Trying to decipher the manuscripts of a man who was himself one of the foremost decipherers of his era is a strange, if chastening, sensation, though not half as strange as what happens to the hero of a story called "Mr. Humphries and His Inheritance," who, on a similar quest, sits down in a library to toil over some papers.
Wilfrid Voynich was wrong that deciphering the manuscript would make it more valuable: the book's resistance to being read is what sets it apart.
"He is having fun with literature, and this is the Sir Walter Scott we know so well and love," said Alison Lumsden of Aberdeen University, who deciphered the manuscript with Gerard Carruthers of Glasgow University.
Unfortunately, Liszt, the composer of Sardanapalo, an opera inspired by Byron's verse drama on the subject, abandoned the project in 1852 after completing Act I, leaving 110 seemingly sketchy pages and 1,256 bars of music slumbering in a Weimar archive until the Cambridge musicologist David Trippett spent three years heroically deciphering the manuscript.
Scholars and scientists have sought to decipher the text since the manuscript was first discovered.
These editions have, however, occasionally received some criticism for the wrong interpretation or notation of Schubert's intentions, on issues such as deciphering the correct pitches from the manuscript, notating tremoli, discriminating between accent and decrescendo markings, and reconstructing missing bars.
Because of Timme's handwriting, the manuscript is difficult to decipher.
The aim of the manuscript was not to decipher key biological events in the induction of Tfh cell differentiation.
In the iron distribution map only the upper text is visible, again difficult to decipher because of the overlap of the recto and verso of the manuscript.
Père de Vaux presides over this, and there are only three scholars authorized to decipher and report on the manuscripts — J. T. Milik, a Polish Roman Catholic priest; Mr. John Allegro, of Manchester; and one American expert: last year Professor Cross, of Chicago, at the present time Monsignor Patrick W. Skehan, of the Catholic University of America.
