A page in the Voynich manuscript can look almost familiar. A plant spreads its leaves above a cluster of roots. Beside it run lines of small, carefully formed characters. An herbal normally lets a reader move between the plant, its name and an account of its uses. Here the drawing survives, the writing is plainly visible, and the connection between them remains out of reach.
Listen to “Unreadable Book” on Spreaker.The book before Voynich
The manuscript bears the name of the rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who bought it from a Jesuit college near Rome in 1912. Its history extends much further back. In the seventeenth century it belonged to Georgius Barschius and later passed to Johannes Marcus Marci. Marci sent it to Athanasius Kircher with a letter that still accompanies the volume.
After Voynich’s death, the book passed through several hands. Bookseller H. P. Kraus donated it to Yale in 1969. Today the Beinecke Library holds it as MS 408. Between these documented transfers lie centuries of attempted readings and an earlier question that remains open: who first set down those characters?
Dating the pages
Radiocarbon measurements on samples from four parchment leaves place the animal skin in the early fifteenth century. The reported combined range was 1404–1438. The test dated the writing surface. It supplied no date for a particular inscription and identified neither a language nor a writer.
That finding helps assess one early suggestion, that the thirteenth-century scholar Roger Bacon wrote the volume. He lived long before the animals that supplied these sampled leaves. The dating rules out his having written on them. It leaves ample room for questions about when the parchment was prepared and when the text was added.
What the drawings offer
Pages with plants give way to circular astronomical or astrological diagrams. Other pages depict figures bathing and vessels beside roots and plant parts. Yale also describes sections of text marked by small star-like signs. Terms such as “pharmaceutical” and “recipes” are scholars’ descriptions of what the illustrations resemble. They do not translate a caption or identify the purpose of a particular passage.
The script contains repeating forms. Their regularity has encouraged work in linguistics and cryptography, but regularity alone cannot establish a particular grammar, language or cipher. A proposed reading would have to work beyond a favored word or picture and allow other researchers to reproduce the result across the manuscript.
Has anyone read it?
No decipherment has gained general acceptance. The book’s most familiar features still capture the difficulty: a reader can follow the edge of a leaf, count the symbols alongside it and turn to another page where some of those symbols recur. Knowing how the marks sit together is still a long way from knowing what the writer meant.
Research Sources
The following resources were consulted to verify and update this article.
- Yale Beinecke Library, The Beinecke Cipher Manuscript — Custodian’s description of the illustrations, script, ownership and acquisition.
- René Zandbergen, Radiocarbon Dating of the Voynich Manuscript — Reproduces the four parchment sample measurements and explains the combined early fifteenth-century range.
- HISTORY, The Mysterious Contents of the Voynich Manuscript — Reporting on the volume’s early provenance, Roger Bacon attribution and continuing uncertainty about the text.
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