The 15th century Voynich Manuscript (also known as the Cipher Manuscript) is considered the most mysterious text in the world, and we seem no closer to decoding it that when it was first purchased by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in the late 16th century. The Emperor purchased the work—likely from the English astrologer John Dee—for 600 gold ducats. he was under the impression that it was the work of English philosopher Roger Bacon. Dee’s son described that his father owned “a booke…containing nothing butt Hieroglyphicks”.
The Voynich Manuscript (15th Century). Image via Yale University Library.
The codex contains roughly 240 pages of botanical drawings, astronomical and astrological fold-outs, images of women bathing and intreracting with strange tubes, cosmological medallions, pharmaceutical diagrams, and a section of texts which have been interpreted as recipes with star-like markings in the margins.
The manuscript is written in a script now referred to as “Voynichese”, which no one has managed to decode. Several attempts have been made to match-up letters in the manuscript with Latin letters, but other interpretations identify different numbers of letters, and it may well be the case that the characters cannot be directly translated in this way.
The Voynich Manuscript (15th Century). Image via Yale University Library.
The manuscript passed through many hands: after Rudolf II it was left to his personal physician Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (whose signature has been spotted on one page under UV light), who left it to the antique collector Georg Baresch. It then went to the scientist Johannes Marcus Marci, then to the German polymath Athanasius Kircher, before the manuscript spent more than 200 years in Rome. Kircher sent the manuscript to the Collegio Romano, where it came under the care of the priest Peter Jan Beckx, at a Jesuit College.
The Polish-American bookseller Wilfred M. Voynich—after whom the manuscript is now named—purchased it in 1912. Voynich moved to the U.S. in 1919, hoping to sell the manuscript for a large sum. Unfortunately, without any academic investigation it proved difficult to sell, so Voynich began seeking out assistance to decipher the book. This apparently raised suspicion and the F.B.I. investigated the bookseller as a potential spy. The first theory on the subject of the manuscript came from the American philosopher William Romaine Newbold, who believed that the book had been written by Roger Bacon, a theory which was publicly savaged after Newbold’s death.
The Voynich Manuscript (15th Century). Image via Yale University Library.
After Voynich’s death in 1931, the book passed to his wife Ethel, then to his secretary, Anne Nill. She sold the book to the Austrian book dealer H. P. Kraus in 1962, who in turn gave the book to Yale University’s Beinecke Library in 1969. The Library has uploaded a scanned version of the manuscript to their digital collections page.
The Voynich Manuscript (15th Century). Image via Yale University Library.
New theories about the manuscript continue to trickle in, and it has become a much coveted mystery for cryptographers around the world. In 2019 three new ideas came out, one from anthropologist Tim King, who proposed that the manuscript was written in a lost Roman shorthand using a Latin dialect, and one from the academic Gerard Cheshire who believed that Voynichese was a mixture of languages he named “proto-Romance”. The University of Bristol swiftly retracted Cheshire’s paper after criticisms from other academics about his theories. In 2019 the computer scientist Torstenn Timm co-authored his second paper on the manuscript, suggesting that the characters may have been randomly generated as a medieval hoax. Other possible languages include phonetically written medieval Turkish, and anagrammatic Hebrew.
The date of the parchment used in the book has been dated to between 1404 and 1438 (with a total of 14 calfskins used to create the manuscript’s vellum), and the ink has been tested and proven to be medieval, dispelling any forgery speculations. But, will we ever know for sure what the Voynich Manuscript really says? For now, it remains a mystery.
The Voynich Manuscript (15th Century). Image via Yale University Library.
The Hunt explores art and ancient relics that are—alas!—lost to time. From the Ark of the Covenant to Cleopatra’s tomb, these legendary treasures have long captured the imaginations of historians and archaeologists, even if they remain buried under layers of sand, stone, and history.