The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval codex written entirely in an unknown script and language that has never been deciphered. Its pages contain illustrations of unidentified plants, astronomical diagrams, apparent medical recipes, and images of nude women in strange pools. Despite over a century of analysis by professional and amateur cryptographers, including World War II codebreakers, the manuscript’s contents remain completely unknown.

The Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript consists of approximately 240 vellum pages, though some have been lost. Radiocarbon dating places the vellum’s creation between 1404 and 1438. The manuscript is written from left to right, with no apparent punctuation.

The text is written in an alphabet of approximately 20-30 distinct characters that do not correspond to any known writing system. Statistical analysis shows the text has characteristics consistent with a natural language, including word frequency patterns and letter distributions that follow Zipf’s law. However, no connection to any known language has been established.

The Illustrations

The manuscript’s illustrations fall into several categories. The “herbal” section shows plants that do not correspond to any known species. The “astronomical” section includes zodiac symbols and celestial diagrams. The “biological” section depicts nude women in interconnected pools or tubes. The “pharmaceutical” section shows what may be medicinal preparations.

None of these illustrations have been definitively identified. The plants are either fantastical creations, extreme stylizations of real plants, or species that have not been recognized.

Known History

The manuscript is named for Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. Letters found with the manuscript show it was owned by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor (1552-1612), and subsequently by alchemists and scholars in Prague.

Before Rudolf II, the manuscript’s history is unknown. Where it was created, by whom, and for what purpose are complete mysteries.

Decipherment Attempts

The Voynich Manuscript has attracted intense interest from cryptographers. William Friedman, who broke Japanese codes during World War II, spent decades studying it without success. Computer analysis has been applied repeatedly without producing readable text.

Numerous claimed solutions have been published, proposing the manuscript as encoded Latin, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Turkish, and various other languages. None of these solutions have been accepted by the academic community, as they generally produce nonsensical text or require arbitrary interpretation.

Theories

Major theories about the manuscript include:

It may be a genuine work in an undiscovered or private language, perhaps created by an isolated community or a single eccentric individual.

It may be an elaborate hoax, created to deceive a wealthy buyer like Rudolf II. However, the statistical properties of the text make this difficult—creating a meaningless text with natural language properties would require sophisticated knowledge.

It may be a coded text using a cipher that has not yet been broken.

It may be glossolalia—writing produced in a trance state without conscious meaning, yet displaying language-like patterns due to the linguistic structures embedded in the writer’s brain.

Assessment

The Voynich Manuscript represents one of the great unsolved mysteries of medieval studies. A genuine physical artifact, definitively dated to the early fifteenth century, contains text that no one has been able to read.

Whether it contains alchemical secrets, herbal knowledge, religious mysticism, or nothing at all remains unknown. The manuscript sits in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, beautiful and inscrutable, keeping whatever secrets it may hold.