The Voynich Manuscript is a parchment codex from the fifteenth centurycomposed of 116 richly illustrated sheets, which no one has ever deciphered. It owes its name to Winfried Voynich, an antique dealer and collector of Polish origins, who in 1912 purchased it from a Jesuit college in the province of Rome. Today the Voynich manuscript is located atYale Universityin the United States. Since the discovery in 1912, claims have been made numerous hypotheses on the language and content of the manuscript. It has been hypothesized that it may have been composed for espionage purposes, that it was written in an artificial language, that it was a forgery made for economic reasons. No hypothesis has ever been proven and the manuscript is still incomprehensible.
What is the Voynich Code
The Voynich Manuscript is a code (i.e. an illustrated manuscript book, written on parchment. From radiocarbon dating, we know that it dates back to period 1404-1438. The codex originally consisted of 116 leaves measuring 16 x 22 cm, but fourteen pages have been lost. In total, the manuscript contains approximately 170,000 characters, equivalent to a book of 80-100 pages today.
The manuscript is without title or indication of the author. The language and alphabet in which it is written are unknown and even the numerous illustrations that accompany the text are partly incomprehensible. However, on the basis of the illustrations, the book can be divided into four sections:
- Botany (sheets 1-66), with images of unknown plants;
- Astronomical or astrological (sheets 67-73), with illustrations that appear to depict stars;
- Organic (sheets 75-86), with female images, many of them immersed in a sort of tub;
- Pharmacological (sheets 87-116), with illustrations of ampoules and small plants, probably used to create medicines.
In addition to this subdivision, others have been proposed, but attempts to connect the images to the text have failed.
The story of the “mysterious” manuscript
The manuscript owes its name to Winfried Voynicha Polish antique dealer who in 1912 purchased it from the Jesuit college of Villa Mondragone, in Monteporzio Catone, near Rome. Inside the manuscript there was a letter from 1665, with which the rector of the University of Prague, Jan Marek Marciasked the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kirchner for help in deciphering the text. From the letter it is clear that the code had been purchased for a large sum by the emperor Rudolf II of Habsburgwho considered it the work of Roger Bacona thirteenth-century philosopher.
After its discovery in 1912, the manuscript remained in the hands of the Voynich family and then in those of another antique dealer until 1969, when it was sold to theYale University, in the United States, where it is still located today. The digital version is available for free.
Hypotheses on the text and language of the Voynich manuscript
Since 1912 the following have been formulated: various hypotheses on the origin and meaning of the manuscript. The man who discovered it, Winfried Voynichbelieved that it had actually been written by Bacon, as was evident from the letter found inside the codex; other scholars thought that it had been fabricated by Voynich himself; until recent years, the theory was widespread that it was a fake created in the seventeenth century to defraud Rudolf II. All these hypotheses have been denied in 2009when radiocarbon dating showed that the parchment dates back to the first half of the fifteenth century.
However, the manuscript remains mysterious because nothing is known about it. neither the content nor the language. One theory is that it was written in cipher language to conceal an industrial espionage operation organized by the Ottoman Empire against Venice. According to another hypothesis, the manuscript is a steganographic textthat is, it hides sensible sentences among nonsense words. It has also been supposed that it could be written in a true language disappearedin a artificial languageor that the characters derive from the alphabet Glagoliticthe oldest Slavic alphabet, preceding the current Cyrillic. No hypothesis has been proven and it cannot even be excluded that the text is intentionally meaningless.
Attempts to Decipher the Voynich Manuscript
Numerous scholars have attempted to solve the enigma of the manuscript, and in recent times newspapers have repeatedly announced, in a manner both sensational and unfounded, that the manuscript had been deciphered.
Among the most recent attempts we recall that of English linguist Stephen Baxwho in 2014 announced that he had deciphered some words; that of another British scholar, Gerard Cheshirewho in 2019 claimed to have deciphered the manuscript, which, he said, contains recipes and herbal remedies; that of an Italian scholar, Eleonora Matarresewho in 2023 announced that he had identified the language of the manuscript, which in his opinion is a German dialect still spoken today in some areas of Carnia, in the province of Udine.
In recent years, attempts have also been made to decipher the text using artificial intelligence. However, no alleged “decipherment” has allowed the Voynich manuscript to be read, which therefore It still remains a mystery.
