A book made of puzzles
At Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library rests a book, cataloged as MS 408, that has baffled scholars for centuries. Known as the Voynich Manuscript, it is a 240-page codex measuring 23.5 by 16.2 cm. Its pages are not paper but vellum, a fine parchment made from calfskin. They are filled with an elegant script that belongs to no known language, composed of over 170,000 glyphs written from left to right.
Scientific analysis has answered some questions while deepening the mystery. In 2009, the University of Arizona performed accelerator mass spectrometry on several parchment samples. The radiocarbon dating results were definitive: the vellum was produced between 1404 and 1438 with 95% confidence. This finding disproved theories that the manuscript was a modern forgery or authored by the 13th-century friar Roger Bacon. Analysis by the McCrone Research Institute confirmed that the inks and paints are consistent with the early 15th century. The text is primarily written in iron gall ink, a common material for the period, and the pigments for the colorful illustrations are derived from ground minerals.
The manuscript's contents are divided into six sections based on its bizarre illustrations. The first and largest is the "herbal" section, with drawings of 113 unidentified plant species. Following this are astronomical and astrological sections with zodiacal charts and celestial diagrams. A "biological" section depicts miniature nude females bathing in pools connected by complex plumbing. The final sections contain cosmological maps, pharmaceutical drawings of roots and herbs, and pages of continuous text thought to be recipes.
A mysterious history
The manuscript's known history begins in the 17th century. Its first confirmed owner was Georg Baresch, an alchemist in Prague. Baresch was so perplexed by the book that he sent copies of its script to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome, hoping for a translation. After Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci, who sent the entire book to Kircher in 1665. A letter from Marci stated the book was once purchased by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II for 600 gold ducats.
The codex then disappeared for over 200 years, likely stored in the library of the Jesuit Collegio Romano. It was rediscovered in 1912 when Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-American bookseller, purchased it from a Jesuit college near Rome. Voynich dedicated his life to solving its secrets but failed. The manuscript was eventually donated to Yale University in 1969 by the bookseller H.P. Kraus. Despite extensive study by professional and amateur cryptographers, including codebreakers from both World War I and World War II, not a single word has ever been deciphered. Statistical analysis shows the text follows patterns of natural language, like Zipf's law for word frequency, which suggests it is not random gibberish.