Some medieval books can’t be read by anyone, and one of them has become almost a trademark of the genre: the Voynich manuscript, kept at Yale University and dated to the 15th century. It has inspired novels and theories of every kind. Specialists often place another volume right behind it on the list of enigmas, […]

For decades, one question has nagged at specialists in ancient Mexico: did Teotihuacan — the city that dominated central Mexico from roughly the first to the sixth century AD, with a population that may have reached 125,000 — actually have a writing system, or were its symbols just decorative emblems? The stakes of that question […]

Galileo Galilei is remembered for pointing a simple two-lens tube at the sky and changing astronomy forever. What he is not remembered for is a four-lens telescope built more than a decade before historians thought such instruments existed — and yet that is exactly what a manuscript unearthed in Spain’s National Library now suggests he […]

In 1648, as Swedish troops looted Prague Castle at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, someone carried off among the spoils a volume that weighed 75 kilos and required two people to move. It was a book, the largest surviving illuminated manuscript of the entire Middle Ages, an object so disproportionate for its time […]