In 1912 a Polish book dealer came across a manuscript which, at first glance, did not seem to be that out of the ordinary. Composed of roughly 240 pages of vellum, it was apparently a remnant of a larger whole with more than 30 pages missing. What remained appears to be a medical text of some kind complete with illustrations.

Such manuscripts were nothing new to the dealer, and everything pointed to it having been written during the early Italian Renaissance, some time at the start of the 15th century. But the first problems surfaced when an attempt was made to read the text.

The manuscript was not written in Italian. Nor was it written in any language which experts could identify, nor even in a script which was known. The illustrations, when subjected to a closer examination, were also more strange than first thought: alongside the plants were drawings of seed pods filled with people, and other strange scenes.

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The plants themselves, when scrutinized, were found to be mysterious too. Not a single plant, diagram or word from the manuscript has ever been conclusively identified or translated. It is an entirely silent text.

This seems strange given how much the text seems to want to offer. Crabbed writings in this unknown language fill the pages of the manuscript, written with great care alongside the drawings in what was clearly a huge investment of time and effort.

And yet, for all this, we know next to nothing about its contents. A century of attempts to read the text, named the Voynich Manuscript after the Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich who discovered it, have come to nothing.

What is the Voynich Manuscript?

An Unreadable Text?

First, let us start with what we do know about the manuscript. The 240 surviving pages appear to divide into six sections, based on the illustration style and content of each one. 

By far the largest of these sections is known as the “herbal” which takes up just less than half the manuscript, with most pages containing what appears to be a picture of a plant along with a few paragraphs of apparently explanatory text. This section appears to be linked to a further 34 leaves in what is called the “pharmaceutical” section, with diagrams of roots and medical preparations: some plants appear in both sections.

Other cross-over illustrations show that the manuscript is clearly part of a single whole. Stars which appear in the “recipe” section are the same as those in the astronomy section, and the naked figures found here apparently bathing are also found in the “balneological” section with its overly complex diagrams of pipes.

All the drawings are a little odd, to tell the truth. The plants do not exist, and nor do the pharmaceutical recipes that derive from them. The bathers who appear frequently throughout seem to go inside the plants, and their baths seem too complex to be practical.

Perhaps the weirdest section of all though is the “cosmological” section with its strange fold-out drawings. These larger diagrams contain a great amount of detail, with the largest covering six pages, but their contents are obscure.

The largest diagram appears to show a map with nine islands, each connected by a pathway. This is not apparently a map of the heavens: castles appear in the drawing, as well as what seems to be a volcano.

Elsewhere in this section more of the circular diagrams that appear in the “astronomical” part of the text can be found. The latter are definitely associated with the zodiac, one of the few recognizable aspects of the Voynich Manuscript, but the further import of this is not known.

 Could this all be a hoax? It is certainly a possibility, but it would appear to be a hoax from the Renaissance itself. The vellum of the pages has been radiocarbon dated to between 1404 and 1438, and the paints and ink used are also consistent with this dating.

This would therefore be an extremely expensive undertaking. The book is made from expensive vellum, designed to last, and the illustrators and text betray a careful and skilled hand. This was not some throwaway joke.

It is not much later that we can confirm that the book existed, its earliest mention being traced to a 1639 letter where it is stated to be owned by an alchemist in Prague, and apparently a complete mystery to him, too. Its history since then is spotty, but it seems to be the real deal, something from the early Renaissance.

There have been many theories as well as to the purpose of the Voynich Manuscript. A who’s-who of the medieval and Renaissance alchemy world has been paraded alongside the text: Roger Bacon wrote it, or Albertus Magnus, John Dee sold it to the Holy Roman Emperor, that sort of thing.

Is it even possible that this is a modern forgery, willfully indecipherable? Could this be the work of Voynich himself? It would seem very unlikely too: the provenance outlined above seems too secure.

 But them that must mean we have something real here. A language we cannot read, one that modern cryptoanalysis suggests does not even resemble a natural language. Drawings of things nobody has ever seen, giving great importance to seemingly trivial things.

A book of nature which contains nothing natural. A book of alchemical preparations which cannot be followed. A book of zodiac signs which include a large number of naked women, and a book where an entire section is devoted to these women bathing in complex contraptions.

A book which has been studied by skilled linguists and codebreakers alike, who agree that there is no recognizable text hidden within its pages. But a book which has nonetheless covered its pages with this “gibberish” in detail and with a certain amount of consistency.

Many attempts have claimed success at deciphering the Voynich Manuscript. But none of these have offered us a definitive understanding of the contents of the text, or the lessons it would teach us.

If there are secrets to be gleaned from this strange relic, we have yet to find them.

Top Image: The Voynich Manuscript is filled with text, diagrams and illustrations, but to date not a single word has been deciphered. Source: Unknown Author / Public Domain.