledge acquired by a global network of diplomats and merchants and colonial administers was synthesized and organized into a miniature world of books

Here Arts and Crafts movement manuscript illuminators went to study the mediaeval masterpieces they based their work on. While simultaneously political exiles and agents of the government came to read up on the culture and history of politically tumultuous foreign nations

Here they mingled with the scholar-administrators of the British Empire’s institutional brain and the army of book sellers, book binders, and book printers which serviced it and fed it new knowledge at an exponential rate where the museum’s library doubled in size every 20 years

This is the true story of the Voynich Manuscript, which is less merely a story of a curious manuscript and a suspicious book dealer, but rather a tale of the vast ideological-historical constructing of the modern world deep in the bowels of Victorian intelligence networks

The Voynich Manuscript stands as an artifact of that history, stranded out of time, lost in the abyss of the war and revolutions of the 1910s, when the positivist nihilism of Britain’s social democratic imperialism collapsed in on itself and nearly took the world with it

Without this context it’s impossible to understand the Voynich Manuscript. This history is the true cipher encrypting its meaning.