The Voynich Manuscript

Scholars divide the manuscript into sections by its pictures. The largest, the herbal section, shows plants with roots, leaves and flowers, most of which cannot be matched to real species. There are astronomical and cosmological diagrams, including circles of stars and zodiac-like figures, a “balneological” section of small nude women in pools and tubes, pages of jars and plant parts that look pharmaceutical, and a final section of short paragraphs marked with stars, sometimes called recipes.

Some pages fold out. At least 14 leaves are missing, so the book we have is incomplete.

In 2009 researchers at the University of Arizona radiocarbon-dated samples of the vellum to between 1404 and 1438. Tests later confirmed it is calfskin and that it was not scraped and reused. The ink could have been applied later than the skin was prepared, but most researchers think the book was written in the early fifteenth century.

The earliest confirmed owner is Georg Baresch, a seventeenth-century alchemist in Prague, who wrote to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome in 1639 asking for help reading it. After Baresch's death the book passed to the physician Jan Marek Marci, who sent it to Kircher with a letter dated 1665 or 1666. That letter repeats a story that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had once paid 600 ducats for it. No record of that purchase has been found.

The book then disappeared into Jesuit libraries for about two centuries, until Voynich bought it in 1912 from a Jesuit collection kept at the Villa Mondragone near Rome.

The American codebreaker William Friedman and his teams worked on it for years without success. In 2019 a widely reported claim that it was written in a “proto-Romance” language was rejected by medieval specialists.

Statistical studies show that the text behaves in some ways like a natural language: word frequencies follow the same pattern as real languages. In other ways it is odd. It is unusually repetitive, and some words repeat two or three times in a row.

After Voynich's death the book passed through his wife Ethel and her friend Anne Nill to the dealer Hans P. Kraus, who could not sell it and donated it to Yale in 1969. It is now Beinecke MS 408, and the whole manuscript can be viewed online.