The Voynich Manuscript

Bound in limp vellum and running to some two hundred and forty surviving pages, the Voynich Manuscript is a book that no living person can read. Its text flows confidently from left to right in an alphabet resembling no known script, in a language that matches no known tongue, illustrated throughout with plants that grow nowhere on earth, naked women bathing in networks of green plumbing, and circular diagrams of stars and suns that suggest astronomy or astrology without ever quite declaring themselves.

The book takes its name from Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who acquired it in 1912 from a Jesuit college in Italy. With it came a seventeenth-century letter claiming the manuscript had once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II, who supposedly paid a small fortune for it in the belief it was the work of the medieval scholar Roger Bacon. That attribution is almost certainly false.

What is not in doubt is its age. Radiocarbon dating of the vellum, performed in 2009, placed the calfskin in the early fifteenth century, between roughly 1404 and 1438, and the inks are consistent with that period. Whatever the manuscript is, it is not a modern forgery.

Cryptographers of considerable reputation have broken their careers upon it. Codebreakers who cracked wartime ciphers came away defeated. The statistical texture of the writing behaves in some ways like natural language, with recurring words and a plausible entropy, yet resists every attempt at translation. Theories range from an unknown European language to an elaborate glossolalia, a cipher, or a sophisticated hoax designed to part a credulous emperor from his gold. No proposed solution has ever survived scrutiny.

Provenance: early fifteenth-century Europe; held as MS 408 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.