Written in the 15th or 16th century, its 240 illustrated vellum pages are variously thought to have been a pharmacopoeia, a book of alchemy, an astrological guide or a hoax. The Voynich manuscript, whose author and language remain unknown, has been described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”.
The manuscript is named after a bookseller, Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. It had belonged to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, who is thought to have bought it from the English astrologer John Dee in 1586. Its earlier history is uncertain.
Based on the subject matter of the drawings, the manuscript falls into six sections: botanicals, with drawings of 113 unidentified plants; astronomical and astrological drawings, including astral charts and zodiac symbols; a biological section, with drawings of miniature female nudes, most with swollen abdomens, immersed or wading in fluids and oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules; an elaborate array of nine cosmological medallions; pharmaceutical drawings of over 100 medicinal herbs and roots portrayed with coloured jars or vessels; and continuous text, possibly recipes, with star-like flowers marking each entry in the margins.
Voynich asked leading cryptographers to decode the manuscript but they failed. And at the end of the 1939–45 war the US military cryptographers who cracked the Japanese navy’s codes tackled a number of ancient encrypted texts, deciphering all except the Voynich manuscript.
It has also been suggested that the manuscript is an elaborate hoax. Critics of this theory argue that Voynichese, as the script has become known, is too complex to be nonsense. The text includes many characteristics of a simple language while also exhibiting many of the properties of a complex encrypted text. Other suggestions are that the text is an exotic language written with an invented alphabet, Ukrainian with the vowels removed, or a constructed language. The manuscript is now in a rare book and manuscript library at Yale University, Connecticut, US.
