Mysterious Voynich manuscript decoded?

Page from Voynich Manuscript
Source: wikimedia commons

Last week I spot in Amazon webshop  BBC Focus Magazine available for subscription and start trial period. Inside first issue I've found interesting article about latest attempt to decode mysterious Voynich manuscript.
The name of this manuscript comes from name of a Polish revolutionary, later British antiquarian and bibliophile Wilfrid M. Voynich. He found and bought this book on 1912 at the Villa Mondragone in Italy.

"Its 240 parchment pages are filled with an intricate script and page after page of colored illustrations showing plants, patterns of stars and groupings of squat, naked nymphs. Since its purchase in Italy in 1912 by Polish-American book collector Wilfred Voynich, the book has been an enigma." Source: The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, BBC Focus Magazine 5/2014

Wilfrid Voynich claim that book must be Roger Bacon work which than have series of notable owner through ages:

"Voynich believed that his find was the work of Roger Bacon, the 13th Century friar, who wrote copiously on science. According to Voynich, the book reached the hands of John Dee, who sold it to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II for 600 ducats (£200,000 in relative earnings.) The claim was based on a letter dated 1665, found with the manuscript." Source: The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, BBC Focus Magazine 5/2014

Wilfrid M. Voynich
(born in Poland as
Wilfrid Michal Habdank-Wojnicz)
Source: wikimedia commons

Roger Bacon as manuscript author isn't now taken under consideration due to radiocarbon dating on first half of XV century, while he lived 200 hundreds years earlier. There is various theories about author of manuscript, below list cited after website dedicated on Voynich manuscript researches:

• Someone from a Cathar cult of Isis followers, as suggested by Levitov. Well disproven by Guy and Stallings.

• Anthony Askham, writing a coded almanac, as suggested by L.C. Strong. The name of Askham derives from an otherwise incredible decryption of the MS.

• John Dee and/or Edward Kelly as suggested by many and most strongly supported by Brumbaugh and more recently Rugg. This is essentially out of the question as it concerns Dee and as for Kelley, there is also no evidence to support it.

• A designer of an early form of a synthetic language, as suggested by Friedman and Tiltman. This cannot be disproved, but is chronologically quite challenging.

• Possibly a missionary to the Far East, in an early attempt to convert Chinese (or another oriental language) to an alphabetic script. This theory is based on certain peculiar text statistics and is by no means disproved, but there is difficulty with the fact that the entire MS has a Western European look. A specific connection (e.g. encoding) with any specific oriental language has also not yet been proposed.

• Wilfrid Voynich creating a modern fake. Disproved by the recent radiocarbon dating of the MS, and the earlier discovery of additional letters referring to the MS. 

Source: The Voynich Manuscript

Similar to various theories about manuscript author there were numerous attempt to manuscript decoding, the last one was announced in February 2014 by Stephen Bax, professor of Applied Linguistics in University of Bedfordshire:

"Like many before him, Professor Bax picked out the initial words on the pages showing plant illustrations. Many of these are words used infrequently elsewhere in the text, suggesting they may correspond to the proper names of the plants. One illustration resembles Centaurea, a thistle-like genus of flowering plants. Using a technique similar to that used in decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs, Bax matched letters to the word kantairon, an approximation to a medieval version of the plant's name, encouraged by the appearance of an almost identical word, differing only in the final letter, on the page. Another clue came from a kind of zodiac, showing a wheel with collections of stars between its spokes. Bax identified a group of seven stars with the Pleiades, hoping that an adjacent word referred to the constellation of Taurus." Source: The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, BBC Focus Magazine 5/2014

Since then Stephen Bax theory already got critical (as usual) opinion from other scientist - article refers to Dr Gordon Rugg of Keele University. Stephen Bax continuing his work however unless whole manuscript will be translated it will remain unsolved mystery.

Most recent information are available on professor website. Book is now in possession of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Primary sources:

[1] The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, BBC Focus Magazine 5/2014
[2] The Voynich Manuscript website

Secondary sources:
[3] New clue to Voynich manuscript mystery, Guardian
[4] World Mysteries

Videos:
[5] The Book That Can't Be Read - Voynich Manuscript, History Channel
[6] Voynich - a provisional, partial decoding of the Voynich script, Stephan Bax lecture