The Voynich Manuscript at the BeineckeLibrary, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

A Library Planet post by Stuart Kells

The Beinecke Library at Yale is a marvel of library architecture and indeed of all forms of architecture. A temple of rare books, it was
designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Construction finished in 1963. The core of the library is a
six-storey, glass-enclosed tower that houses the book stacks. The tower is surrounded by a void, and the outer skin of the library is another
box, this one made from translucent Vermont marble panels in a Vierendeel steel truss clad in granite.
One of the treasures of the library is the mysterious ‘VoynichManuscript’ (Beinecke 408). Probably from Central or Eastern Europe, this
fifteenth-century illustrated codex is written in an undeciphered language. The manuscript takes its name from antiquarian bookdealer
Wilfrid M. Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Yale received it in 1969. While often characterised as a magical, astrological, medical or
scientific text, the work’s meaning has so far eluded researchers.
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Like many people, I have long been fascinated by the manuscript. I’ve spent many hours looking at the high-resolution digital copy on the
Yale website – even making a game of it with my youngest daughter, Charlotte. (At the age of six, Charlotte came up with a plausible
identification of one of the botanical illustrations as the castor oil plant.)
In 1995, Australian philosopher David Chalmers put forward what he called the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, which relates to how
people perceive reality. According to Chalmers, any new theory of consciousness will fail unless it offers a solution to the ‘hard problem’.
In the case of Voynich, too, there is a hard problem. Some sections in the manuscript seem to have been written in a practised hand, and they
have the feel of real language. Those sections are a large part of why people take the manuscript seriously. But at the same time there are
highly problematic sections, such as those that contain a high degree of strange repetition of longish words such as (in the
European Voynichalphabet) ‘qokedy’. In those passages, there are also sequences of words that are almost repetition, but with single letter
changes. These problematic passages are a large part of why many people think the manuscript is a hoax, or nonsense.
A convincing theory of Voynich needs to explain this divide, which is the ‘hard problem’ of the manuscript. The Voynich text can only be
unlocked once that problem is solved. And in 2023, a solution may well be imminent.
Dr Lisa Fagin Davis is a palaeographer, codicologist, fragmentologist and bibliographer with a particular interest in pre-seventeenth-century
manuscript fragments and collections in North America. Having taught Latin Palaeography at Yale, DrDavis now teaches Manuscript
Studies at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science and, as of 2023, she is the regular
Latin Palaeography instructor at The Rare Book School, University of Virginia.
Since receiving her PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale University in 1993, she has written and published extensively in that field. She has
also catalogued medieval manuscript collections at major institutions (Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Wellesley College, the Museum
of Fine Arts Boston, the Boston Public Library) and several private collections, and she has supervised or was the principal investigator for
several digital reconstructions of dismembered manuscripts.
Dr Davis has examined the manuscript in person more than half a dozen times, and she is recognised as a leading expert in Voynich studies.
She is also a very engaging person, and is very transparent about her work; she is active on ‘manuscript twitter’ and ‘rare book twitter’, and
through that platform and others she patiently responds to questions and theories about the manuscript.
Davis’s recent work includes a breakthrough finding: conformation that the Voynich manuscript is the work of multiple scribes. By applying
the principles of Latin Palaeography to the Voynichese writing system, Davis has identified five separate hands at work in the manuscript,
revealing the work to be a much more collaborative production than previously assumed.
Further examination of the manuscript by Davis has established that by ‘overlaying the scribal corpora onto the sections and quires’, it is
evident that the book is assembled in a highly unusual way, probably indicating that the pages are not currently in their original order.
Together, Davis’s findings are very promising and could offer a solution to the ‘hard problem’ of the manuscript. Linguists such as
Australian-born Yale Professor Claire Bowern are now building on her findings to analyse the language of the different scribal parts, to test
the hypothesis that the respective scribes were writing in different languages or dialects; or even the idea that one scribe was writing a real
language, and one or more other scribes were not.
Last week, I had the pleasure of asking Lisa Fagin Davis some questions about the manuscript, and the current state of Voynichstudies.
SK: Why do so many people find the Voynich manuscript so fascinating?
LFD: The Voynich Manuscript appeals to a general audience because of its enduring mystery … what is it? What does it SAY? What do the
mysterious illustrations mean? The astrological and astronomical diagrams? What’s the deal with the naked women bathing? It is so much
more than just a manuscript written in a unique writing system that may be a code. The fact that it IS a unique writing system adds to the
appeal … who WOULDN’T want to be the first to crack it?
SK: Is today an exciting time to be a leading scholar in Voynichmanuscript studies?
LFD: For sure! Today’s researchers have a whole set of tools at their disposal that previous generations couldn’t have imagined. The high-
resolution open-access images on the Beineckewebsite allow anyone with internet access to view the manuscript in full, download images,
zoom in, crop, print, and annotate. Internet communities such as Voynich Ninja < https://www.voynich.ninja/index.php > bring together
both professional and amateur researchers for collaboration and critique. Generally speaking, these online communities are generous,
capacious, collaborative spaces, believe it or not. Online media, Youtube, blogs, and other outlets facilitate sharing and promotion of ideas
and theories (often without vetting, which is of course the danger of online publishing without peer review). And while past researchers
like Elizebethand William Friedman had access to early computers in the 1960s and 1970s, the power they could access was nothing
compared to today’s computers. Not to mention AI engines, of course, which are also being brought to bear for linguistic, computational,
and cryptographic analyses. Finally, the Voynichused to be thought of only as a joke and as the domain of conspiracy theorists and
crackpots. That impression still holds somewhat, of course, but as more peer-reviewed work continues to be published the topic is becoming
more “acceptable” in mainstream academia. The recent online Voynich conference that was sponsored by the University of Malta with
proceedings published online and open-access definitely helped give Voynichresearch a patina of respectability! The proceedings are online
here: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/
SK: In broad terms, how did you establish that the manuscript is the work of multiple scribes?
LFD: I applied methodologies usually applied to Latin scripts, analysing particular letterforms and particular FEATURES of particular
letterforms that are consistent in one group of pages but take a different, also consistent, form on a different group of pages. Features that
show the same usage patterns combine to confirm the identification of the groups of pages written by particular hands. For example, in the
Roman alphabet one might look at how someone writes [&]. For any writer, that symbol will be written in the same manner whenever they
write it, while a different writer will write it differently.
SK: Given what you’ve discovered about the work of multiple scribes, and possibly the presence of multiple ‘dialects’ in the manuscript, do
you feel that you and your colleagues are getting close to unravelling the manuscript’s meaning and origins?
LFD: It’s really hard to say. There is still strong disagreement among very smart people about whether Voynichese is a transcript of natural
human language, a code, or nonsense. Some argue that it is a forgery made by Voynich or an early-modern trickster (I find that extremely
unlikely, because of the codicological and provenance evidence). Continued analyses will hopefully lead to the resolution of these questions,
which will get us that much closer to the complete answer(s).

27. It is uncertain when was the Voynich Manuscript written.

28. The Voynich Manuscript was donated by Wilfried Voynich to the library Yale University.
29. The manuscript was made out of less than 70 symbols.
30.The manuscript attracted diverse attention. People in many fields like professor or experts also have interest on it.
Questions 31-34 matching
31.The times of the word appearing suggests that the transcript may be written by artificial language.

32.Unlike other mysterious objects, people have direct access to the transcript.

33. The person who wrote the manuscript was not entirely insane.

34. The true author may be the same one suggested by Voynich.
A. Rugg
B.Bacon
C.William Friedman
D.William Newboid
E.Wilfried Voynich
F.Shelfried
Questions 35-39 complete the summary below
There are many codebreakers work on the manuscript. William Newbold thought at that era, when the manuscript shows up, people can look
cells through 35..
William Friedman's team has a thought that the manuscript use 36. to represent text. But the research on the symbols has no apparently
process. Freidman thinks there will be more 37. to bring advances in research.
Some other experts invented a new system to pick up symbols in a 38. , which helps study the manuscript.
Rugg invented a system called 39. system to study the manuscript.
Question 40
40. the writer's main aim in writing this article
C. explain numerous attempts to decode the manuscript