In 1912, the book collector Wilfrid M. Voynich bought a medieval manuscript. 235 pages written in an unknown script and what appears to be an unknown language or a cipher from the Jesuit College at the Villa Mondragone, Frascati,near Rome, Italy. Despite the efforts of many well known cryptologists and scholars, the book remains unread.

Since 1969, it is at Yale University, at the Beinecke Rare Book Library with catalogue number MS 408. It is known from a letter of J. M. Marci in 1665/6 that the manuscript was bought by Emperor Rudolph II of Bohemia (1552-1612) for 600 ducats (about 900,000 US$ in today's currency). The manuscript somehow passed to Jacobus de Tepenecz, the director of Rudolph's botanical gardens. Speculations are that this must have happened after 1608, when Jacobus Horcicki received his title "de Tepenecz". Thus 1608 is the earliest definite date for the Manuscript.

The Voynich Manuscript, as it has come to be known, contains many drawings of plants, but the plants have not been identified, nor have the drawings been identified with known fanciful or distorted drawings of plants from the Middle Ages. There are what look like astrological drawings.

There are curious drawing of little nude women bathing in baths with convoluted plumbing; nothing else like these drawings is known. The persons and costumes look generally European. The script seems to have been developed from early Arabic numerals and medieval Latin abbreviations and embellishments; it resembles Renaissance cipher scripts. The Voynich Manuscript looks a little like a lot of things, but really like nothing else at all; it is a completely unique artifact.