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Some people still think it’s a medieval hoax. Why?
The meaning of the cryptic text has eluded scholars for centuries. Their latest efforts include computational analyses seeking new insights into the medieval enigma.
The 15th century Voynich manuscript has puzzled scholars and confounded attempts to decipher it for centuries. Its 200-odd pages contain dozens of colorful illustrations of plants, astrological diagrams and naked female figures bathing in elaborately plumbed pools of green water.
The manuscript takes its name from Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish-born antiquarian who acquired and publicized it in the early 20th century. Some scholars have argued that the text is gibberish, the document an elaborate hoax. Others have variously claimed that the underlying language is Latin, or one of the Romance languages or Hebrew.
The manuscript now resides in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. “It’s surprisingly small, a bit bigger than a paperback,” says Yale linguist Claire Bowern. It appears to have five main sections, she says. The section on plants is the longest, making up just over half of the manuscript. The astrological section includes zodiac charts and depictions of the sun and moon. The section with the bathing nymphs is often called the balneological section, a reference to the science of baths and bathing.
Seeing the manuscript in person got Bowern thinking: Even though her main research focus is on documenting endangered Indigenous languages in Australia (where she’s from), perhaps some of the statistical methods, software and approaches that she and other linguists use to study and compare languages could be used to study the Voynich manuscript.
Stranger still, the manuscript is not written in any known script or language. If it’s written in code, no one has cracked it, though many have tried. In 2018, a pair of researchers, citing the apparent similarity of some of the manuscript’s plant illustrations to the flora of Central America, claimed that the manuscript was produced by the ancient Aztecs. None of these claims has gained widespread acceptance.
The mystery surrounding the Voynich manuscript has inspired novels, cameo appearances in popular TV shows and video games, and even a symphony — which debuted at Yale in 2017, along with an exhibit Bowern attended with a couple of her students.
A “pharmaceutical” section depicts what may be herbal remedies — plant roots alongside medicine bottles — and a fifth section, unillustrated, has blocks of text demarcated with little stars.
The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript
Do we know where the manuscript came from or who created it?
No, not at all. We know that the manuscript was in Prague in the early 1600s. And from there it went to the library of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, and presumably stayed there until it ended up in a Jesuit archives outside Rome, where Wilfrid Voynich found it in 1911 or 1912.
Voynich himself shrouded the manuscript in mystery. He was never clear in his lifetime about where it came from. He said he found it in a castle, but that seems like he was trying to be unclear about where he got it.
Was he trying to increase the price he could get by creating an air of mystery around it? Or what was he up to?
Partly that, and also it’s not quite clear whether he obtained the manuscript totally above board. He received a number of manuscripts from the Jesuit archives, and it’s not quite clear whether they knew that this manuscript was part of it, or whether the person who was selling the manuscript had the authority to do so.
Is there any chance he created the manuscript himself?
I’m pretty comfortable saying this is an early 15th century object. We get that from the carbon dating of the parchment, which puts it between 1404 and 1438. The type of ink is typical of what was used in that time period, and the clothing of the figures in the illustrations and so on are all consistent with that time period. Of course, it could be a copy of even earlier material, just as we have modern paperbacks of Shakespeare but the plays themselves go back hundreds of years.
Why would someone in those days create a ciphered manuscript?
I think people in the medieval period probably acted from similar sorts of motivations to people these days. So, why do people people encipher things in general? Either to to hide it from people who shouldn’t see it, or to create some sort of in-group solidarity type of thing.
One theory that’s come up, which I’m not sure I buy into, is that this was witchcraft or it was a manuscript that contained information that the Catholic Church didn’t want to get out. But that strikes me rather more as a Dan Brown scenario than something that might have actually happened.
I think people in the medieval period probably acted from similar sorts of motivations to people these days. So, why do people people encipher things in general? Either to to hide it from people who shouldn’t see it, or to create some sort of in-group solidarity type of thing.
We do have examples of information being made secret, but it’s military information or political information, and it’s 100 or 150 years later. Books of herbal remedies, on the other hand, were widely distributed and not secret. So that raises the question of why someone would have enciphered information that was readily attainable.
One possible analogy is the technical terminology in academia. As a linguist, I have a huge number of technical terms I use with other linguists, and they’re not exactly meant to keep people out, but they’re a shorthand way of talking with other linguists and a marker that I’m part of the in-group of knowledgeable individuals. So maybe we should think about this not so much as hiding information from others, but more as a kind of in-joke or preservation of knowledge for people who knew that particular language or way of writing.
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