TheCodeBreakers
family Dee was associated), was told or assumed that it was Bacon's,
tried to solve it, and, failing, made a gift of it to Rudolf, perhaps on behalf
of Elizabeth, for whom he was serving at Rudolf's court as a secret
political agent. The English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne
(who, incidentally, first used the word "cryptography" in English) related
that Dee's son, "Dr. Arthur Dee (speaking about his father's life in
Prague) told about . . . book containing nothing but hieroglyphicks,
which book his father bestowed much time upon, but I could not hear
that he could make it out." The comment may refer to this very
manuscript.
This is conjectural, however. What is certain is that Kircher deposited
the manuscript in the Jesuit Collegium Romanum, and that in 1912 an
American rare book dealer named Wilfred Voynich purchased it for an
undisclosed sum from the Jesuit school of Mondragone in Frascati, Italy.
Eager to read the manuscript, Voynich generously supplied
annaabi.ee 
