The Voynich Manuscript

In 1912 the Polish-born antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought a group of manuscripts from the Jesuits at the Villa Mondragone, near Frascati outside Rome. Among them was a small, unassuming volume written in a flowing script unlike any known alphabet. Its pages were crowded with colourful drawings: plants that cannot easily be identified, circular diagrams with stars and zodiac signs, groups of naked women in pools connected by pipes, and jars that resemble those used by apothecaries.

Tucked into the book was a letter written in 1665 or 1666 by Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague, sending it to the famous Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome, who had claimed to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. Marci reported that the book had once been bought by Emperor Rudolf II, a great collector of curiosities. A faint signature on the first page, visible under ultraviolet light, belongs to Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenec, a chemist at Rudolf’s court.

Voynich spent the rest of his life trying to discover the book’s author and meaning. After his death and that of his widow, the manuscript was sold to the dealer H. P. Kraus, who could not find a buyer and donated it to Yale in 1969. The manuscript was later examined by many experts in palaeography, botany and cryptography, and Voynich circulated photographs among scholars in the hope that someone would solve it.

In 2009 researchers at the University of Arizona carried out radiocarbon dating on samples of the vellum and found that the animal skins were prepared between 1404 and 1438. Analysis of the inks found materials consistent with the period, and most scholars think the text and pictures were added not long after the vellum was made. This rules out authorship by Roger Bacon, who died around 1292, and makes a seventeenth-century or modern forgery much less likely, though not strictly impossible.

The script consists of a small set of characters, written fluently with few corrections. Words repeat in patterns that resemble those of natural languages in some respects, for example in how often common words appear. Yet the text also has peculiar features, such as low variety in its words and the same words repeated several times in a row. Some researchers think it encodes a known language, others that it records an unknown language or invented writing system, and others that it is meaningless text designed to look like writing.

Some of the twentieth century’s greatest codebreakers tried and failed, including William Friedman and his team, who had broken Japanese ciphers. A detailed study for the US National Security Agency by Mary D’Imperio in 1978 summarised their efforts. The book remains unread. Researchers have also studied the drawings, comparing the plants with medieval herbals and the circular diagrams with astronomical and astrological manuscripts. Some details, such as the style of clothing and the castle walls on one fold-out page, have been compared with central European or northern Italian art of the fifteenth century, but none of these clues has led to a firm identification.

The first famous solution came in 1921, when the philosopher William Newbold claimed the book was written by Roger Bacon and recorded discoveries made with microscopes and telescopes. His method was later shown to depend on his own imagination, and in 1931 the scholar John Manly demonstrated that the microscopic marks Newbold read were simply cracks in the ink. Since then, many others have announced decipherments, identifying the text as an early form of Turkish, Hebrew, Latin abbreviations, a lost language or a women’s health manual. Each has failed to convince specialists, often because it cannot produce consistent readings across the whole book.

The hoax theory also has a long history. Some have suggested that the Elizabethan alchemist Edward Kelley, who visited Rudolf’s court, created the book to sell to the emperor, a theory now hard to reconcile with the early date of the vellum. Others proposed that Voynich himself forged it, which the radiocarbon dating and the Marci letter make unlikely.

Today the manuscript is fully digitised and freely available online, and a printed facsimile was published by Yale University Press in 2016. It appears in novels, games and puzzles, and attracts amateur and professional researchers alike, a real historical object whose meaning remains a genuine open question.