The Friar and the Cipher Read Free

Voynich pulled from the trunk in the Villa Mondragone. Many of the details of his life remain shadowy, and the mythology that grew up around him often blurred fact with fiction. Much of what we know has been deduced from background information rather than gleaned from irrefutable evidence.
    Still, as Bacon has been a subject of almost cultish fascination for more than four centuries, a remarkable amount of scholarly detective work has been done to lift his biography from the murk. Bacon has aroused considerable passions from both those who think that he was one of the preeminent figures in the history of science, on a par with Galileo, and those who dismiss him as a quirky iconoclast whose appeal is derived from his quixotic personality rather than any real contribution to human thought. In order to objectively navigate between these extremes, a historian must rely in no small part on what Bacon's detractors are forced to admit and what his champions are forced to concede.
    The manuscript's provenance is equally obscure. There are large gaps in the chain of ownership. A trail must be woven, once again not by hard data but by careful construction, the testing of relative hypotheses, the weighing of alternatives.
    The scale of the investigation is breathtaking; it covers the range of human experience, skipping across time periods and disciplines. It begins with the musings of Plato and Aristotle, moves through the development of scientific and Christian thought on to the rise of universities and finally to the intellectual standoff between Roger Bacon and his belief in experiment and Thomas Aquinas and the logic of Catholicism. But Bacon's legacy and the foggy history of the manuscript also lead to spies and plots in Elizabethan England, palaces in exotic Bohemia, a spectacular showman and scientist who in his lifetime was considered a rival to Isaac Newton, and finally to modern cryptanalysis and the secret world of the premier code-breaking unit in America, the National Security Agency.
    It is a journey of intellectual curiosity, moral courage, and tenacity of spirit, which is incomplete even to this day. Still, as Roger Bacon knew eight centuries ago, it is the willingness to undertake the journey, and not the results, that is so vital to human progess.

    First page of the Voynich manuscript. Under ultraviolet light, the name of a previous owner and date can be seen in the margins. Under magnification, “Tepen” can just be made out.
BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY

CHAPTER ONE
    Turmoil and Opportunity:
Roger Bacon's England
    •   •   •
    ROGER BACON WAS BORN IN SOMERSET, in southwest England, about one hundred miles west of London. There are no surviving records of his birth—the evidence for the date comes from Bacon himself. In a work known to have been written in 1268 he said: “I have labored much in sciences and languages, and I have up to now devoted forty years to them.” What he apparently meant by this was that he had started what today would be the equivalent of an undergraduate arts course in 1228. Since the average thirteenth-century boy started college at about fourteen, this puts the year of his birth at 1214. He lived to be eighty, so his lifetime spanned nearly the whole of the thirteenth century.
    Bacon came from a family of wealthy minor nobles. His father held no title and was probably a product of the new and burgeoning merchant class, men who worked their way into higher society by accumulating cash, which was then used to purchase land and a manor house. The most successful of these could buy castles and conduct themselves as genuine nobility, knighting their sons, but Bacon's family did not seem to fall into this category. He had at least one older brother, to whom he refers in his writings, but neither was ever granted a title by the king.
    Bacon remained throughout his life a product of the England of his childhood, an England in the midst of great change and