the Voynich manuscript
A Well-kept Secret of Mediaeval Science: the Voynich manuscript
Gabriel Landini (Lecturer in Analytical Pathology, School of Dentistry) and Ren Zandbergen (System Analyst and Consultant in the Space Sector, Darmstadt, Germany).
Note: this article first appeared in the July 1998 issue of ´Aesculapius´, the journal of the University of Birmigham Medical and Dental Graduates Society, and has been published here with the kind permission of the editor.
Introduction
Imagine a book written in an unknown alphabet, in an unknown language, at an unknown date and place. Could such a book be read? Could one retrieve the information it contains, if any? This is not a trivial question and it has baffled historians and scientists alike for most part of this century, in the case of a particular mediaeval document, called “the Voynich manuscript”.
Brief history
In 1912, Wilfrid M. Voynich (a rare book collector) bought a number of mediaeval manuscripts from an undisclosed source in Europe. Among these was a 235-page manuscript written in an unknown script and what appears to be an unknown language or a cipher. Understandably, Voynich wanted to have the mysterious manuscript deciphered and provided photographic copies to a number of experts. However, the book still remains unread. Since then, the manuscript has been known as the “Voynich manuscript”.
It was eventually known that Voynich bought the manuscript from the Jesuit college at the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, in Italy and that it originally belonged to the Collegium Romanum. Attached to the manuscript was a letter in Latin dated 1666 (or 1665) from Johannes Marcus Marci of Cronland, rector of the University of Prague, to Athanasius Kircher S.J., a Jesuit priest and scholar in Rome, offering the manuscript for decryption and mentioning that it was bought by Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia (1552-1612) for 600 gold ducats. The letter also implied that Kircher knew about the manuscript and had exchanged a letter and some transcribed portions with the previous owner who did not want to send him the whole manuscript. The letter further mentioned that Roger Bacon (the Franciscan friar who lived from 1214 to 1294) had been considered as the author, but in any case the manuscript had not been read.
The figures on this page clearly show the style of the illustrations and the script used in the Voynich MS. Some characters resemble those from the roman alphabet (a, o, c, n, m), some are like numbers (2, 4, 8, 9) and others are similar to symbols used as Latin abbreviations or in alchemy in the Middle Ages. In addition there are a few instances of extraneous writing (different from the main body of the manuscript), not in “Voynich script” and perhaps added later, such as the names of the months in the astrological section (in an unidentified Romance language) and three incomprehensible lines on the last folio, suggesting a key to decryption, or an attempted decryption by one of the previous owners.