Voynich manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an otherwise unknown writing system,
Voynich manuscript
referred to as 'Voynichese'.[18] The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th
century (1404–1438), and stylistic analysis indicates it may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Renaissance.[1][2] The origins, authorship and purpose of the manuscript are debated. Various hypotheses have Yale University
been suggested, including that it is an otherwise unrecorded script for a natural language or constructed
language; an unread code, cypher, or other form of cryptography; or simply a meaningless hoax.

The manuscript currently consists of around 240 pages, but there is evidence that additional pages are missing.
Some pages are foldable sheets of varying size. Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations or diagrams,
some crudely coloured, with sections of the manuscript showing people, fictitious plants, astrological symbols,
etc. The text is written from left to right. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer
who purchased it in 1912.[19] Since 1969, it has been held in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library.[20][12][21]

The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including
American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II.[22] The manuscript has never
been demonstrably deciphered, and none of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years has been
independently verified.[23] The mystery of its meaning and origin has excited the popular imagination, making it
the subject of study and speculation.

Contents A floral illustration on page 32

Description Also known Beinecke MS 408
Codicology as
Parchment, covers, and binding Type codex
Ink
Date unknown, parchment dated
Paint
to early 15th century[1][2]
Retouching
Place of origin possibly Italy[1][2]
Text
Extraneous writing Language(s) unknown
Transcription possibly natural[3] or
Statistical patterns constructed language[4][5]
a very small number of words
Illustrations
were found in Latin and
Purpose
High German[4]
History
Timeline of ownership Scribe(s) unknown
Author(s) unknown
Authorship hypotheses
suggested:
Early history
Roger Bacon,[6]
Fabrication by Voynich
Wilfrid Voynich himself,[7]
Giovanni Fontana
Jakub of Tepenec,[8]
Other theories
Athanasius Kircher,[9]
Language hypotheses Raphael Mnishovsky,[6]
Ciphers Antonio Averlino Filarete,[10]
Codes Cornelis Drebbel,[11]
Shorthand Anthony Ascham[4] etc.
Steganography Compiled by unknown
Natural language
Illuminated by unknown
Constructed language
Patron unknown
Hoax
Glossolalia Dedicated to unknown

Decipherment claims Material vellum

William Romaine Newbold Size ≈ 23.5 cm × 16.2 cm × 5 cm
Joseph Martin Feely (9.3 in × 6.4 in × 2.0 in)
Leonell C. Strong Format one column in the page
Robert S. Brumbaugh body, with slightly indented
John Stojko right margin and with
Stephen Bax paragraph divisions, and
Nicholas Gibbs often with stars in the left
Greg Kondrak margin;[12]
Ahmet Ardıç the rest of the manuscript

Gerard Cheshire appears in the form of graphics

i.e. diagrams or markings for
Facsimiles
certain parts related to
Cultural influence illustrations;

See also the manuscript contains foldable

parts
References
Citations Condition partially damaged and
Bibliography incomplete;
240 out of 272 pages found
Further reading
(≈ 88%)[13][10][12]
External links i.e. 18 out of 20 quires
Analyst websites found
News and documentaries (272 pages i.e. 20 quires is the
smallest estimated number, and
it contains
Description > 170,000 characters)[14]

Script unknown
Codicology possibly an invented
script[15]
The codicology, or physical characteristics of the manuscript, has been studied by researchers. The manuscript very small number of words
measures 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 cm (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in), with hundreds of vellum pages collected into 18 quires. found in Latin script[4][13]
The total number of pages is around 240, but the exact number depends on how the manuscript's unusual
foldouts are counted.[12] The quires have been numbered from 1 to 20 in various locations, using numerals Contents herbal, astronomical,
consistent with the 1400s, and the top righthand corner of each recto (righthand) page has been numbered from balneological, cosmological
1 to 116, using numerals of a later date. From the various numbering gaps in the quires and pages, it seems and pharmaceutical
likely that in the past the manuscript had at least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already missing sections + section with
when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912. There is strong evidence that many of the book's recipes
bifolios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite
Illumination(s) color ink, a bit crude, was
different from what it is today.[13][10]
used for painting the
figures, probably later than
Parchment, covers, and binding the time of creation of the
text and the outlines
Radiocarbon dating of samples from various parts of the manuscript was performed at the University of Arizona themselves[13]
in 2009. The results were consistent for all samples tested and indicated a date for the parchment between 1404
Additions –
and 1438.[24] Protein testing in 2014 revealed that the parchment was made from calf skin, and multispectral
analysis showed that it was unwritten on before the manuscript was created (not a palimpsest). The parchment Exemplar(s) two manuscript copies
was created with care, but deficiencies exist and the quality is assessed as average, at best.[24] The parchment is which Baresch sent twice to
prepared from "at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins".[25] Kircher in Rome
Previously ? Rudolf II, Holy Roman
Some folios are thicker than the usual parchment thickness, such as folios 42 and 47.[26]
kept Emperor → Jakub of
The goat skin[27] binding and covers are not original to the book, but date to its possession by the Collegio Tepenec → Georg Baresch
Romano.[12] Insect holes are present on the first and last folios of the manuscript in the current order and Athanasius
suggest that a wooden cover was present before the later covers, and discolouring on the edges points to a Kircher (copies) → Jan
tanned-leather inside cover.[24] Marek Marci (Joannes Marcus
Marci) → rector of Charles
University in Prague →
Ink
Athanasius Kircher →
Many pages contain substantial drawings or charts which are colored with paint. Based on modern analysis Pieter Jan Beckx → Wilfrid
using polarized light microscopy (PLM), it has been determined that a quill pen and iron gall ink were used for Voynich → Ethel Voynich →
the text and figure outlines. The ink of the drawings, text and page and quire numbers have similar microscopic Anne Nill → Hans Peter
characteristics. Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) performed in 2009 revealed that the inks contained Kraus → Yale[4][9][12][16][17]
major amounts of carbon, iron, sulfur, potassium, and calcium and trace amounts of copper and occasionally Discovered earliest information about
zinc. EDS did not show the presence of lead, while X-ray diffraction (XRD) identified potassium lead oxide,
the existence comes from a
potassium hydrogen sulphate and syngenite in one of the samples tested. The similarity between the drawing
letter that was found inside
inks and text inks suggested a contemporaneous origin.[13]
the covers of the
manuscript, and it was
Paint written in either 1665 or
1666
Colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the ink outlined figures, possibly at a later date. The blue,
Accession MS 408
white, red-brown, and green paints of the manuscript have been analyzed using PLM, XRD, EDS, and
scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Other cryptography case which
has not been solved or
The blue paint proved to be ground azurite with minor traces of the copper oxide cuprite.[13] deciphered
The white paint is likely a mixture of eggwhite and calcium carbonate.[13]
The green paint is tentatively characterized by copper and copper-chlorine resinate; the crystalline material might be atacamite or some other
copper-chlorine compound.[13]
Analysis of the red-brown paint indicated a red ochre with the crystal phases hematite and iron sulfide. Minor amounts of lead sulfide and
palmierite are possibly present in the red-brown paint.[13]

The pigments used were deemed inexpensive.[24]

Retouching
Computer scientist Jorge Stolfi of the University of Campinas highlighted that parts of the text and drawings have been
modified, using darker ink over a fainter, earlier script. Evidence for this is visible in various folios, for example f1r, f3v,
f26v, f57v, f67r2, f71r, f72v1, f72v3 and f73r.[28]

Text

Every page in the manuscript contains text, mostly in an unidentified language, but some have extraneous writing in
Evidence of retouching of text; page
Latin script. The bulk of the text in the 240 page manuscript is written in an unknown script, running left to right. Most of
3; f1r
the characters are composed of one or two simple pen strokes. There exists some dispute as to whether certain characters
are distinct, but a script of 20–25 characters would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen
rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. There is no obvious punctuation.[4]

Much of the text is written in a single column in the body of a page, with a slightly ragged right margin and paragraph
divisions and sometimes with stars in the left margin.[12] Other text occurs in charts or as labels associated with
illustrations. There are no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document. The ductus flows
smoothly, giving the impression that the symbols were not enciphered; there is no delay between characters, as would
normally be expected in written encoded text.

Extraneous writing Retouching of drawing; page 131;

f72v3
Only a few of the words in the manuscript are thought to have not been written in the unknown script:[17]

f1r: A sequence of Latin letters in the right margin parallel with characters from the unknown script, also the now-
unreadable signature of "Jacobj à Tepenece" is found in the bottom margin.
f17r: A line of writing in the Latin script in the top margin.
f70v–f73v: The astrological series of diagrams in the astronomical section has the names of 10 of the months
(from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France,
northwest Italy, or the Iberian Peninsula.[29]
f66r: A small number of words in the bottom left corner near a drawing of a nude man have been read as "der
Mussteil", a High German[17] phrase for "a widow's share".
f116v: Four lines written in rather distorted Latin script, except for two words in the unknown script. The words in
Latin script appear to be distorted with characteristics of the unknown language. The lettering resembles
European alphabets of the late 14th and 15th centuries, but the words do not seem to make sense in any
language.[30] Whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text or were added later is not known.
Page 119; f66r, showing
characteristics of the text
Transcription

Various transcription alphabets have been created to equate Voynich characters with Latin characters to help with
cryptanalysis,[31] such as the Extensible (originally: European) Voynich Alphabet (EVA).[32] The first major one was
created by the "First Study Group", led by cryptographer William F. Friedman in the 1940s, where each line of the
manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card to make it machine readable.[33][34]

Page 191; f107r, text detail

European Voynich Alphabet: Capital EVA letters are sometimes used to illustrate different variations of the same symbol.

Statistical patterns

The text consists of over 170,000 characters,[14] with spaces dividing the text into about 35,000 groups of varying length, usually referred to as "words" or "word
tokens" (37,919); 8,114 of those words are considered unique "word types."[35] The structure of these words seems to follow phonological or orthographic laws
of some sort; for example, certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels), some characters never follow others, or some may be doubled or
tripled, but others may not. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: Some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the
end (like Greek ς), and some always in the middle section.[36]

Many researchers have commented upon the highly regular structure of the words.[37] Professor Gonzalo Rubio, an expert in ancient languages at Pennsylvania
State University, stated:
 The things we know as grammatical markers – things that occur commonly at the beginning or end of words, such as 's' or 'd' in our language, and
that are used to express grammar, never appear in the middle of 'words' in the Voynich manuscript. That's unheard of for any Indo-European,
Hungarian, or Finnish language.[38]

Stephan Vonfelt studied statistical properties of the distribution of letters and their correlations (properties which can be vaguely characterized as rhythmic
resonance, alliteration or assonance) and found that under that respect Voynichese is more similar to the Mandarin Chinese pinyin text of the Records of the
Grand Historian than to the text of works from European languages, although the numerical differences between Voynichese and Mandarin Chinese pinyin look
larger than those between Mandarin Chinese pinyin and European languages.[39]

Practically no words have fewer than two letters or more than 10.[14] Some words occur in only certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout
the manuscript. Few repetitions occur among the thousand or so labels attached to the illustrations. There are instances where the same common word appears up
to three times in a row[14] (see Zipf's law). Words that differ by only one letter also repeat with unusual frequency, causing single-substitution alphabet
decipherings to yield babble-like text. In 1962, cryptanalyst Elizebeth Friedman described such statistical analyses as "doomed to utter frustration".[40]

Illustrations

The illustrations are conventionally used to divide most of the manuscript into six different sections, since the text itself
cannot be read. Each section is typified by illustrations with different styles and supposed subject matter[14] except for the
last section, in which the only drawings are small stars in the margin. The following are the sections and their
conventional names:

Herbal, 112 folios: Each page displays one or two plants and a few paragraphs of text, a format typical
of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches
seen in the "pharmaceutical" section. None of the plants depicted are unambiguously identifiable.[12][41]
Astronomical, 21 folios: Contains circular diagrams suggestive of astronomy or astrology, some of
them with suns, moons, and stars. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the
zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.).
Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are
at least partly nude, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached
to either arm by what could be a tether or cord of some kind. The last two pages of this section were lost A detail from the balneological
(Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February), while Aries and Taurus are split into four section of the manuscript
paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.[12][41]
Balneological, 20 folios: A dense, continuous text interspersed with drawings, mostly showing small
nude women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes. The
bifolio consists of folios 78 (verso) and 81 (recto); it forms an integrated design, with water flowing from one folio
to the other.[24][41]
Cosmological, 13 folios: More circular diagrams, but they are of an obscure nature. This section also has
foldouts; one of them spans six pages, commonly called the Rosettes folio, and contains a map or diagram with
nine "islands" or "rosettes" connected by "causeways" and containing castles, as well as what might be a
volcano.[12][41][42]
Pharmaceutical, 34 folios: Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.), objects
resembling apothecary jars, ranging in style from the mundane to the fantastical, and a few text
paragraphs.[12][41]
Recipes, 22 folios: Full pages of text broken into many short paragraphs, each marked with a star in the left Detail of page 50, f25v;
margin.[12][41] resembling a dragon

Five folios contain only text, and at least 28 folios are missing from the manuscript.[41]

Purpose

The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to
address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of the illustrations have fueled many theories
about the book's origin, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.[14]

The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal, but attempts have failed to identify the plants, either with actual specimens
or with the stylized drawings of contemporaneous herbals.[43] Only a few of the plant drawings can be identified with reasonable
certainty, such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern. The herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be
Detail of page 158, f86r6;
clean copies of them, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plant
the castle
drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with
flowers from a third.[43]

The basins and tubes in the balneological section are sometimes interpreted as implying a connection to alchemy, yet they bear little obvious resemblance to the
alchemical equipment of the period.

Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting, and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of
the manuscript. However, interpretation remains speculative, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets.[14]

History
Much of the early history of the book is unknown,[44] though the text and illustrations are all characteristically European. In 2009, University of Arizona
researchers performed radiocarbon dating on the manuscript's vellum and dated it between 1404 and 1438.[2][45][46] In addition, McCrone Associates in
Westmont, Illinois, found that the paints in the manuscript were of materials to be expected from that period of European history. There have been erroneous
reports that McCrone Associates indicated much of the ink was added not long after the creation of the parchment, but their
official report contains no statement of this.[13]

The first confirmed owner was Georg Baresch, a 17th-century alchemist from Prague. Baresch was apparently puzzled about this
"Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years.[9] He learned that Jesuit scholar Athanasius
Kircher from the Collegio Romano had published a Coptic (Egyptian) dictionary and claimed to have deciphered the Egyptian
hieroglyphs; Baresch twice sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome, asking for clues. The 1639 letter from Baresch
to Kircher is the earliest known mention of the manuscript to have been confirmed.[16]

Whether Kircher answered the request is not known, but he was apparently interested enough to try to acquire the book, which
Baresch refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (also known as Johannes
Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague. A few years later, Marci sent the book to Kircher, his long-time
friend and correspondent.[16]
Page 66, f33v, has been
interpreted to represent a
Marci also sent Kircher a cover letter (in Latin, dated August 19, 1665 or 1666) that was still attached to the book when Voynich
sunflower
acquired it: [9][47][48][49][50][51][52]

Reverend and Distinguished Sir, Father in Christ:

This book, bequeathed to me by an intimate friend, I destined for you, my very dear Athanasius, as soon as
it came into my possession, for I was convinced that it could be read by no one except yourself.

The former owner of this book asked your opinion by letter, copying and sending you a portion of the book
from which he believed you would be able to read the remainder, but he at that time refused to send the
book itself. To its deciphering he devoted unflagging toil, as is apparent from attempts of his which I send
you herewith, and he relinquished hope only with his life. But his toil was in vain, for such Sphinxes as
these obey no one but their master, Kircher. Accept now this token, such as it is and long overdue though it
be, of my affection for you, and burst through its bars, if there are any, with your wonted success.

Dr. Raphael, a tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, then King of Bohemia, told me the said
book belonged to the Emperor Rudolph and that he presented to the bearer who brought him the book 600
ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon, the Englishman. On this point I suspend judgement; it is Joannes Marcus Marci, who
your place to define for us what view we should take thereon, to whose favor and kindness I unreservedly sent the manuscript to
commit myself and remain Athanasius Kircher in 1665
or 1666
At the command of your Reverence,
Joannes Marcus Marci of Cronland
Prague, 19th August, 1665 [or 1666]

The "Dr. Raphael" is believed to be Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky,[4] and the sum would be about 2 kg of gold.

While Wilfrid Voynich took Raphael's claim at face value, the Bacon authorship theory has been largely discredited.[17]
However, a piece of evidence supporting Rudolph's ownership is the now almost invisible name or signature, on the first
page of the book, of Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, the head of Rudolph's botanical gardens in Prague. Jacobus may
have received the book from Rudolph II as part of the debt that was owed upon his death.[44]
Voynich among his books in Soho
No records of the book for the next 200 years have been found, but in all likelihood, it was stored with the rest of
[16] Square
Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University). It
probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal
States. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the
Collegio.[16] Many books of the university's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty just before this
happened, according to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, and those books were exempt from confiscation.[16]
Kircher's correspondence was among those books, and so, apparently, was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the ex libris of
Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the university's rector at the time.[12][16]

Beckx's private library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by
the Society of Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Ghislieri College.[16]

In 1903, the Society of Jesus (Collegio Romano) was short of money and decided to sell some of its holdings discreetly to the
Vatican Library. The sale took place in 1912, but not all of the manuscripts listed for sale ended up going to the Vatican.[53]
Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 of these manuscripts, among them the one which now bears his name.[16] He spent the next seven
years attempting to interest scholars in deciphering the script, while he worked to determine the origins of the manuscript.[4]

In 1930, the manuscript was inherited after Wilfrid's death by his widow Ethel Voynich, author of the novel The Gadfly and
daughter of mathematician George Boole. She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill Wilfrid Voynich acquired the
manuscript in 1912.
sold the book to antique book dealer Hans P. Kraus. Kraus was unable to find a buyer and donated the manuscript to Yale
University in 1969, where it was catalogued as "MS 408",[17] sometimes also referred to as "Beinecke MS 408".[12]

Timeline of ownership

The timeline of ownership of the Voynich manuscript is given below. The time when it was possibly created is shown in green (early 1400s), based on carbon
dating of the vellum.[44] Periods of unknown ownership are indicated in white. The commonly accepted owners of the 17th century are shown in orange; the
long period of storage in the Collegio Romano is yellow. The location where Wilfrid Voynich allegedly acquired the manuscript (Frascati) is shown in green (late
1800s); Voynich's ownership is shown in red, and modern owners are highlighted blue.
 Timeline of Voynich manuscript ownership

Authorship hypotheses
Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript, among them Roger Bacon, John Dee or Edward Kelley, Giovanni Fontana, and
Voynich.

Early history

Marci's 1665/1666 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his friend the late Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been
bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia for 600 ducats (66.42 troy ounce actual gold weight, or
2.07 kg). (Mnishovsky had died in 1644, more than 20 years earlier, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication
in 1611, at least 55 years before Marci's letter. However, Karl Widemann sold books to Rudolf II in March 1599.)

According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was
13th century Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon.[6] Marci said that he was suspending
judgment about this claim, but it was taken quite seriously by Wilfrid Voynich, who did his best
to confirm it.[16] Voynich contemplated the possibility that the author was Albertus Magnus if
not Roger Bacon.[54]

Rudolf II, portrait by Hans

The assumption that Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that John Dee sold the
von Aachen. manuscript to Rudolf. Dee was a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I
of England who was known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts.

Dee and his scrier (spirit medium) Edward Kelley lived in Bohemia for several years, where
they had hoped to sell their services to the emperor. However, this sale seems quite unlikely,
according to John Schuster, because Dee's meticulously kept diaries do not mention it.[16]

If Bacon did not create the Voynich manuscript, a supposed connection to Dee is much Ernest Board's portrayal of
weakened. It was thought possible, prior to the carbon dating of the manuscript, that Dee or Bacon in his observatory at
Kelley might have written it and spread the rumor that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the Merton College
hopes of later selling it.[55](p249)

Mathematician John Dee Fabrication by Voynich

may have sold the
manuscript to Emperor Some suspect Voynich of having fabricated the manuscript himself.[7] As an antique book
Rudolf around 1600. dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means, and a lost book by Roger Bacon
would have been worth a fortune. Furthermore, Baresch's letter and Marci's letter only establish
the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one mentioned. These
letters could possibly have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript, assuming that he was aware of them.
However, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the June 1999[44] discovery of Baresch's letter to
Kircher as having eliminated this possibility.[7][16]

Eamon Duffy says that the radiocarbon dating of the parchment (or, more accurately, vellum) "effectively rules out any
possibility that the manuscript is a post-medieval forgery", as the consistency of the pages indicates origin from a single source,
and "it is inconceivable" that a quantity of unused parchment comprising "at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins" could have
Edward Kelley might have
survived from the early 15th century.[25] created the manuscript as a
fraud

Giovanni Fontana

It has been suggested that some illustrations in the books of an Italian engineer, Giovanni Fontana, slightly resemble Voynich illustrations.[56] Fontana was
familiar with cryptography and used it in his books, although he did not use the Voynich script but a simple substitution cipher. In the book Secretum de thesauro
experimentorum ymaginationis hominum (Secret of the treasure-room of experiments in man's imagination), written c. 1430, Fontana described mnemonic
machines, written in his cypher.[57] That book and his Bellicorum instrumentorum liber both used a cryptographic system, described as a simple, rational cipher,
based on signs without letters or numbers.[58]
Other theories

Sometime before 1921, Voynich was able to read a name faintly written at the foot of the manuscript's first page: "Jacobj à
Tepenece". This is taken to be a reference to Jakub Hořčický of Tepenec, also known by his Latin name Jacobus Sinapius.
Rudolph II had ennobled him in 1607, had appointed him his Imperial Distiller, and had made him curator of his botanical
gardens as well as one of his personal physicians. Voynich (and many other people after him) concluded that Jacobus owned the
Voynich manuscript prior to Baresch, and he drew a link from that to Rudolf's court, in confirmation of Mnishovsky's story.

Jacobus's name has faded further since Voynich saw it, but is still legible under ultraviolet light. It does not match the copy of his
signature in a document located by Jan Hurych in 2003.[1][8] As a result, it has been suggested that the signature was added later,
possibly even fraudulently by Voynich himself.[1]

Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Athanasius Kircher. Mueller
sent some unintelligible text to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt, and asking him for a translation. One of Giovanni Fontana's
Kircher reportedly solved it.[59] It has been speculated that these were both cryptographic tricks played on Kircher to make him fantastical illustrations,
look foolish.[59] c. 1420–1430

Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of the Bacon story, was himself a cryptographer
and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was uncrackable (c. 1618).[60] This has led to the speculation that
Mnishovsky might have produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made Baresch
his unwitting test subject. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected
some kind of deception.[60]

In his 2006 book, Nick Pelling proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written by 15th century North Italian architect
Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), a theory broadly consistent with the radiocarbon dating.[10]

Language hypotheses
Many hypotheses have been developed about the Voynich manuscript's "language", called Voynichese:
Some pages of the manuscript fold
out to show larger diagrams.
Ciphers

According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European
language that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of
some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters. This was the working hypothesis for most 20th-century
deciphering attempts, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early
1950s.[34]

The main argument for this theory is that it is difficult to explain a European author using a strange alphabet—except as
an attempt to hide information. Indeed, even Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript
roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography in Europe as a relatively systematic discipline.

The counterargument is that almost all cipher systems consistent with that era fail to match what is seen in the Voynich
manuscript. For example, simple substitution ciphers would be excluded because the distribution of letter frequencies
does not resemble that of any known language; while the small number of different letter shapes used implies that The Voynich manuscript is written in
nomenclator and homophonic ciphers would be ruled out, because these typically employ larger cipher alphabets. an unknown script.
Polyalphabetic ciphers were invented by Alberti in the 1460s and included the later Vigenère cipher, but they usually
yield ciphertexts where all cipher shapes occur with roughly equal probability, quite unlike the language-like letter
distribution which the Voynich manuscript appears to have.

However, the presence of many tightly grouped shapes in the Voynich manuscript (such as "or", "ar", "ol", "al", "an",
"ain", "aiin", "air", "aiir", "am", "ee", "eee", among others) does suggest that its cipher system may make use of a
"verbose cipher", where single letters in a plaintext get enciphered into groups of fake letters. For example, the first two
lines of page f15v (seen above) contain "oror or" and "or or oro r", which strongly resemble how Roman numerals such
as "CCC" or "XXXX" would look if verbosely enciphered.[61]

It is possible that the text was encrypted by starting from a fundamentally simple cipher, then augmenting it by adding
nulls (meaningless symbols), homophones (duplicate symbols), a transposition cipher (letter rearrangement), false word
breaks etc.

The Vigenère square or table may

Codes have been used for encryption and
decryption.
According to the "codebook cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually be codes to be looked up in
a "dictionary" or codebook. The main evidence for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution of
many words are similar to those of Roman numerals, which at the time would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based ciphers would be viable for
only short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read.

Shorthand

In 1943, Joseph Martin Feely claimed that the manuscript was a scientific diary written in shorthand. According to D'Imperio,[17] this was "Latin, but in a system
of abbreviated forms not considered acceptable by other scholars, who unanimously rejected his readings of the text".

Steganography
This theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in inconspicuous details—e.g., the
second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, called steganography, is very old and was described by Johannes Trithemius in
1499. Though the plain text was speculated to have been extracted by a Cardan grille (an overlay with cut-outs for the meaningful text) of some sort, this seems
somewhat unlikely because the words and letters are not arranged on anything like a regular grid. Still, steganographic claims are hard to prove or disprove,
because stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to find.

It has been suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes.[62][63] There are indeed examples of steganography
from about that time that use letter shape (italic vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen
strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum.

Natural language

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of
English or Latin texts.[3] Amancio et al. (2013)[64] argued that the Voynich manuscript "is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with
random texts."[64]

The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some little-known natural language, written
plaintext with an invented alphabet. He suggested Chinese in jest, but later comparison of word length statistics with Vietnamese
and Chinese made him view that hypothesis seriously.[65] In many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-
Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai (Thai, Lao, etc.), morphemes
generally have only one syllable;[66] and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns. Other intriguing
similarities are the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees of the ecliptic (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and
⼆⼗四节⽓ 節氣
starting with Pisces, which are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar (èr shí sì jié qi, / ).

Child (1976),[67] a linguist of Indo-European languages for the U.S. National Security Agency, proposed that the manuscript
was written in a "hitherto unknown North Germanic dialect".[67] He identified in the manuscript a "skeletal syntax several
elements of which are reminiscent of certain Germanic languages", while the content itself is expressed using "a great deal of
obscurity."[68]

In February 2014, Professor Stephen Bax of the University of Bedfordshire made public his research into using "bottom up" The first page includes two
methodology to understand the manuscript. His method involved looking for and translating proper nouns, in association with large red symbols, which
relevant illustrations, in the context of other languages of the same time period. A paper he posted online offers tentative have been compared to a
translation of 14 characters and 10 words.[69][70][71][72] He suggested the text is a treatise on nature written in a natural language, Chinese-style book title,
rather than a code. upside-down.[65]

Tucker & Talbert (2014)[73] published a paper claiming a positive identification of 37 plants, 6 animals, and one mineral
referenced in the manuscript to plant drawings in the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis or Badianus manuscript, a fifteenth-century Aztec herbal.[73]
Together with the presence of atacamite in the paint, they argue that the plants were from colonial New Spain and the text represented Nahuatl, the language of
the Aztecs. They date the manuscript to between 1521 (the date of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire) and circa 1576. These dates contradict the earlier
radiocarbon date of the vellum and other elements of the manuscript. However, they argued that the vellum could have been stored and used at a later date. The
analysis has been criticized by other Voynich manuscript researchers,[74] who argued that a skilled forger could construct plants that coincidentally have a passing
resemblance to theretofore undiscovered existing plants.[75]

In 2014, a team led by Diego Amancio of the University of São Paulo published a study using statistical methods to analyse the relationships of the words in the
text. Instead of trying to find the meaning, Amancio's team looked for connections and clusters of words. By measuring the frequency and intermittence of words,
Amancio claimed to identify the text's keywords and produced three-dimensional models of the text's structure and word frequencies. The team concluded that in
90% of cases, the Voynich systems are similar to those of other known books, indicating that the text is in an actual language, not random gibberish.[64]

The use of the framework was exemplified with the analysis of the Voynich manuscript, with the final conclusion that it differs from a random
sequence of words, being compatible with natural languages. Even though our approach is not aimed at deciphering Voynich, it was capable of
providing keywords that could be helpful for decipherers in the future.[64]

Constructed language

The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript words led William F. Friedman to conjecture that the text could be a constructed language. In 1950,
Friedman asked the British army officer John Tiltman to analyze a few pages of the text, but Tiltman did not share this conclusion. In a paper in 1967, Brigadier
Tiltman said:

After reading my report, Mr. Friedman disclosed to me his belief that the basis of the script was a very primitive form of synthetic universal language
such as was developed in the form of a philosophical classification of ideas by Bishop Wilkins in 1667 and Dalgarno a little later. It was clear that the
productions of these two men were much too systematic, and anything of the kind would have been almost instantly recognisable. My analysis
seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution.[4]

The concept of a constructed language is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin
of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes (fusional languages); as a consequence, a text
in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with similar letters, and likewise for all diseases,
etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or
suffix in the Voynich manuscript.[5]

Hoax
The unusual features of the Voynich manuscript text, such as the doubled and tripled words, and the suspicious contents of its
illustrations support the idea that the manuscript is a hoax. In other words, if no one is able to extract meaning from the book,
then perhaps this is because the document contains no meaningful content in the first place. Various hoax theories have been
proposed over time.

In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have
been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a
perforated paper overlay.[76][77] The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool,
more than 100 years after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the
pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be
used to emulate any language to a certain degree.[78]

In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia supported the hoax hypothesis.[18]
Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced Page 175; f99r, of the
using a quasi-stochastic method, such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts.[18] pharmaceutical section

Some scholars have claimed that the manuscript's text appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. In 2013, Marcelo Montemurro, a
theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester, published findings claiming that semantic networks exist in the text of
the manuscript, such as content-bearing words occurring in a clustered pattern, or new words being used when there was a shift
in topic.[79] With this evidence, he believes it unlikely that these features were intentionally "incorporated" into the text to make a
hoax more realistic, as most of the required academic knowledge of these structures did not exist at the time the Voynich
manuscript would have been written.[80]

In September 2016, Gordon Rugg and Gavin Taylor addressed these objections in another article in Cryptologia, and illustrated a
simple hoax method that they claim could have caused the mathematical properties of the text.[81]

In 2019, Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner published an algorithm that matches the statistical characteristics of the Voynich
manuscript, and could have been used by a Medieval author to generate meaningless text.[82]

Glossolalia Page 135; f75r, from the

balneological section
In their 2004 book, Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill suggest the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of showing apparent nymphs
glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), channeling, or outsider art.[15] If so, the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in
a manner which resembles stream of consciousness, either because of voices heard or because of an urge.
This often takes place in an invented language in glossolalia, usually made up of fragments of the author's
own language, although invented scripts for this purpose are rare.

Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the Voynich
manuscript and the illustrations that she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine, which
can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of
Script invented by Hildegard von Bingen
stars", and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the balneological section.[83] This theory has been found
unlikely by other researchers.[84]

The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text. Kennedy and Churchill are
themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. In the culminating chapter of their work, Kennedy
states his belief that it is a hoax or forgery. Churchill acknowledges the possibility that the manuscript is either a synthetic
forgotten language (as advanced by Friedman), or else a forgery, as the preeminent theory. However, he concludes that, if
the manuscript is a genuine creation, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author.[15]

Decipherment claims
Since the manuscript's modern rediscovery in 1912, there have been a number of claimed decipherings. Detail of the nymphs on page 141;
f78r

William Romaine Newbold

One of the earliest efforts to unlock the book's secrets (and the first of many premature claims of decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Romaine Newbold
of the University of Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless itself, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a
series of tiny markings discernible only under magnification. These markings were supposed to be based on ancient Greek shorthand, forming a second level of
script that held the real content of the writing. Newbold claimed to have used this knowledge to work out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and
recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before van Leeuwenhoek. A circular drawing in the astronomical section depicts an irregularly
shaped object with four curved arms, which Newbold interpreted as a picture of a galaxy, which could be obtained only with a telescope.[4] Similarly, he
interpreted other drawings as cells seen through a microscope.

However, Newbold's analysis has since been dismissed as overly speculative[85] after John Matthews Manly of the University of Chicago pointed out serious
flaws in his theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given
case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that
nearly anything at all could be discerned from the microscopic markings. Although evidence of micrography using the Hebrew language can be traced as far back
as the ninth century, it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Close study of the manuscript revealed the markings to be
artefacts caused by the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum. Perceiving significance in these artefacts can be attributed to pareidolia. Thanks to Manly's
thorough refutation, the micrography theory is now generally disregarded.[86]

Joseph Martin Feely

In 1943, Joseph Martin Feely published Roger Bacon's Cipher: The Right Key Found, in which he claimed that the book was a scientific diary written by Roger
Bacon. Feely's method posited that the text was a highly abbreviated medieval Latin written in a simple substitution cipher.[17]

Leonell C. Strong

Leonell C. Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, believed that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of
arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th-century English
author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Notes released after his death reveal that the last stages of his analysis, in
which he selected words to combine into phrases, were questionably subjective.[55](p252)

Robert S. Brumbaugh

In 1978, Robert Brumbaugh, a professor of classical and medieval philosophy at Yale University, claimed that the manuscript was a forgery intended to fool
Emperor Rudolf II into purchasing it, and that the text is Latin enciphered with a complex, two-step method.[17]

John Stojko

In 1978, John Stojko published Letters to God's Eye,[87] in which he claimed that the Voynich Manuscript was a series of letters written in vowelless
Ukrainian.[54] The theory caused some sensation among the Ukrainian diaspora at the time, and then in independent Ukraine after 1991.[88] However, the date
Stojko gives for the letters, the lack of relation between the text and the images, and the general looseness in the method of decryption have all been criticised.[54]

Stephen Bax

In 2014, applied linguistics Professor Stephen Bax self-published a paper claiming to have translated ten words from the manuscript using techniques similar to
those used to successfully translate Egyptian hieroglyphs.[89] He claimed the manuscript to be a treatise on nature, in a Near Eastern or Asian language, but no
full translation was made before Bax's death in 2017.[90]

Nicholas Gibbs

In September 2017, television writer Nicholas Gibbs claimed to have decoded the manuscript as idiosyncratically abbreviated Latin.[91] He declared the
manuscript to be a mostly plagiarized guide to women's health.

Scholars judged Gibbs' hypothesis to be trite. His work was criticized as patching together already-existing scholarship with a highly speculative and incorrect
translation; Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, stated that Gibbs' decipherment "doesn't result in Latin that makes sense."[92][93]

Greg Kondrak

Greg Kondrak, a professor of natural language processing at the University of Alberta, together with his graduate student Bradley Hauer, used computational
linguistics in an attempt to decode the manuscript.[94] Their findings were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in
2017, in the form of an article suggesting that the language of the manuscript is most likely Hebrew, but encoded using alphagrams, i.e. alphabetically ordered
anagrams. However, the team admitted that experts in medieval manuscripts who reviewed the work were not convinced.[95][96][97] The claim was disputed on
Hebrew language grounds.[98]

Ahmet Ardıç

In 2018, Ahmet Ardıç, an electrical engineer with an interest in Turkic languages, claimed in a YouTube video that the Voynich script is a kind of Old Turkic
written in a 'poetic' style.[99] The text would then be written using 'phonemic orthography', meaning the author spelled out words as they heard them. Ardıç
claimed to have deciphered and translated over 30% of the manuscript.[100][101] His submission to the journal Digital Philology was rejected in 2019.[102]

Gerard Cheshire

In 2019, Cheshire, a biology research assistant at the University of Bristol, made headlines for his theory that the manuscript was written in a "calligraphic proto-
Romance" language. He claimed to have deciphered the manuscript in two weeks using a combination of "lateral thinking and ingenuity."[103][104] [105]
Cheshire has suggested that the manuscript is "a compendium of information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing and astrological readings", that it contains
numerous descriptions of medicinal plants[106][107][108][109] and passages that focus on female physical and mental health, reproduction, and parenting; and that
the manuscript is the only known text written in proto-Romance.[110] He further claimed: "The manuscript was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of
reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon."[111]

Cheshire claims that the fold-out illustration[112] on page 158 depicts a volcano, and theorizes[113] that it places the manuscript's creators near the island of
Vulcano which was an active volcano during the 15th century.

However, experts in medieval documents disputed this interpretation vigorously,[114] with the executive director of the Medieval Academy of America Lisa Fagin
Davis denouncing the paper as "just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense".[110] Approached for comment by Ars Technica, Davis gave this
explanation:

As with most would-be Voynich interpreters, the logic of this proposal is circular and aspirational: he starts with a theory about what a particular
series of glyphs might mean, usually because of the word's proximity to an image that he believes he can interpret. He then investigates any number
of medieval Romance-language dictionaries until he finds a word that seems to suit his theory. Then he argues that because he has found a Romance-
 language word that fits his hypothesis, his hypothesis must be right. His "translations" from what is essentially gibberish, an amalgam of multiple
languages, are themselves aspirational rather than being actual translations. — L. Fagin Davis (2019)[114]

The University of Bristol subsequently removed a reference to Cheshire's claims from its website,[115] referring in a statement to concerns about the validity of
the research, and stating: "This research was entirely the author's own work and is not affiliated with the University of Bristol, the School of Arts nor the Centre
for Medieval Studies".[116][117]

Facsimiles
Many books and articles have been written about the manuscript. Copies of the manuscript pages were made by alchemist Georgius Barschius (the Latinized
form of the name of Georg Baresch; cf. the second paragraph under "History" above) in 1637 and sent to Athanasius Kircher, and later by Wilfrid Voynich.[118]

In 2004, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library made high-resolution digital scans publicly available online, and several printed facsimiles appeared. In
2016, the Beinecke Library and Yale University Press co-published a facsimile, The Voynich Manuscript, with scholarly essays.[119]

The Beinecke Library also authorized the production of a print run of 898 replicas by the Spanish publisher Siloé in 2017.[120][121]

Cultural influence
The manuscript has also inspired several works of fiction, including the following

Author(s) Year Title

Colin Wilson 1974 The Return of the Lloigor
2001 Datura tai harha jonka jokainen näkee
Leena Krohn
(2013) (Eng: Datura: or, A Delusion We All See)
Lev Grossman 2004 Codex
Scarlett Thomas 2004 PopCo
Michael Cordy 2008 The Source
Alex Scarrow 2011 Time Riders: The Doomsday Code
Jonathan Maberry 2012 Assassin's Code
Linda Sue Park 2012 The 39 Clues – Cahills vs. Vespers, book 5: Trust No One
Robin Wasserman 2012 The Book of Blood and Shadow
Jeremy Robinson
2013 Prime
& Sean Ellis
Dominic Selwood 2013 The Sword of Moses
Deborah Harkness 2014 The Book of Life

The "voynix", biomechanical creatures from an alternate future which transition from servitors to opponents in Dan Simmons' paired novels Ilium/Olympos, are
named in reference to the manuscript.

Between 1976 and 1978,[122] Italian artist Luigi Serafini created the Codex Seraphinianus containing false writing and pictures of imaginary plants in a style
reminiscent of the Voynich manuscript.[123][124][125]

Contemporary classical composer Hanspeter Kyburz's 1995 chamber work The Voynich Cipher Manuscript, for chorus & ensemble is inspired by the
manuscript.[126]

In 2015, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra commissioned Hannah Lash to compose a symphony inspired by the manuscript.[127]

The novel Solenoid (2015), by Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu uses the manuscript as literary device in one of its important themes.[128]

In the third season episode of the CBS crime drama Elementary titled "Under My Skin", the character of Sherlock Holmes studies the Voynich manuscript,
stating that he disbelieves theories that the manuscript is extraterrestrial in origin.

Images from the manuscript appear in multiple locations in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine.

The film Seventh Son features some pages of a magical book written with the Voynich alphabet; also some figures are similar to the ones of the manuscript.

The Voynich Manuscript also appears in the games Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Assassin's Creed Rogue, and is cited as having been stolen from a man
named Peter Beckford.

See also
Asemic writing Copiale cipher Rongorongo
Automatic writing False document Undeciphered writing systems
Beale ciphers Fictional language Vinland map
Book of Soyga Oera Linda Book
Codex Gigas Rohonc Codex

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PMC 3699599 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3699599). PMID 23844002 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23844002).
Retrieved 8 June 2016.
Banks, Michael J. (5 May 2008). A Search-Based Tool for the Automated Cryptoanalysis of Classical Ciphers (https://web.archive.org/web/20
120305223855/http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~mbanks/pub/mjb503_report.pdf) (PDF) (M.Eng. thesis). University of York. Archived from the
original (http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~mbanks/pub/mjb503_report.pdf) (PDF) on 5 March 2012. Retrieved 8 June 2016.
Barabe, Joseph G. (1 April 2009). "Materials Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript" (https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/voy
nich_analysis.pdf) (PDF). Beinecke Library (McCrone Associates). Retrieved August 15, 2019.
Berloquin, Pierre (2008). Hidden Codes & Grand Designs: Secret languages from ancient times to modern day (https://archive.org/details/hid
dencodesgrand0000berl). Sterling. pp. 1–384 (https://archive.org/details/hiddencodesgrand0000berl/page/n6). ISBN 978-1-4027-2833-4.
Retrieved 8 June 2016. "Codex Seraphinianus+base 21."
Brumbaugh, Robert S. (1978). The World's Most Mysterious Manuscript. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-8093-0808-8.
Child, James R. (Summer 1976). "The Voynich manuscript revisited". NSA Technical Journal. XXI (3).
D'Imperio, M.E. (1978). The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma (https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a070618.pdf) (PDF). National
Security Agency. Retrieved 1 February 2021.; D'Imperio, M.E. (1978). The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. Laguna Hills, CA:
Aegean Park Press. ISBN 978-0-89412-038-1. (Books Express Publishing, 2011, ISBN 978-1-78039-009-3)
Grossman, Lisa (3 February 2014). "Mexican plants could break code on gibberish manuscript" (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2498
7-mexican-plants-could-break-code-on-gibberish-manuscript.html). New Scientist. Retrieved 8 June 2016.
Kahn, David (1967). The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (https://archive.org/details/codebreakerssto00kahn) (1st ed.). New York:
Macmillan. pp. 870–871 (https://archive.org/details/codebreakerssto00kahn/page/870).
Kennedy, Gerry; Churchill, Rob (14 January 2011). The Voynich Manuscript: The mysterious code that has defied interpretation for centuries
(https://books.google.com/books?id=qRiNsvWPGcMC&pg=PA12). Inner Traditions International, Limited. ISBN 978-1-59477-854-4.
Retrieved 8 June 2016.
Kennedy, Gerry; Churchill, Rob (2004). The Voynich Manuscript. London, UK: Orion. ISBN 978-0-7528-5996-5.
Landini, Gabriel (October 2001). "Evidence of linguistic structure in the Voynich manuscript using spectral analysis". Cryptologia. 25 (4):
275–295. doi:10.1080/0161-110191889932 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2F0161-110191889932). S2CID 28332554 (https://api.semanticschola
r.org/CorpusID:28332554).
Montemurro, Marcelo A.; Zanette, Damián H. (20 June 2013). "Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An
Information-Theoretic Analysis" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3689824). PLoS One. 8 (6): e66344.
Bibcode:2013PLoSO...866344M (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013PLoSO...866344M). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0066344 (https://doi.o
rg/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0066344). PMC 3689824 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3689824). PMID 23805215 (https://pu
bmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23805215).
Pelling, Nicholas John (2006). The Curse of the Voynich: The secret history of the world's most mysterious manuscript. Compelling Press.
ISBN 978-0-9553160-0-5.
Schinner, Andreas (April 2007). "The Voynich manuscript: Evidence of the hoax hypothesis". Cryptologia. 31 (2): 95–107.
doi:10.1080/01611190601133539 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2F01611190601133539). ISSN 0161-1194 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0161-
1194). S2CID 20016840 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:20016840).
Schuster, John (2009). Haunting Museums (https://books.google.com/books?id=mBvnz9i0h8sC&pg=PA175). Tom Doherty Associates.
pp. 175–272. ISBN 978-1-4299-5919-3. Retrieved 8 June 2016.
Shailor, Barbara A. "Beinecke MS 408" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130911161941/http://brbl-net.library.yale.edu/pre1600ms/docs/pre160
0.ms408.htm). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, General Collection of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Medieval and Renaissance
Manuscripts. Yale University. Archived from the original (http://brbl-net.library.yale.edu/pre1600ms/docs/pre1600.ms408.htm) on September
11, 2013. Retrieved June 8, 2016.
Stojko, John (1978). Letters to God's Eye: The Voynich manuscript for the first time deciphered and translated into English. New York:
Vantage Press.
Tiltman, John H. (Summer 1967). "The Voynich manuscript: The most mysterious manuscript in the world" (https://web.archive.org/web/2011
1018025101/https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/Voynich_Manuscript_Mysterious.pdf) (PDF). NSA Technical Journal.
National Security Agency. XII (3). Archived from the original (http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/Voynich_Manuscript_Mysteri
ous.pdf) (PDF) on October 18, 2011. Retrieved June 8, 2016.
Tucker, Arthur O.; Talbert, Rexford H. (Winter 2013). "A preliminary analysis of the botany, zoology, and mineralogy of the Voynich
manuscript" (https://archive.today/20140122054819/http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue100/hg100-feat-voynich.html?ts=139036920
2&signature=402e6a559a0e56b5343a6f4d002492fa). HerbalGram (100): 70–75. Archived from the original (http://cms.herbalgram.org/herba
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June 8, 2016.
 Winter, Jay (2015). The Complete Voynich Manuscript (https://books.google.com/books?id=FjnPCgAAQBAJ&q=dee+selling+manuscript+ba
con&pg=PA249) (digitally enhanced researchers' ed.). Lulu Press. ISBN 978-1-329-60774-3. Retrieved June 9, 2016.

Further reading
Duffy, Eamon (2017-04-20). "Secret knowledge – or a hoax?" (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/voynich-manuscript-secret-know
ledge-or-hoax/). The New York Review of Books. ISSN 0028-7504 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0028-7504). Retrieved 2020-05-13.
Stollznow, Karen (2014). "The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript" (http://karenstollznow.com/the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript/). Skeptic
Magazine. Vol. 19 no. 2. Retrieved June 8, 2016.
Hermes, Jürgen (2012-02-14). Textprozessierung – Design und Applikation (http://www.uni-koeln.de/) (doctoral thesis) (in German).
Universität zu Köln.
Foti, Claudio (2010). Il Codice Voynich (in Italian). Roma, IT: Eremon Edizioni. ISBN 978-88-89713-17-4.
Violat-Bordonau, Francisco (2006). El ABC del Manuscrito Voynich (in Spanish). Cáceres, Spain: Ed. Asesores Astronómicos Cacereños.
Goldstone, Lawrence; Goldstone, Nancy (2005). The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual
Manuscript in the World (https://archive.org/details/friarcipher00lawr). New York, NY: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-7679-1473-4.
Pérez-Ruiz, Mario M. (2003). El Manuscrito Voynich (in Spanish). Barcelona, ES: Océano Ambar. ISBN 978-84-7556-216-2.
Casanova, Antoine (19 March 1999). Méthodes d'analyse du langage crypté: Une contribution à l'étude du manuscrit de Voynich (http://voyni
ch.free.fr/a_casanova_these_19mars1999.pdf) (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). Université de Paris. Retrieved 13 June 2016.
Manly, John Matthews (1931). "Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS". Speculum. 6 (3): 345–391. doi:10.2307/2848508 (https://doi.org/10.230
7%2F2848508). JSTOR 2848508 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2848508). S2CID 163421798 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:16342
1798).
Newbold, William Romaine (1928). The Cipher of Roger Bacon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Manly, John Matthews (July 1921). "The most mysterious manuscript in the world: Did Roger Bacon write it and has the key been found?" (htt
p://www.harpers.org/archive/1921/07/0004969). Harper's Monthly Magazine. No. 143. pp. 186–197.
Voynich, Wilfrid Michael (1921). "A preliminary sketch of the history of the Roger Bacon cipher manuscript" (https://books.google.com/books?
id=tNcCAAAAYAAJ&q=%22A%20Preliminary%20Sketch%20of%20the%20History%20of%20the%20Roger%20Bacon%20Cipher%20Man
uscript%22&pg=PA415). Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 3 (43): 415–430.
Levitov, Leo (1987). Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari heresy, the cult of Isis. Laguna
Hills, California: Aegean Park Press.

External links
"The Voynich Manuscript" (https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3519597) (pdf). Digital collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. Yale University.
The Voynich Manuscript (https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript) at the Internet Archive
"Voynich Manuscript Voyager" (https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f1r/0.373/0.422/2.00). jasondavies.com. — navigating through high-
resolution scans
"Voynich" (http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/voynich). "Public-domain font based on Voynich 101, which was used to transcribe the text to a
digital form"
"Voynich manuscript character navigator" (http://www.voynichese.com/).
Dunning, Brian (5 April 2011). "Skeptoid #252: The Voynich Manuscript" (https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4252). Skeptoid.

Analyst websites
Zandbergen, René (ed.). "Voynich.nu" (http://www.voynich.nu/index.html).
Reeds, Jim (ed.). "Voynich manuscript bibliography" (http://www.voynich.net/reeds/bib.html). Voynich.net.
Reeds, Jim (ed.). "Voynich manuscript mailing list HQ" (http://www.voynich.net/). Voynich.net.
Stolfi, Jorge (ed.). "Extensive list of authors who published about the Voynich manuscript" (http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/).
Bloem, Peter (ed.). "Unsupervised analysis of the Voynich manuscript" (https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/b.bredeweg/pdf/BSc/20052006/Bloem.pdf)
(PDF).
Pelling, Nick (ed.). "Voynich theories" (http://ciphermysteries.com/the-voynich-manuscript/voynich-theories). Cipher Mysteries.
"Voynich manuscript discussion forum" (https://www.voynich.ninja/index.php). Voynich Ninja.

News and documentaries

Whitfield, John (17 December 2003). "World's most mysterious book may be a hoax" (https://www.nature.com/articles/news031215-5).
Nature. doi:10.1038/news031215-5 (https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fnews031215-5). Retrieved 2021-06-02. news – summary of Gordon Rugg's
paper directed towards a more general audience
"The mystery of the Voynich manuscript" (https://web.archive.org/web/20050910212025/http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&co
lID=1&articleID=0000E3AA-70E1-10CF-AD1983414B7F0000). Scientific American. 21 June 2004. Archived from the original (http://www.sci
am.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0000E3AA-70E1-10CF-AD1983414B7F0000) on 2005-09-10.
"The unread: The mystery of the Voynich manuscript" (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/07/the-unread-the-mystery-of-the-
voynich-manuscript.html). The New Yorker (blog). July 2013.
written and directed by Klaus T. Steindl & Andreas Sulzer (2011). The Voynich Code: The world's mysterious manuscript (https://web.archive.
org/web/20120309095747/http://www.newyorkfestivals.com/winners/tvf2011winners/pieces.php?iid=413203&pid=1). New York Festivals
(TV documentary). TV 2011 festival winners (Silver World Medal). Austria: ORF (film company). Archived from the original (http://www.newyo
rkfestivals.com/winners/tvf2011winners/pieces.php?iid=413203&pid=1) on 2012-03-09.
"Le mystère de l'indéchiffrable manuscrit Voynich reste entier" (https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2019/05/25/le-mystere-de-l-indechiffrabl
e-manuscrit-voynich-reste-entier_5467154_3246.html). Le Monde. 25 May 2019.

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