The Voynich Manuscript: The Book Nobody Can Read

The Story

In 1912 the antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid M. Voynich bought a small book from the Jesuit College at Frascati, near Rome. Its pages were covered in a flowing script that matched no known alphabet, wrapped around drawings of unidentifiable plants, astronomical diagrams and figures bathing in pools. Yale's Beinecke Library, which now owns it as MS 408, describes it as 'Written in an unidentified script by an unknown author.'

Its earlier history is partly documented. The Beinecke says its first confirmed owner was the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who 'purchased it for 600 gold ducats and believed that it was the work of Roger Bacon.' The library calls the Bacon link 'pure speculation.' It later passed through a pharmacist and an alchemist to Johannes Marcus Marci, who sent it in 1666 to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher with a letter still kept with the manuscript.

'Cryptographic approaches have failed to decipher the text, if it is indeed encoded,' says the library that owns it.

After Voynich's death it went to his wife, Ethel, then to their friend Anne Nill, who sold it in 1961 to the New York dealer H. P. Kraus. Kraus gave it to the Beinecke eight years later. The library says it has left the building only once since then.

For more than a century people have tried to read it. The Beinecke's verdict is that 'Cryptographic approaches have failed to decipher the text, if it is indeed encoded.' The failures led some to suspect a hoax, perhaps by Voynich himself.

Science weakened that theory. In 2009 a University of Arizona team led by Greg Hodgins cut tiny samples from four pages and radiocarbon-dated them. NBC News reported that the samples 'were made between 1404 and 1438.' The university said this made the book 'a century older than scholars had previously thought.' The inks themselves could not be radiocarbon-dated, but the university said their colors 'are consistent with the Renaissance palette.'

Not every question is settled. The Beinecke's own page dates the manuscript's production to 'the end of the fifteenth or during the sixteenth century' even while noting that testing suggests consistency with fifteenth-century manuscripts. Whether the book is a cipher, a lost language or an elaborate early hoax, no one has shown.