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The Voynich Manuscript

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The Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated book written in a script no one can read. It is held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University as MS 408.⁠[1] Its parchment has been radiocarbon-dated to 1404–1438.⁠[2] The book is named after Wilfrid Voynich, the book dealer who bought it in 1912.

Its pages show plants that have never been identified for certain, star charts, and small figures bathing in green pools. Since 1921 several people have announced a reading of the text; none has held up when tested on pages it was not built from.⁠[3]

Description

The manuscript has 102 leaves of calfskin parchment, gathered in 18 quires. Some leaves are missing and several fold out.⁠[1] The text runs to about 38,000 words, written left to right in a script of roughly two dozen distinct glyphs. Scholars divide the book by its pictures into six sections: herbal, astronomical, bathing, cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes.

Lisa Fagin Davis identified five scribes from their letterforms.⁠[4] In the 1970s Prescott Currier found two statistically distinct "languages", now called Currier A and B, which partly line up with the scribes.⁠[5] In 2026 Layfield and Davis argued that the book was made from single leaves and is no longer in its maker's order.⁠[6]

History

The earliest trace is a signature on the first page, erased and later recovered under ultraviolet light, of Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenec, a chemist at the court of Rudolf II in Prague.⁠[1] In 1639 the Prague alchemist Georg Baresch wrote to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome, asking for help reading it. In 1665 Johannes Marcus Marci sent the book to Kircher with a letter, still kept with it, which repeats a story that Rudolf II had paid 600 ducats for it.

The book stayed with the Jesuits for two centuries. Voynich bought it in 1912 from the Jesuit collection at the Villa Mondragone near Rome. The dealer H. P. Kraus gave it to Yale in 1969.⁠[1]

Timeline

TimelineUpdates automatically · nowMap
  1. 1404–1438The parchment is made
  2. 1608–1622Jakub Hořčický de Tepenec signs the first page
  3. 1639Georg Baresch writes to Athanasius Kircher, sending copied pages
  4. 1665–1666Johannes Marcus Marci sends the book to Kircher in Rome, with a letter
  5. 1680Kircher's library passes to the Collegio Romano
  6. 1870–1879Moved out of state hands to the Jesuits' Villa Mondragone
  7. 1912Wilfrid Voynich buys it from the Jesuits at Villa Mondragone
  8. 1921William Newbold announces a reading, later shown to rest on cracks in the ink
  9. 1961Anne Nill sells it to the dealer Hans P. Kraus
  10. 1969Kraus gives it to Yale; catalogued as Beinecke MS 408
  11. 2009Radiocarbon dating at the University of Arizona
  12. 2020The complete digital facsimile is published, free to all

Attempts to read it

William Newbold announced in 1921 that the text was a cipher by Roger Bacon, read from tiny strokes inside the letters. John Manly showed in 1931 that the strokes were cracks in the ink.⁠[7] The cryptologist William Friedman came to suspect an early artificial language.⁠[1]

Later work split between meaning and no meaning. Gordon Rugg showed in 2004 that text with similar features can be made with a table and a card grille.⁠[8] Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner proposed in 2020 that the scribes made words by copying and changing nearby words.⁠[9] Against that, keywords cluster by section much as they do in real texts,⁠[10] and a 2021 review of the linguistic evidence found word-level patterns consistent with meaningful text, even though the spelling is unlike any known language.⁠[3] In 2025 Michael Greshko showed that a hand cipher of the period could produce text with similar statistics.⁠[11]

Questions

3 of 23 questions are answered.

Answered: One answer is acceptedWhen was the parchment made?Answered: One answer is acceptedWhat order were the leaves in?Answered: One answer is acceptedHow many scribes wrote it?No evidence yet: Nothing has been tested yetWhere was it made, and in what milieu?No evidence yet: Nothing has been tested yetAre there records outside the text?
0
What kind of text is it?
7 answers0
Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedMost likely: a notation or memory system
Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedIs it a natural language?Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedIs it a cipher of a known language?Open: No answer is ahead yetIs it meaningless text from a procedure?Open: No answer is ahead yetIs it a constructed or notational language?Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedIs it a list, index or shorthand?
Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedWhat procedure reproduces its statistics?Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedWhat did the line and page add?
Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedWhat do the illustrations show?Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedHow do text and pictures relate?Open: No answer is ahead yetWho would have made and used it?
No evidence yet: Nothing has been tested yetDoes any reading survive held-out pages?Not settled: One answer is ahead but not confirmedDo earlier readings survive the evidence?

Artifacts

Every artifact is a copy of the book, or of something about it, with its own key and its distance from the object.

1fachys ykal ar ataiin shol shory2sory ckhar or y kair chtaiin shar3syaiir sheky or ykaiin shod cthoary4soiin oteey oteos roloty cthiar CPY08HW5FQ07411 · copy · click to copy Transcription2 steps from object Zandbergen–Landini ZL3b transliteration (EVA, IVTFF)IVTFF 2.0 Folio 1r CPY08HVA19M4BT5 · copy · click to copy Photo1 step from object Folio 1rBeinecke digital images · public domain Folio 68r CPY08HVAYK46XAM · copy · click to copy Photo1 step from object Folio 68rBeinecke digital images · public domain 68r, full size CPY08HVFH2M7ET5 · copy · click to copy Photo1 step from object 68r, full sizeBeinecke digital images · public domain Folio 78r CPY08HVB2ZR75F4 · copy · click to copy Photo1 step from object Folio 78rBeinecke digital images · public domain Folio 99r CPY08HVBB9C3Z9Z · copy · click to copy Photo1 step from object Folio 99rBeinecke digital images · public domain

References

  1. 1.Clemens, R. (ed.) 2016. The Voynich Manuscript. Yale University Press. SRC08JHN1NG6AMW
  2. 2.University of Arizona 2011. UA experts determine age of book 'nobody can read'. UA News. SRC08JJE7AR0ZE1
  3. 3.Bowern, C., Lindemann, L. 2021. The linguistics of the Voynich manuscript. Annual Review of Linguistics. SRC08JHTHEG6MSY
  4. 4.Davis, L. 2020. How many glyphs and how many scribes? Digital paleography and the Voynich manuscript. Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. SRC08JHRPVG4Z28
  5. 5.Currier, P. 1976. Some important new statistical findings. New Research on the Voynich Manuscript: Proceedings of a Seminar, 30 November 1976. SRC08JHQAX84PKW
  6. 6.Layfield, C., Davis, L. 2026. Singulion structure and the Voynich manuscript. Digital Medievalist. SRC08JHT2SR33NX
  7. 7.Manly, J. 1931. Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS. Speculum. SRC08JJENZG4AS3
  8. 8.Rugg, G. 2004. An elegant hoax? A possible solution to the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia. SRC08JHY6MG0DDD
  9. 9.Timm, T., Schinner, A. 2020. A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia. SRC08JHZ3Y07R9B
  10. 10.Montemurro, M., Zanette, D. 2013. Keywords and co-occurrence patterns in the Voynich manuscript: an information-theoretic analysis. PLoS ONE. SRC08JHX9B03EPJ
  11. 11.Greshko, M. 2025. The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich manuscript-like ciphertext. Cryptologia. SRC08JHZJJR0Z8T