Voynich Manuscript, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1912 a book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich went through a collection of old volumes being sold off by the Jesuits at the Villa Mondragone, near Frascati outside Rome. One of them was a small, unremarkable-looking book of vellum pages, filled with drawings of plants, naked women in pools and wheels of stars. Every line of text was written in an alphabet nobody had seen before.
More than a century later, that is still where things stand. The book now lives at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as MS 408, and anyone can page through high-resolution scans of it online. People have. Thousands of them, including some of the best codebreakers of the 20th century. Nobody has produced a reading that other specialists accept.
I have covered a lot of "unsolved" mysteries for this site, and most of them turn out to be solved, or at least boringly explained, once you read past the headlines. This one does not.
What is actually on the pages
The manuscript runs to roughly 240 pages, some of them large foldouts. Researchers usually sort it into sections by the pictures, because the pictures are the only part anyone can follow.
The biggest section looks like a herbal, the kind of plant book medieval readers used to identify medicinal species. The trouble is that most of the plants do not match anything botanists recognize with confidence. Some look like composites, with the roots of one plant and the leaves of another. After that come circular diagrams with suns, moons and what appear to be zodiac signs, then the strangest part: pages of small nude female figures sitting in pools or tubs connected by tubes, which researchers call the "balneological" section for lack of a better word. The book ends with drawings of jars and plant parts, and long blocks of text marked with small stars.
The script itself is fluent. There are no crossings-out to speak of, and the hand moves the way a practiced writer's does. Whoever wrote it was not inventing each letter as they went.
How old it is and who owned it
A page from the bathing section of the Voynich Manuscript, with small figures in green pools linked by pipes and dense lines of script (Voynich Manuscript, Beinecke Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
For a long time one popular theory said Voynich forged the whole thing himself. Science closed that door in 2009, when a team at the University of Arizona radiocarbon dated samples of the vellum to between about 1404 and 1438. That dates the animal skin, not the ink, but nobody seriously argues that someone kept blank vellum for a century before using it.
The ownership trail is patchy but real. A letter tucked inside the book, written in 1665 or 1666 by the Prague physician Johannes Marcus Marci, sends it to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome. Marci passes on a story he had heard that Emperor Rudolf II once paid 600 ducats for it. That is hearsay, and Marci says so. A faint signature on the first page, readable under ultraviolet light, belongs to Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec, a chemist who worked at Rudolf's court, which at least puts the book in the right city.
After Voynich died in 1930 the manuscript passed through his widow's estate and was eventually bought by the dealer Hans P. Kraus, who could not find a buyer at the price he wanted. He gave it to Yale in 1969.
The people who tried to break it
The first famous attempt went badly. In 1921 William Romaine Newbold, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, announced that the book was the work of the 13th-century friar Roger Bacon and that, read properly, it described microscopes and telescopes centuries early. His method depended on microscopic "shorthand" marks he believed he saw in the ink. After his death, the medievalist John Manly showed in 1931 that the marks were just cracks in drying ink. The Bacon theory has also run into the radiocarbon date, which is about 150 years too late for him.
Then the professionals took over. William Friedman, the cryptanalyst who led the team that broke Japan's diplomatic "Purple" cipher before Pearl Harbor, ran informal study groups on the manuscript in the 1940s and kept working on it for decades. He never cracked it. In the 1970s Prescott Currier, another veteran American codebreaker, noticed that the text falls into two distinct "languages" with different word statistics, now called Currier A and Currier B. More recently the paleographer Lisa Fagin Davis has argued that the handwriting belongs to five different scribes, which makes a lone hoaxer harder to picture.
Language, cipher or hoax
Every theory has a real problem, and I think that is the honest summary.
If it is a natural language written in an invented alphabet, it is a strange one. Some words repeat two or three times in a row, and the text has less variety from letter to letter than most European languages. If it is a cipher, it would have to be one that produces those odd patterns, and simple substitution ciphers of the period do not. If it is a meaningless hoax, it is a remarkably consistent one: the word frequencies follow the same broad pattern found in real languages, which is hard to fake by hand (though in 2004 the British researcher Gordon Rugg showed that a grille-and-table method available at the time could generate text with some of the same features).
The confident announcements keep coming anyway. In 2017 a widely shared article claimed the text was abbreviated Latin about women's health; specialists picked it apart within days. In 2019 a paper in the journal Romance Studies argued for a lost "proto-Romance" language, and the University of Bristol, where the author was a research associate, distanced itself from the claim after criticism from other scholars. I would treat the next "Voynich solved" headline the same way. It may be the one, but the base rate is not encouraging.
How to look at it yourself
The best thing about this mystery is that the evidence is not locked away. Yale's Beinecke Library has put a full digital copy online, free, and Yale University Press published a printed facsimile in 2016 for anyone who wants it on paper. Wikimedia Commons also hosts the page images, which is where the pictures on this page come from.
If you do spend an evening with it, start with the herbal pages and try to name the plants before reading anyone else's guesses. Then look at the star diagrams, where a few month names were added later in a different hand and in a readable script. Somebody, a few generations after the scribes, apparently tried to use the book as a calendar (or at least labelled it like one), which is more than the rest of us have managed.
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