Kennedy, Gerry, and Rob Churchill. The Voynich manuscript: the unsolved riddle of an extraordinary book which has defied interpretation for centuries. London: Orion Books, 2005.

Summary: A very strange old book, handwritten on vellum, about 250 pages long, has astonished and puzzled almost everyone who has examined it. Almost every page contains a drawing or diagram, or sometimes several such drawings, accompanied by what at first glance appears to be prose text written in some unfamiliar alphabetic script. On closer examination, some parts of the supposed text turn out to have characteristics that are not much like natural languages (e.g., lots of middle-sized words, but few that are very short or very long; long strings of words that are almost, but not quite, alike). And many of the diagrams depict plants, but not plants of any recognizable species. Some of the plants, indeed, are fantastic and even impossible in structure. Other drawings depict weird, visionary scenes:

Myriad plump ‘nymphs’, often with headdresses, but otherwise completely naken, dance or recline in pools of limpid green liquid; the bools or baths themselves connected by streams, channels or ‘plumbing’ that appears more organic than architectural. Other individual figures stand alone in urns or tubs, arms upraised, either dispatching or receiving something from the interconnecting tubing. On one page (f82r), a figure with dark hair or headdress stands in a vessel, her left arm placed into a cruciform junction of pipes, from the other end of which issue flames, which themselves produce a star. Another star appears, leaving a trail from the original as it passes across the page to rest above another female figure, this one wrapped in a shroud, lying, either dead or asleep, on a tapering plinth. Above these figures two other women, one crowned, the other with long flowing blond hair, gesture towards two arching pipes that join and flow into a decorated vase; below, eleven nymphs, six of whom sport elaborate hats or crowns, stand around, and in, yet another green bath with ornate, curlicued edges. And this image is far from the exception; page after page is filled with equally strange scenes. ... Streams of seeds of pollen issue from tubes, grape-like clusters of eggs produce flowing rivers which feed the pools in which the nymphs bathe and from which animals drink. ...

The overriding sense is that the creator of the manuscript had a purpose other that to create something of ‘beauty’, and was driven rather by a desire to convey meaning.

Kennedy and Churchill give the (very imperfectly known) history of the manuscript and the many failed attempts to decipher the text, then summarize the numerous current theories, including their own speculation that it is a hoax or forgery.