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This late-medieval document is covered in illustrations of stars and planets, plants, zodiac symbols, naked women, and blue and green fluids. But the text itself – thought to be the work of five different scribes – is enciphered and yet to be understood.In an article published in Social History of Medicine, my coauthor Michelle L. Lewis and I propose that sex is one of the subjects detailed in the manuscript – and that the largest diagram represents both sex and conception.Late-medieval sexology and gynaecologyResearch on the Voynich manuscript has revealed some clues about its origins. Carbon dating provides a 95%...

Many books were printed and bound in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts. This often involved manuscripts that had lost their value: books that were too Catholic or were written in a language that could no longer be read.Something very special was found in a number of book bindings in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: 21 fragments of a manuscript from the 11th century, an almost 1,000-year-old Latin psalter with Old English glosses. Thijs Porck, senior university lecturer of...

The university announced on Tuesday that the so-called “Galileo manuscript” – a one-page document that includes a letter accompanying the astronomer’s presentation of his telescope and his supposed notes observing Jupiter’s moons through his telescope in 1610 – was crafted by Tobia Nicotra, a well-known forger from Italy who was fined and sentenced to two years in jail for crafting fake Galileo documents in 1934. He also infamously produced fake autographs of Christopher Columbus and Mozart. The possibility came to light in May when the Georgia State University professor Nick Wilding expressed “serious doubts about its authenticity”. Wilding found while...

Is John 7:53-8:11 Authentic?The account of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) has a textual history that makes heads spin. Michaels in her commentary on John [146] offers the details: It is not in the earliest manuscripts (with one exception); in those manuscripts where we do find it, it is not found in one place. Some have it at the end of John. Some put it after our John 7:36; one puts it after 7:44. Some have it in Luke, after Luke 21:38. So what's happening here? Do we maybe have a bit of an otherwise rejected gospel, or...

Choral music not heard since the time of Henry VIII has been brought to life for the first time in 500 years, as an academic unearths an untouched manuscript and shows it to a modern choir. The manuscript, a book of 34 religious songs, was given to Henry VIII as a lavish gift from a French diplomat in his early reign. Containing songs referencing Henry and his then-bride Catherine of Aragon, it is considered the most "luxurious" surviving diplomatic gift of its kind. It remained in the Royal Collection after the king's death, and was later given to the nation...

 The University of Oxford and the Vatican have jointly created a digital project that will put online over 1.5 million pages of medieval and biblical texts. The four-year project will digitize the collections of the Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) related to their Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts and fifteenth-century printed books. They include a Gutenberg Bible from 1455, an autographed and annotated manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and the oldest surviving Hebrew codex.The project is funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation. Dr Leonard Polonsky said, “In today’s fast-paced, digital-driven world of scholarship, easy...

Ramón Mercader from Barcelona killed Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City. On 20th August 1940, the exiled Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded at his home in a suburb of Mexico City when an ice axe was driven into his skull. He cried out to his guards as they burst into his study, ‘Don’t kill him! He must talk.’ Despite struggling fiercely, and even managing to bite the hand of his assassin, Trotsky died the next day, and the man who wielded the murder weapon was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He insisted throughout his trial and his...

Exciting news from one of Christianity’s earliest seats, and the UK Daily Mail: The world’s earliest illustrated Christian book has been saved by a British charity which located it at a remote Ethiopian monastery.The incredible Garima Gospels are named after a monk who arrived in the African country in the fifth century and is said to have copied them out in just one day.Beautifully illustrated, the colours are still vivid and thanks to the Ethiopian Heritage Fund have been conserved. The survival of the Gospels is incredible considering the country has been under Muslim invasion, Italian invasion and a fire...

The Mystery of the Voynich ManuscriptNew analysis of a famously cryptic medieval document suggests that it contains nothing but gibberish By Gordon Rugg STRANGE IMAGES of heavenly spheres, fantastic plants and nude women adorn the pages of the Voynich manuscript, which is written in an odd script that does not match that of any known language. The manuscript now resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. In 1912 Wilfrid Voynich, an American rare-book dealer, made the find of a lifetime in the library of a Jesuit college near Rome: a manuscript some 230 pages long,...

For 2,000 years, the document written by one of antiquity's greatest mathematicians was ill treated, torn apart and allowed to decay. Now, US historians have decoded the Archimedes book. But is it really new? When the Romans advanced to Sicily in the Second Punic War and finally captured the proud city of Syracuse, one of their soldiers met an old man who, surrounded by the din of battle, was calmly drawing geometric figures in the sand. "Do not disturb my circles," the eccentric old man called out. The legionnaire killed him with his sword. That, at least, is the legend....

Wiping away the dust from the frame he bought at a car boot sale for £1, Kenneth Anderson-Jones could hardly believe his eyes.For there on the scrap of old paper inside was what appeared to be the signature of Abraham Lincoln. As Mr Anderson-Jones, 75, read the accompanying text, his incredulity grew even more as he realised it seemed to be an order written in ink by the former US President and dated March 10, 1864. It read: "Under the authority of an act of Congress to revive the grade of lieutenant-general in the United States Army, approved February 29,...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Lost for almost 1,700 years, a manuscript entitled "Gospel of Judas" is putting a new spin on the case of the biblical bad guy, maintaining that Jesus actually asked disciple Judas to betray him. The third- or fourth-century ancient Coptic manuscript -- authenticated, translated and displayed Thursday at National Geographic headquarters here -- paints a different picture of Judas and Jesus. The papyrus manuscript known as a codex maintains, as the bible does not, that Jesus requested that Judas "betray" him by handing him to authorities, something it says pained Judas greatly."The codex has been authenticated as...

Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesThe recently discovered manuscript for Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge." Heather Carbo, a matter-of-fact librarian at an evangelical seminary outside Philadelphia, was cleaning out an archival cabinet one hot afternoon in July. It was a dirty and routine job. But there, on the bottom shelf, she stumbled across what may be one of the most important musicological finds in years. It was a working manuscript score for a piano version of Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge," a monument of classical music. And it was in the composer's own hand, according to Sotheby's auction house. The 80-page manuscript...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said Saturday. The handwritten manuscript titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas" was dated December 1924. Considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs, it was published in the proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in January 1925. High-resolution photographs of the 16-page, German-language manuscript and an account of its discovery were posted on the institute's Web site. "It was quite exciting" when a student working on his...

Bedouin wanders across Biblical manuscript Fragments of a Biblical manuscript dating back to the last Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 135 AD Judaea, have been uncovered near the Dead Sea. After four decades with a dearth of new finds, archaeologists had resigned themselves to believing the desert caves in the modern-day West Bank had already yielded all their secrets from the Roman era. "It's simply sensational, a dream come true," archaeology professor Hanan Eshel, a Biblical specialist at Israel's Bar Ilan University, said. For the past 20 years, he has scoured the Judaean desert around the Dead Sea, overturning...

'They're the most beautiful books that were created.' So said Peter Stoicheff, professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, who wants to reassemble forty boxes of single manuscript pages. May 26, 2005: University of Saskatchewan Reassembles Medieval Manuscripts at Rare Book News and Scattered Leaves at Bookworm started me on a little journey. Prof Stoicheff's quote is in Pages for the ages: U of S prof on quest to reassemble pages of centuries-old manuscripts. The hand-written pages were torn from some 50 books in the possession of Otto Ege of Cleveland, Ohio. In the early decades of the...

For five days in May, the ancient collided with the ultra-modern at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), bringing brilliant, long-hidden ideas to light with brilliant X-ray light. A synchrotron X-ray beam at the Department of Energy facility illuminated an obscured work - erased, written over and even painted over - of ancient mathematical genius Archimedes, born 287 B.C. in Sicily. Archimedes' amazingly advanced ideas have been lost and found several times throughout the ages. Now scientists are employing modern technology — including X-ray fluorescence at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) — to completely read the Archimedes Palimpsest, the...

Coptic manuscripts unearthed in Pharaonic tomb in Egypt Published February 21, 2005 CAIRO -- Polish experts excavating in the southern city of Luxor have discovered three ancient Coptic manuscripts in a Pharaonic tomb, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Saturday. The find was the single most important Coptic discovery since 1945 when a pair of bedouins stumbled onto the Coptic codices in Nag Hammadi in Egypt's western desert, it said. The manuscripts date to the sixth century and were concealed in a Middle Kingdom (2000 to 1800 BC) tomb in Luxor, about 710 kilometers (440 miles) south of Cairo,...

Recent News! They discover proof that Atlantis did not submerge complete but only one part...By Salvador Morales. Atlantis News Agency. Madrid, Spain. 01-06-2005. The Spanish investigator and scriptologist, Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, has discovered paleographical proofs that in fact the island or peninsula (Nêsos) denominated like Atlantis or Atlantic, it was divided in two parts below the sea. To date all atlantologists and students of the Timaeus and the Critias de Plato had thought that in texts of the Greek philosophist narrated the collapse of the all island or Atlantis peninsula, nevertheless, Georgeos Diaz-Montexano has reviewed the oldest texts known writings in...

The Mystery of the Voynich ManuscriptNew analysis of a famously cryptic medieval document suggests that it contains nothing but gibberish By Gordon Rugg Image: BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITYSTRANGE IMAGES of heavenly spheres, fantastic plants and nude women adorn the pages of the Voynich manuscript, which is written in an odd script that does not match that of any known language. The manuscript now resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Overview/A Medieval Mystery In 1912 Wilfrid Voynich, an American rare-book dealer, made the find of a lifetime in the library of...