The Book Nobody Can Read

Imagine opening a book more than five hundred years old.

Its pages are covered in neat lines of writing. The letters repeat in recognizable patterns. Paragraphs begin and end. Certain words appear again and again. Whoever wrote it seems to have known precisely what they were saying.

There is only one problem.

Nobody else does.

Welcome to the Voynich Manuscript.

It is a book filled with impossible plants, naked figures bathing in mysterious green pools, wheels of stars and zodiac symbols, elaborate diagrams, strange vessels, roots, leaves and hundreds of pages of writing in a script that has resisted generations of linguists, historians and cryptographers.

We do not know who wrote it.

We do not know what language it contains.

We do not know exactly what it is for.

And despite more than a century of determined attempts to crack it, we still cannot read it.

Naturally, Edenglow would like a copy.

A Very Real Mysterious Book

The Voynich Manuscript is not a legendary lost grimoire or an invention that acquired a life of its own. The actual object exists.

Officially known as Beinecke MS 408, it is kept at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The manuscript is roughly 240 pages long today, although some leaves are missing. Its pages are vellum, and its writing was applied primarily in brownish-black ink, apparently using a quill pen.

Scientific examination has provided one particularly useful piece of evidence: this really is an old manuscript made using materials consistent with the fifteenth century.

That matters.

Because when confronted with something this peculiar, "somebody made an elaborate fake" is a perfectly reasonable place to begin.

If it was a hoax, however, it was not simply a modern prank created for twentieth-century collectors.

Someone went to an extraordinary amount of trouble a very long time ago.

A Garden That Never Grew

The first thing many people notice about the manuscript is its plants.

There are lots of them.

Leaves curl from elaborate roots. Flowers open on branching stems. Bulbs and tendrils twist across the pages with the confidence of botanical illustrations.

Except many of the plants cannot be reliably identified.

Some look tantalizingly familiar. A leaf may resemble one species while the flower suggests another and the root appears to have escaped from an entirely different botanical universe.

Researchers have proposed countless identifications over the years, but there is no generally accepted botanical key that suddenly makes the garden understandable.

Perhaps the illustrator was copying unfamiliar plants badly.

Perhaps the drawings are composites.

Perhaps they are symbolic.

Perhaps they represent medicinal plants whose stylized depiction made perfect sense to the intended reader.

Or perhaps we are trying to identify things that were never meant to be literal plants at all.

The manuscript, naturally, declines to clarify.

Look to the Stars

Other pages contain astronomical and astrological imagery.

There are suns, moons, stars, circular diagrams and recognizable zodiac symbols. Human figures sometimes surround the diagrams. Elsewhere enormous foldout pages reveal elaborate cosmological designs composed of circles, pathways and structures whose precise meaning remains uncertain.

These pages at least provide something familiar to hold onto.

Astrology, astronomy, medicine and the natural world were deeply intertwined in medieval and early Renaissance intellectual traditions. A manuscript combining plants, stars, remedies and the human body would not necessarily have seemed as peculiar to its original audience as it does to us.

Which raises an intriguing possibility.

Maybe the Voynich Manuscript isn't strange at all.

Maybe we are simply not the people it was written for.

The Writing That Refuses to Talk

Then there is the script.

It is sometimes informally called Voynichese, although that name should not be mistaken for an identification of an actual language.

The writing flows from left to right. Characters form repeated combinations. Words appear separated by spaces. Some forms occur frequently while others are rare. The text looks structured rather than like someone absent-mindedly scribbling nonsense.

And yet nobody has produced a generally accepted decipherment.

That has not been for lack of trying.

The manuscript has attracted professional and amateur cryptographers, linguists, historians, computer scientists and determined puzzle-solvers. Proposed solutions have identified its language as everything from various European and Semitic languages to encoded medical shorthand and artificial language.

Periodically someone announces that the Voynich Manuscript has finally been solved.

Headlines follow.

Other specialists examine the proposed solution.

And the Voynich Manuscript quietly returns to its shelf, still unread.

Enter Mr. Voynich

The book takes its modern name from Wilfrid M. Voynich, a Polish-born antiquarian bookseller who acquired it in 1912 from the Jesuit College at Frascati near Rome.

But its history stretches much further back.

The manuscript's early history leads to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. According to a letter written in 1666 by Johannes Marcus Marci, Rudolf was said to have purchased the mysterious book for 600 gold ducats and believed it to be the work of medieval scholar Roger Bacon. No independent record of that purchase has been found, however, and the Roger Bacon attribution is no longer considered credible. 

According to the manuscript's recorded history, Rudolf purchased it for the considerable sum of 600 gold ducats and believed it to be the work of the medieval English scholar Roger Bacon.

It wasn't.

Or, more cautiously, there is no reliable evidence that it was.

The manuscript later belonged to pharmacist Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec, then to the alchemist Georgius Barschius. Barschius apparently found the book every bit as irritatingly mysterious as we do and sought Kircher's help in understanding it. 

After his death, it passed to Johannes Marcus Marci, who in 1666 sent it to the celebrated Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome.

The letter Marci sent with it survives with the manuscript.

Then the book largely disappeared from public attention until Voynich acquired it in 1912.

After Voynich died, it passed through several hands before bookseller H. P. Kraus donated it to Yale's Beinecke Library in 1969.

There it remains.

Still refusing introductions.

The Temptation to Solve It

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the Voynich Manuscript is what it does to us.

We cannot tolerate an unopened door.

Give us a manuscript in Latin and specialists will translate it.

Give us damaged writing and scholars will reconstruct it.

Give us an ancient inscription and someone will spend a career comparing every surviving character.

But give us a book that looks completely readable while remaining incomprehensible, and it becomes almost unbearable.

Surely the answer must be there.

Surely one more pattern will unlock it.

Surely the strange flower means something.

Surely those women are doing something specific in those pools.

Surely that symbol is a clue.

The manuscript invites interpretation while withholding confirmation.

That is an exceptionally effective way to haunt people.

A Book Without a Story

There is something rather wonderful about the fact that we live in an age capable of examining pigments microscopically, analyzing medieval materials, comparing enormous bodies of text with computers and placing high-resolution images of an ancient manuscript before anyone with an internet connection— and the book still gets to keep its secret.

Maybe someone will decipher it tomorrow.

Perhaps an overlooked manuscript will turn up containing the key.

Perhaps a linguistic breakthrough will reveal that generations of researchers have been approaching it from entirely the wrong direction.

Or perhaps there is no secret at all.

The Voynich Manuscript might be a medical handbook, an herbal, an astronomical guide, a collection of remedies, a private system of knowledge, an elaborate cipher, or one of history's most spectacular exercises in meaningless writing.

For now, we simply don't know.

And perhaps that is why the Voynich Manuscript remains more compelling than it would be if we could read it.

Five centuries ago, someone sat down with ink, vellum and an idea.

They filled page after page.

They drew their peculiar garden.

They charted their stars.

They populated strange pools with bathing figures.

They wrote thousands upon thousands of words.

Then they disappeared.

The book remained.

And after all this time, it still hasn't told us what they said.