Wilfrid Voynich (born Michał Habdank-Wojnicz;

Telšiai Telšiai (; Samogitian: ''Telšē'') is a city in Lithuania with about 21,499 inhabitants. It is the capital of Telšiai County and Samogitia region, and it is located on the shores of Lake Mastis. Telšiai is one of the oldest cities in Lithua ...

, Деятели революционного движения в России: Био-библиографический словарь: От предшественников декабристов до падения царизма: � 5 т. - М.: Изд-во Всесоюзного общества политических каторжан и ссыльно-поселенцев, 1927-1934
Entry on Voynich
– New York, 19 March 1930) was a Polish revolutionary, antiquarian and

bibliophile Bibliophilia or bibliophilism is the love of books. A bibliophile or bookworm is an individual who loves and frequently reads and/or collects books. Profile The classic bibliophile is one who loves to read, admire and collect books, often ama ...

. Voynich operated one of the largest rare book businesses in the world, but he is remembered as the

eponym An eponym is a person, a place, or a thing after whom or which someone or something is, or is believed to be, named. The adjectives which are derived from the word eponym include ''eponymous'' and ''eponymic''. Usage of the word The term ''epon ...

of the

Voynich manuscript The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an otherwise unknown writing system, referred to as 'Voynichese'. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and stylistic ana ...

Life

Michał Habdank-Wojnicz was born in the town of

in present-day Lithuania, then part of the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

, into a Polish-Lithuanian noble family. The " Habdank" part of his surname is the name of a Polish

heraldic clan A heraldic clan (''ród herbowy''), in Poland, comprised all the noble ('' szlachta'') bearers of the same coat of arms. The members of a heraldic clan were not necessarily linked by consanguinity. The concept was unique to Polish heraldry. Hi ...

. He was the son of a Polish petty official ( titular counsellor). He attended a ''gimnazjum'' in

Suwałki Suwałki ( lt, Suvalkai; yi, סואוואַלק) is a city in northeastern Poland with a population of 69,206 (2021). It is the capital of Suwałki County and one of the most important centers of commerce in the Podlaskie Voivodeship. Suwałki ...

(a town in northeastern Poland), then studied at the universities of Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. He graduated from Moscow University in chemistry and became a licensed pharmacist. Michael Voynich

In 1885, in

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...

, Wojnicz joined

Ludwik Waryński Ludwik Tadeusz Waryński (24 September 1856 at Martynówka – 2 March 1889 in Shlisselburg) was an activist and theoretician of the socialist movement in Poland. Biography Waryński was born at Martynówka, Kiev Governorate (Мартині ...

's revolutionary organization, '' Proletariat''. In 1886, after a failed attempt to free fellow-conspirators :pl:Piotr Bardowski (1846–1886) and Stanisław Kunicki (1861–1886), who had both been sentenced to death, from the

Warsaw Citadel Warsaw Citadel (Polish: Cytadela Warszawska) is a 19th-century fortress in Warsaw, Poland. It was built by order of Tsar Nicholas I after the suppression of the 1830 November Uprising in order to bolster imperial Russian control of the city. ...

, he was arrested by the Russian police. In 1887, he was sent to penal servitude at Tunka near Irkutsk in Siberia. Whilst in Siberia, Voynich acquired a working knowledge of eighteen different languages, albeit not well."Mr. W. M. Voynich." Times ondon, England22 March 1930: 17. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 10 April 2017. In June 1890 he escaped from

Siberia Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive region, geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a ...

and travelling west by train got to Hamburg, eventually arriving in London in October 1890. Under the assumed name of Ivan Kel'chevskii at first, he worked with Sergius Stepniak, a fellow revolutionary, under the banner of the anti-tsarist

Society of Friends of Russian Freedom The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom was an organization of British and American political activists and reformers who supported the Russian opposition movement against Tsarist autocracy broadly defined, at the end of the 19th and the beginn ...

in London. After Stepniak's death in a railway crossing accident in 1895, Voynich ceased revolutionary activity. Voynich became an antiquarian bookseller from around 1897, acting on the advice of Richard Garnett, a curator at the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

. Voynich opened a bookshop at

Soho Square Soho Square is a garden square in Soho, London, hosting since 1954 a ''de facto'' public park let by the Soho Square Garden Committee to Westminster City Council. It was originally called King Square after Charles II, and a much weathered ...

in London in 1898. He was remarkably lucky in finding rare books, including a Malermi Bible in Italy in 1902. In 1902 he married a fellow former revolutionary, Ethel Lilian Boole, daughter of the British mathematician

George Boole George Boole (; 2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in ...

, with whom Voynich had been associated since 1890. Voynich was naturalised a British subject on 25 April 1904, taking the legal name Wilfrid Michael Voynich. Voynich opened another bookshop in 1914 in New York. With the onset of the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, Voynich was increasingly based in New York. He became deeply involved in the antiquarian book trade, and wrote a number of catalogues and other texts on the subject. Voynich relocated his London bookshop to 175 Piccadilly in 1917. Also in 1917, based on rumors, Voynich was investigated by the

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, t ...

, in relation to his possession of

Bacon's cipher Bacon's cipher or the Baconian cipher is a method of steganographic message encoding devised by Francis Bacon in 1605. A message is concealed in the presentation of text, rather than its content. Cipher details To encode a message, each letter of ...

. The report also noted that he dealt with manuscripts from the 13th, 12th, and 11th centuries, and that the value of his books at the time was half a million dollars. However, the investigation did not reveal anything significant beyond the fact that he possessed a secret code nearly a thousand years old. Voynich died at

Roosevelt Hospital Mount Sinai West, opened in 1871 as Roosevelt Hospital, is affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Mount Sinai Health System. The 514-bed facility is located in the Midtown West neighborhood of New York City. The f ...

in New York, in 1930 of

lung cancer Lung cancer, also known as lung carcinoma (since about 98–99% of all lung cancers are carcinomas), is a malignant lung tumor characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. Lung carcinomas derive from transformed, malign ...

Voynich manuscript

The most famous of Voynich's possessions was a mysterious

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in ...

he said he acquired in 1912 at the

Villa Mondragone Villa Mondragone is a patrician villa originally in the territory of the Italian comune of Frascati (Latium, central Italy), now in the territory of Monte Porzio Catone (Alban Hills). It lies on a hill 416m above sea-level, in an area called ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

, but first presented in public in 1915. The book has been

carbon-dated Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was dev ...

, which revealed that the materials were manufactured sometime between 1404 and 1438, although the book may have been written much later. He owned the manuscript until his death.

References

External links

Biographical information on E. L. Voynich and W. M. Voynich
by Rafał T. Prinke

{{DEFAULTSORT:Voynich, Wilfrid Michael 1865 births 1930 deaths People from Telšiai People from Kovno Governorate Clan Abdank Polish revolutionaries Polish antiquarians Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United Kingdom Book and manuscript collectors Polish expatriates in the United States Polish male non-fiction writers Soho Square People from the Russian Empire of Polish descent

Life

Voynich manuscript

See also

References

External links