The Voynich Manuscript: the book no one can read

Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds, under the shelfmark MS 408, one of the most studied and least understood volumes in history. It is the so-called Voynich Manuscript: some two hundred and forty vellum pages covered in a script that no one has ever managed to read, accompanied by drawings of unknown plants, astral diagrams and female figures bathing in pools. For over a century cryptographers, linguists and historians have wrestled with its text, without any agreed result.

From the court of Prague to Villa Mondragone

The documented history of the manuscript begins in the seventeenth century. A letter of 1665 or 1666, written by the Prague physician Johannes Marcus Marci to the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher and found together with the codex, reports a rumour: Emperor Rudolf II was said to have bought it for six hundred ducats. The information is second-hand and is not confirmed by other documents. More solid is the presence, on the first page, of the faded name of Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec, a chemist in the emperor's service, legible under ultraviolet light.

Before Marci the volume had belonged to the Prague alchemist Georg Baresch, who had already written to Kircher hoping for help in deciphering it. Having passed into Jesuit collections, it ended up in Villa Mondragone at Frascati, where in 1912 it was bought by the antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, after whom it is named. After various changes of hand, the book dealer Hans P. Kraus donated it to Yale in 1969.

What it contains

Scholars divide the codex into sections according to its images. The largest part is herbal: each page shows a plant, often impossible to identify with certainty. There follow astronomical and astrological diagrams, some with recognisable signs of the zodiac; a so-called balneological section, with naked figures in pools linked by pipes; a large fold-out sheet with rosettes; pages of containers resembling apothecary jars beside roots and leaves; and finally long pages of text with small stars in the margin.

The script flows regularly, without hesitation or obvious corrections. It uses a few dozen recurring signs and shows internal rules: certain characters appear only at the beginning or end of words, and some words are repeated several times in a row, something unusual in natural languages. This combination of order and strangeness is what makes the text so hard to classify.

Dating and hypotheses

In 2009 a team from the University of Arizona submitted the vellum to radiocarbon dating, placing the preparation of the skins between 1404 and 1438. The result ruled out the attribution to Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century Franciscan proposed by Voynich, and made theories of a modern forgery unlikely, although in principle someone could have written on vellum that was already old.

The hypotheses fall into three broad families. Some believe the text encrypts a known language, others that it transcribes a natural language in an invented alphabet, others still that it is a meaningless sequence produced to impress a buyer. Among the many who have worked on it was the American cryptologist William Friedman. No proposed reading has so far won the agreement of specialists.

Today the manuscript can be consulted in full in digital reproduction, and in 2016 a printed facsimile produced with Yale was published. Its fame springs from this very paradox: it is one of the most accessible books in the world, which anyone can leaf through, and at the same time one of the few that no one can read.