Photocopies are available from Yale: A B&W microfilm of the VMS costs about 40.In 1912, an antiques dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a remarkable manuscript. Another Yale page of VMS images. Currently, a 'Free text search' for 'Voynich' and '408' works on this web page. The Yale web site often has VMS images available, but the details of where they are kept and how to acces them changes often.
Earlier this September, scholar Nicholas Gibbs published an article in the Times Literary Supplement claiming to have cracked the code, only to be pooh-poohed by medievalists across the internet.Gibbs may have failed to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but he joins a long and illustrious lineage of failures. “Two problems presented themselves — the text must be unravelled and the history of the manuscript must be traced.”To this date, no one has successfully solved either problem.The text that came to be known as the Voynich manuscript is now housed at Yale, and dozens of medievalists and cryptologists study it every year. The Voynich Manuscript got its name from.“The fact that this was a 13th century manuscript in cipher convinced me that it must be a work of exceptional importance, and to my knowledge the existence of a manuscript of such an early date written entirely in cipher was unknown,” Voynich said. The entire thing was in code.The Voynich Manuscript is currently kept at Yale University in the United States. It wasn’t in any known shorthand or variation of medieval Latin or English or French or any other known language.
(Rudolf was passionately devoted to alchemy and the occult.) Rudolf, however, seemed to have no luck decoding the manuscript, and it passed from hand to hand until it ended up in Jesuit holdings in Rome, where it would remain hidden until Voynich turned it up 300 years later.Along the way, the manuscript paused with early cryptologists like the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, who claimed to have decoded the Egyptian hieroglyphs (he hadn’t), but it remained unsolved. It entered the historical record centuries old and already unreadable.The first supposed owner of the manuscript is believed to be the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who allegedly purchased it for 600 gold ducats ($90,000 today) sometime around the beginning of the 17th century, apparently under the belief that the manuscript was the work of the 13th-century English alchemist Roger Bacon. As far back as anyone has been able to track discussion of the Voynich manuscript, there is no history of it existing as anything other than a marvelous, indecipherable curiosity. Where did the Voynich manuscript come from?No one knows who wrote the Voynich manuscript or for what purpose, but carbon dating places its origins between 14, despite Voynich’s claim that it was a 13th-century document.
Physicist Andreas Schinner thinks that it was written by “an autistic monk, who subconsciously followed a strange mathematical algorithm in his head.”Scores of other enthusiastic would-be code breakers over the years have created dozens of other theories, ranging from the vaguely plausible-sounding to the extremely wild.You may have noticed that few of the theorists I’ve just named are scholars of medieval manuscripts by profession. Botanist Arthur Tucker thinks it depicts Mexican plants. Ultimately, they concluded that cracking the code was impossible, and that “the Voynich MS was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type.”Computer scientist Gordon Rugg thinks the whole thing is a hoax, and that the reason no one can decode the manuscript is that there’s nothing to decode. Friedman, who helped break Japan’s Purple cipher during World War II, collaborated with his wife and fellow cryptographer Elizebeth for years in an attempt to decode the manuscript. (The carbon dating of the manuscript that places it in the 15th century means it is impossible the 13th-century Bacon could have written it.)Military cryptographer William F.
Voynich Manuscript Yale Manual For The
Once the characters are decoded, he claims, the manuscript becomes clear: It is “an instruction manual for the health and wellbeing of the more well to do women in society.” The recipe section really is a series of recipes for women’s health, he adds, and that would have been clear to everyone if only the manuscript’s original index hadn’t gone missing.Here’s the problem: The abbreviations Gibbs is proposing don’t render themselves into readable Latin. What’s wrong with the Gibbs theory?Gibbs, a historical researcher and television writer, argues that the apparent code in the Voynich manuscript is actually a series of Latin abbreviations, with each character standing for an abbreviated word rather than a letter. But for decades, they’ve been patiently debunking wild theory after wild theory about the manuscript.Into that atmosphere — of endless wild theories, all endlessly debunked — came Nicholas Gibbs.
Why does anyone care about the Voynich manuscript?So in the 600 years that the Voynich manuscript has existed, we know of no one who has been able to read a word of it or use it to accomplish anything useful.Yet people have devoted their lives to studying it. But it is not a new theory, nor has it been definitively proved, and the coded text of the manuscript remains un-decoded. “If enthusiasm could move mountains,” Pelling says of Gibbs, “he’d be in like a shot.”Many Voynich manuscript scholars and enthusiasts have suggested before Gibbs that the manuscript might be a woman’s health manual, and that part of his theory remains a viable possibility. Worse yet, his theory lacks elegance: It isn’t anchored by a throughline, but instead consists of old worked-over, half-baked theories linked together in a halfhearted narrative. Gibbs, he said in a statement to Vox, has essentially cherry-picked from various old theories that have already been debated and debunked without contributing anything new of his own. “It doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense.”As for the idea that a missing index is the key to everything, Davis says, “This is the piece that really killed it for me.” While there’s some evidence that the manuscript is missing pages, there’s no compelling reason to think that the missing pages were an index.For Nick Pelling, who runs the Voynich manuscript-focused site Cipher Mysteries, the more pressing issue is that Gibbs’s theory doesn’t offer anything new to the field.
It feels like the beginnings of the plot in a fantasy novel that ends with the person who decodes the Voynich manuscript being declared the rightful ruler of the kingdom.Pelling argues that the fascination the manuscript wields has less to do with whatever might be hidden in its code than for what we can use it to say about us. It could contain astonishing secrets about the world or human nature or magic. When Umberto Eco visited Yale’s Beinecke Library in 2013, the Voynich manuscript was the only thing he asked to see.In part, there’s the romantic thrill of the mystery: The Voynich could say anything.
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