The Voynich Manuscript, the Illustrated Book No One Can Read

In Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library there is a codex catalogued as MS 408. It has about two hundred and forty pages of vellum, is densely illustrated and is written in an alphabet that no one has ever managed to decipher with certainty. It is the Voynich manuscript, perhaps the most enigmatic book in the world, and its history is a tangle of collectors, emperors, Jesuits and antiquarian booksellers.

A bookseller, a villa and a letter

The manuscript takes its name from Wilfrid Voynich, an antiquarian bookseller of Polish origin, who bought it in 1912 together with other volumes from a Jesuit library kept at Villa Mondragone, near Frascati. Inserted in the codex was a letter of 1665 or 1666 written by the Prague physician Johannes Marcus Marci to the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, to whom he was sending the book in the hope that he could read it.

In the letter Marci reported a piece of news he had heard from others: Emperor Rudolf II was said to have paid six hundred ducats for the manuscript. On the first leaf, moreover, ultraviolet photographs revealed an erased signature of Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenec, a chemist and pharmacist in Rudolf's service. These clues place the book in Prague at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but say nothing certain about its origin.

What the pages show

Scholars divide the manuscript into sections according to its illustrations. The largest is the botanical one, with drawings of plants that for the most part do not correspond to recognisable species. Then come an astronomical or astrological section, with circular diagrams and some signs of the zodiac; a so-called balneological section, with female figures immersed in pools connected by pipes; a section with containers resembling apothecary jars and fragments of plants; and finally pages of text alone.

The writing flows regularly, without obvious corrections, and shows repetitive patterns that have attracted the attention of linguists and cryptographers. During the twentieth century experts in military codes also worked on it, such as the American William Friedman, without reaching a shared solution. In recent years computer-based statistical analyses have also produced interesting but contradictory results, which do not allow us to establish whether the text has a meaning at all.

Dating and hypotheses

In 2009 a radiocarbon analysis carried out at the University of Arizona dated the vellum to between about 1404 and 1438. The result concerns the support, not necessarily the writing, but it makes unlikely the theories that attributed the book to Roger Bacon, who died in the thirteenth century, or to a twentieth-century forger. The inks and pigments are compatible with a fifteenth-century origin.

Hypotheses about its content remain extremely numerous: a natural language written in an invented alphabet, a cipher, an artificial language, a medical or alchemical treatise, even an elaborate hoax of the period. No proposal has so far convinced the scholarly community. After Voynich's death the codex passed through various hands and in 1969 it was donated to Yale by the bookseller Hans Peter Kraus.

The Voynich manuscript, which can be consulted in full online, continues to be studied by specialists and enthusiasts. Whatever it contains, it perfectly embodies the fascination of the secret book: a concrete object, dated and precisely described, that guards a message still out of reach. For the history of the book it is also an exemplary case of how provenance, materials and images can be reconstructed rigorously even when the text remains silent.