Creative classroom: In ‘books of secrets,’ historian’s students find an unexpected past
One afternoon Nell Meosky ’14 was sitting at a table in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library with her classmates in the undergraduate seminar “Spies, Secrets, and Science.” She eagerly began to leaf through pages of a late medieval text, when an exclamation of “Wait!” by her professor, Paola Bertucci, made her take pause.
The text, Bertucci explained to her students, was the famous Voynich manuscript, an illustrated codex penned in an unknown writing system that has baffled scholars and fired the imaginations of people around the world. Carbon-dated to the early 15th century, the manuscript was acquired by the Beinecke Library in 1969, and Bertucci wanted her students to know that what they were seeing — and touching — is a rare treasure. (more…)