What is the Voynich Manuscript?

Widely considered the most mysterious manuscript in the world, the Voynich Manuscript rests safely today as MS408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

In 1912 the fathers of the Jesuit Villa Mondragone in need of new sources of income invited Wilfrid M. Voynich, a collector of ancient manuscripts, to search the dusty corners of the villa for anything of value. Voynich discovered the manuscript he named after himself at the bottom of a trunk among a collection of ancient materials in the basement.  The seven by ten inch manuscript consists of approximately two hundred and thirty-five pages of hand-written script with crudely drawn illustrations depicting bizarre plants, unfamiliar astrological diagrams, and unclad women, often seen bathing in tubular structures that look like plumbing.

The origin of the manuscript remains obscure, but the earliest confirmed owner was an alchemist in Prague in the early 17th Century who sent it to numerous intellectuals of his time in an attempt to discover its meaning. 2He was unsuccessful.  One frequently mentioned possibility was that the book was bought by the King of Bohemia for 600 ducats (around  $35,000 dollars in today’s money) based on the assumption that it was written by the English Franciscan friar and scientist, Francis Bacon (1214-1294). More Info?

Is It a Fraud?

Good question.  No one knows if it is a genuine document or something that had been forged long ago just to squeeze a few extra ducats out of a rich prince or duke.  Arguments for and against it being a fraud is as follows:

Against: No reputable scientist, professor, or cryptologist has considered the Voynich worth their attention.  It is just another phony document that has gotten too much publicity.

For: Many highly trained experts, scientists and amateurs alike, have studied the manuscript since it was discovered in 1912.  William Friedman, America’s chief cryptanalyst during WWII, the man who broke the Japanese “Purple” cipher that helped the US Navy to win the war in the pacific, and later became special assistant to the director of the National Security Agency, spent years working on the Voynich Manuscript and never questioned its validity. 

Voynich himself circulated copies of the manuscript to various scientists hoping someone could explain its origin. In fact the letter, dated 1666, accompanying the manuscript when it was discovered in Italy was asking for the same thing: for someone to discover the contents and meaning of the manuscript.  So we can conclude that attempts to decipher it dating back to the early 17th century and perhaps much earlier have been unsuccessful.  Specialists in the 20th century from Botany to Linguistics, from Cryptography to Computer Science, and from Art to Medicine have made attempts to understand the manuscript finding only that it was more difficult and complex than they had, at first, imagined.  More Info?

What’s It Got to Do with Famous Scientists?

There has always been an implied or assumed connection between the Voynich Manuscript and Rodger Bacon. Some believe he was the author of the manuscript. He was a Franciscan friar in the 1200’s who many believe was the first advocate of the modern scientific method. He was a Master at Oxford in England and friend to Pope Clement IV. The pope urged Bacon to write about the place of “natural philosophy”—the modern term would be science—within theology.  Bacon wrote a voluminous tract called in Latin Opus Majus—which means “Greater Work.”  Using the books he had at hand as references he wrote about optical and mechanical devices that didn’t exist at that time and wouldn’t be implemented for hundreds of years. 

Unfortunately, the pope died while the document was on route and his successor was much more conservative and less tolerant of new ideas than his predecessor.  In the years that followed, fragments of the Opus Majus circulated around Europe and Bacon’s ideas were eventually brought to reality by Galileo (the telescope), Copernicus (heliocentric cosmology), Newton (optics), Columbus (sail west to get to India), the Gregorian Calendar (accepted in 1582, three hundred years after suggested by Rodger Bacon).

Today, Rodger Bacon is often confused with his namesake the better known Francis Bacon who lived in England three hundred years later in the time of James I.  Francis Bacon’s star ascended when James I took the throne in 1603.  He soon became knighted and a member of parliament.  He espoused the scientific method as did Rodger Bacon but differed in that Francis Bacon did not see a close relationship between mathematics and science while Rodger Bacon felt the two fields were intimately connected as we do today.

A large part of the reason for why a disproportionate amount of credit for development of the “scientific method” went to Francis Bacon is the evolution in the meaning of the vocabulary of scientific terms such as alchemy, astrology, magic, and mysticism.  This relates to an evolving view of epistemology, that is the study of acquiring knowledge.More Info?

What If?

Recent (2009) analysis of the vellum (University of Arizona) and ink (McCrone Research Institute in Chicago) have confirmed that the Voynich Manuscript is indeed a medieval document and not a twentieth-century fraud, but we don’t have sufficient historical information to know if it was written by Roger Bacon or was a seventeenth-century fraud.  Is it another language that awaits discovery of a linguistic key, such as the Rosetta stone with hieroglyphics, to unlock?  Is it in an unknown cipher that is waiting to be decrypted?  We can’t be sure.  Where does that leave us?

The facts are insufficient to come to a precise conclusion.  Isn’t that the way life is?  When we can’t make decisions based by precise facts, what do we do?  We keep working and look for other possibilities.  Sometimes it helps if we free our imagination to fill in the unknown details and see where it leads us.

What if the Voynich Manuscript is more, not less, than it appears to be? What if it is a fragmentary copy of a greater, more ancient work…something that originated in the earliest time of humanity? What if the European Renaissance of the 14th-16th centuries is just one of many such “rebirths” that have occurred throughout earlier history and the Voynich Manuscript is implicated in each one.  Have we gained or lost something when we stopped looking to the ancient past for answers to questions of today? See Lessons from the Past

The novel, The Renaissance Manuscript, takes the facts about the Voynich Manuscript we have available today and spins a tale about what it might be.  This is a book of speculative fiction that takes known historical facts and weaves an imaginative story of what the manuscript might be a part of.  If you like history, action, and quirky characters, you will like this book.  Tell Me More!