Wilfrid Michael Voynich (31 October 1865[1] – 19 March 1930), born Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, was a Polish revolutionary, British and American antiquarian and bibliophile, and the eponym of the Voynich manuscript.
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Michał Wojnicz was born in Telshi—a town in then Kovno Governorate, which was part of the Russian Empire, now it is Telšiai, a town in Lithuania—into a Polish-Lithuanian noble family. He was the son of a titular counsellor.[1]
In 1885, in Warsaw, Wojnicz joined Ludwik Waryński's revolutionary organization, Proletarjat. In 1886, after a failed attempt to free fellow-conspirators from the Warsaw Citadel who had been sentenced to death, he was arrested by Tsarist police and, in 1887, sent to penal servitude at Tunka.
In 1890 he escaped from Siberia and arrived in London, adopting as his first name his nom de guerre, Wilfryd. In 1893 he married a fellow-revolutionary, Ethel Lilian Boole, daughter of the famous British mathematician, George Boole.
With Stepniak, a fellow revolutionary, he founded the Society of Friends for a Free Russia in London.[2]
After the 1895 death of Stepniak in a railway crossing accident, the Voyniches (as they had anglicized their surname) ceased revolutionary activity. In 1898 Voynich opened a bookshop in London, followed by another in 1914 in New York. He was much involved with the handling of early books and wrote a number of catalogues and other texts on the subject.
Voynich died in New York in 1930.
The most famous of Voynich's possessions was a mysterious medieval manuscript which he had acquired in 1912 at the Villa Mondragone in Italy. It is written in an unknown script which several famous linguists and cryptologists have been unable to decrypt since the manuscript's first public presentation in 1915.