The history of ownership of book is patchy. It seems to have gathered dust on the shelves of a Jesuit college for at least two hundred years, but the trail leads back to Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia during the 16th century. Rudolf was a dabbler and a collector. He was interested in astronomy and alchemy, he collected plants and animals and well, any oddities that took his fancy. The Voynich manuscript seems like just the kind of thing that would have appealed to him. But how did he come by it?