The Voynich Manuscript: A 600-Year-Old Mystery

In the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University lives a mysterious and ancient book, catalogued as MS 408 and known more commonly as the Voynich Manuscript.

Though it has been around for six centuries, it remains one of the human world’s greatest mysteries. Written in an as-yet-unknown language (plus a few lines in Latin script), it contains 240 pages that include both text and illustrations. Many amateur and expert codebreakers have taken a stab at it—including some famous codebreakers from the First and Second World Wars—but it has yet to be cracked.

However, we do have some hints as to what the Voynich Manuscript contains.

The illustrations reveal the book is largely about the natural world, with images of plants and animals as well as astronomical and cosmological diagrams. Some pages even appear to contain recipes.

The manuscript’s name comes from one of its more recent owners, a Polish antiquarian book dealer by the name of Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912 and who attempted to decipher its pages and determine its mysterious origins for the better part of a decade.

He had no better luck than anyone else who has attempted to crack it. The Voynich Manuscript has, in fact, been a mystery since the 16th century, with one of its early owners, Georg Baresch, describing it as a “Sphynx.”

Some think the manuscript is a complete fake, and that Voynich created it himself to guarantee himself (or at least his name) a spot in history. As a rare book dealer, Voynich would’ve had the knowledge and means to fake such a document, wouldn’t he?

However, thanks to advances in science, this possibility has been all but eliminated, since the carbon dating shows the materials to be from between 1404 and 1438 CE.

Some think the book is not in an unknown language at all, but is actually written in cipher, a code meant to obscure the book’s contents. Perhaps it contains alchemical recipes that the author wanted to keep secret? However, other experts suggest the writing doesn’t appear be coded at all, as it flows smoothly and there are no corrections.

Whatever the case may be, we know one thing for certain: we don’t know much. Whether in an unknown language or a complicated cipher, the process of determining the key to the Voynich Manuscript is ultimately the same.

However, 600 years on, it is a code we still have yet to crack.

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