Imagine a small volume of just over two hundred pages, modest in size, entirely covered with enigmatic drawings and a script that no one has ever managed to decipher. Among its illustrations, at times grotesque, are impossible plants, organisms that belong to no known botany, and female figures immersed in intricate systems of tubes and basins, as if suspended within a logic that eludes all interpretation. At times, the manuscript appears to evoke an ancient and improbable cosmogony, or from the fevered dream of a science fiction writer. And yet, this codex truly exists. It dates back to the fifteenth century; its author is unknown, and its contents remain undeciphered to this day. It is the Voynich manuscript, which the medievalist Robert Brumbaugh described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”1.
The origins of the Voynich manuscript
The Voynich manuscript, composed of 204 parchment folios made from calfskin and measuring a modest 22 × 16 cm, is preserved at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Now fully digitized and freely accessible online, the codex remains an unsolved challenge for cryptographers and philologists around the world, a kind of linguistic “Everest”, whose summit is as fascinating as it is inaccessible.
The manuscript takes its name from the bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, who merely had the merit of acquiring it from the Jesuit college of Villa Mondragone in Frascati. Voynich immediately recognized the unusual nature of the object and even considered returning it. However, an unexpected discovery convinced him to keep the mysterious book. Among its pages, he found a letter from the rector of the University of Prague, Johannes Marcus Marci, dated 19 August 1665 and addressed to the renowned Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, perhaps in the hope that he might be able to decipher it. Kircher was indeed one of the great polymaths of his time and was known for his interest in esotericism and alchemical sciences. According to the letter, the manuscript had once been in the possession of Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg.
Description and contents of the book
A preliminary analysis of the Voynich manuscript reveals several evident features. First of all, the volume is incomplete, as at least 14 pages are missing, having been torn out and lost. The text, written in an unknown language, shows a marked syllabic repetition. it is not uncommon to find repeated words occurring consecutively of the same word even three or four times, a linguistic phenomenon that is difficult to interpret using known analytical frameworks. On this issue, we have two main hypotheses, both plausible:
- the manuscript may be written in a cipher, an assumption that has generated numerous attempts at decryption;
- alternatively, it may be a forgery or an erudite game, devoid of any real meaning.
We will return to both interpretations later. As for the figurative illustrations, the codex has traditionally been divided into five distinct sections, based on the subjects depicted2.
1. In the “botanical” section (1r–66v), there is an abundance of images of both real and fantastical plants.
2. In the “astronomical” section (67r–73v), we can observe depictions of astral calendars.
3. In the “biological” section (75r–85r), female figures appear to be bathing in large basins connected by pipes.
4. In the “pharmaceutical” section (86v–102v), we can see vials, flasks, and plant roots.
5. In the final section, from page 103r onward, which resembles an index, no images appear except for a few small stars.
The dating of the manuscript
The dating of the manuscript also remains controversial. The only certain historical element concerns one of its early owners: Jacobus da Tepence3. An infrared analysis has in fact revealed his signature, later erased for unknown reasons. It is known that behind this name stood the alchemist Jakub Hořčický, a trusted servant of Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg. Since Hořčický died in 1622, the codex must necessarily predate that year.
In February 2011, a radiocarbon-14 analysis placed the origin of the Voynich manuscript between 1404 and 14384. However, scholars conducted the examination solely on samples of parchment and not on the ink. The dating therefore refers to the physical support of the volume, without allowing any certainty regarding the time when the text itself was written. An apparently anachronistic element further complicates the picture: one of the illustrations in the “botanical” section resembles the common sunflower. Yet this plant was introduced into Europe only after the discovery of America in 1492.
Is the Voynich manuscript an encrypted codex?
It would be impossible to reconstruct the entire history of the numerous attempts at decipherment that, over time, have sought to shed light on the Voynich manuscript. Internationally renowned experts such as Herbert Yardley, known for having broken German codes during the First World War, or John Manly, credited with deciphering the Waberski cipher, and even the most advanced electronic computers, have failed in their attempts to interpret it.
In general, many scholars believe that the volume possesses an internal coherence, or that it nonetheless conceals a meaning. Some support the hypothesis of a ciphered text; others suggest that it may be written in a real language that has not yet been identified. Among the more intriguing theories is the idea that the manuscript combines two distinct writing systems and may be the result of multiple authors5.
Attempts at decryption
A survey of the main attempts at deciphering the Voynich manuscript is presented here, without any claim to completeness.
- 1921. William Newbold, a professor of medieval philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, proposed that Roger Bacon was the author of the manuscript. Thus, the text would have been written in an unusual form of Latin.
- Starting in the 1940s, two famous cryptographers, Joseph Martin Feely and Leonell C. Strong, used the substitution decipherment technique in an attempt to obtain a coherent Latin text. The study, however, was unsuccessful.
- 1945. Physician Leonell Strong claimed to have translated a passage of the manuscript describing a contraceptive method.
- 1945. William Friedman established the Voynich Manuscript Study Group with the aim of shedding light on this indecipherable mystery. The research stalled without success after numerous attempts at decipherment. Friedman therefore hypothesized that the author of the manuscript might have written it in a philosophical or symbolic language.
- 1978. John Stojko, an amateur philologist, claimed to have identified the language of the Voynich manuscript: it would be Ukrainian with the vowels removed6.
- 1987. Physicist Leo Levitov argued that the text was the work of the Cathars, composed in a medieval Central European dialect7. The volume would constitute a manual for ritual suicide.
- 2014. Stephen Bax, a linguistics professor at the University of Bedfordshire, claimed to have identified ten meaningful words. The text would have been written in an extinct Caucasian dialect8.
- 2018. The Ardiç family (Ahmet Ardiç, Alp Erkan Ardiç, Ozan Ardiç et al.) claims to have deciphered 30% of the code. The language of the Voynich manuscript would be Old Turkish, written in a phonetic alphabet, and the volume nothing less than an early encyclopedia9.
Is the Voynich Manuscript a Renaissance forgery?
Not a small number of scholars interpret the Voynich manuscript as the work of a forger. This hypothesis is based on computational analyses. In 1976, William Ralph Bennett highlighted the relative simplicity and low entropy of the text. In other words, the manuscript does not appear to contain errors, neither grammatical nor orthographic. This is a rather unusual circumstance for a text with meaningful content10.
Computer scientist and psychologist Gordon Rugg proposed in 2004 a possible explanation for the method used to compose the Voynich manuscript11. In his study, Rugg used the so-called Cardan grille – a device devised around 1550 – to generate random syllabic sequences, producing a text strikingly similar in structure to the mysterious manuscript. This reconstruction would support the hypothesis, also advanced by Robert Brumbaugh, that the Voynich codex may be a Renaissance forgery. Rugg himself suggests that it was created by the alleged forgers Edward Kelley and John Dee, with the intent of deceiving Rudolf II of Habsburg. The emperor is said to have paid six hundred Venetian ducats for the volume. This was a considerable sum, equivalent today to roughly one hundred thousand euros. According to this theory, Kelley and Dee allegedly convinced the ruler by passing the manuscript off as a work by the philosopher Roger Bacon.
Notes
- R. S. Brumbaugh, The world’s most mysterious manuscript, Londra, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977. ↩︎
- R. Zandbergen, The origin of the Voynich Manuscript, 2016. ↩︎
- D. Jackson, The Marci letter found inside the Voynich Manuscript, 2015. ↩︎
- D. Stolte, Experts determine age of book ‘nobody can read, 2011. ↩︎
- E. Friedman, The Most Mysterious Manuscript. – Still an Enigma, Washington Post, 1962. ↩︎
- R. Zandbergen, Voynich Manuscript – History of research of the Manuscript, 2016. ↩︎
- D. Stallings, Catharism, Levitov, and the Voynich Manuscript, 1998. ↩︎
- S. Bax, A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script, 2014. ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6keMgLmFEk. ↩︎
- R. Bennett, Scientific and Engineering Problem Solving with the Computer, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976. ↩︎
- G. Rugg, World’s most mysterious book may be a hoax, a cura di J. Whitfield, Nature, 2003. ↩︎
