The Voynich Manuscript: A Book Nobody Can Read
1420 · event
In a library at Yale University lies a small book of about two hundred and forty pages, written on vellum in a flowing script that no one has ever read. Its pages carry drawings of plants that match no known species, circular diagrams of stars and zodiac signs, networks of pipes and pools with small human figures bathing in them, and dense columns of what looks entirely like text. Radiocarbon dating of the vellum places its making in the first half of the fifteenth century, most likely between 1404 and 1438, somewhere in central Europe.
The manuscript takes its modern name from Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who bought it in Italy in 1912 and spent years trying to interest scholars in it. Its earlier history can be traced in fragments. It appears in the circle of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf the Second in Prague, and a letter of 1665 accompanies it to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome, whose successors kept it until the twentieth century.
Codebreakers of both world wars, professional linguists, computer scientists and enthusiastic amateurs have all attacked it. Announcements of a solution appear every few years and none has been accepted. What makes the puzzle serious is that the writing behaves like a language. Its word frequencies and structure follow the statistical patterns of real text rather than random letters, which argues against a simple hoax, although an elaborate one has never been ruled out.
The Voynich manuscript is now among the most studied and most photographed books in the world, freely available online so that anyone can try. It has become a mirror for the way people handle the unknown, some seeing lost knowledge, some a beautiful fraud. Either way it is a reminder that a single object can hold out against six centuries of clever readers.