The Voynich Manuscript's documented history before the twentieth century is thin and partly reconstructed from a single seventeenth century letter found tucked inside it, linking the book to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague and later to the scholars Georg Baresch and Johannes Marcus Marci, who reportedly sent it to the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher in Rome. It surfaces again clearly only in 1912, when the antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid Voynich acquired it, along with other manuscripts, from the Jesuit-run Collegio Romano, apparently sold quietly to raise funds, and it is Voynich's own attempt to identify and sell the mysterious book that gave it his name and its modern fame.
After Voynich's death his widow retained the manuscript before eventually selling it, and it passed to the rare book dealer Hans P. Kraus in the 1960s, who catalogued it prominently and offered it for sale at a substantial price, but found no buyer willing to meet his terms over several years. Rather than continue holding unsold inventory, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale's Beinecke Library in 1969, a gift that finally gave the object a stable, permanent institutional home after decades moving between dealers and estates. Radiocarbon testing of its vellum in 2009 dated the material to the early fifteenth century, consistent with the manuscript's handwriting style and ruling out the popular theory that it was a later production specifically for Rudolf II's court, though it does not by itself explain what the text says or why it was written.