Philip Neal's Voynich Manuscript Pages
The Voynich manuscript, now MS 408 of the Beinecke library at Yale University, appears
to be a late mediaeval scientific compendium written in an unknown cipher script. It has been
dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries by experienced palaeographers.
Most cipher texts of this period have easily yielded to modern cryptanalysis,
but this one has defied experts for nearly 100 years. In these pages I make relevant historical material available in one location, with English translations for those who do not know the original languages but have other contributions to make. I also publish here my own opinions about the origin of the manuscript and speculations about the nature of the original text.
Twenty first century material
In December 2009 it was announced that the manuscript has been radiocarbon dated to AD 1421 ± 17 years within 95% confidence limits.
Twentieth century material
The manuscript was brought to light by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912 and acquired by the Beinecke
Library in 1969. Voynich was something of a mystery man, a political refugee from his native Poland
who established himself as a prosperous book dealer in London and later New York. He was coy
about the origin of the manuscript when he lectured on it to a conference in 1921, but it came
out after his death that he bought it from the
Jesuit order in Italy under condition of secrecy. The evidence for this, preserved with the
manuscript, is on the website of the Beinecke Library.
There are three descriptions of the manuscript by professional paleographers.
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Seymour de Ricci, Census of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the United States and Canada, 1935-40.
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Barbara A. Shailor, Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Volume 3
Volume 11 of Arizona studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 1987.
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Julian Roberts and Andrew G Watson, ed. John Dee's Library Catalogue
London, The Bibliographical Society, 1990.
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Ricci dates the manuscript to the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Shailor to the fifteenth or sixteenth, and Roberts and Watson to the sixteenth: all with due expression of uncertainty.
Seventeenth and eighteenth century material
Also preserved with the manuscript is the Marci letter of 1665, from the Czech scientist
Johann Marcus Marci to the Roman Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. It provides a convincing explanation
of how the Jesuits acquired the manuscript and was until recently the only piece of evidence
about its earlier history. Athanasius Kircher was a polymath with a world-wide network of
correspondents and he left a huge archive of letters and documents which they sent to him. When
this archive was digitised in the 1990s, Voynich scholar Rene Zandbergen thought to search for other
mentions of the manuscript and struck gold.
The two individuals known to have possessed the manuscript before Marci are
Georg Baresch or Barschius and Jakobus Horcziczky de Tepenecz, whose signature
is found on the first folio. These two books set out what we know of them.
Horcziczky is also discussed by Balbin, below.
The archive contains many samples of exotic languages and scripts which were sent to Kircher
to be identified and interpreted. Although fascinating, none of them refers to the Voynich
manuscript. There is also a story that Kircher was taken in by a supposed old manuscript which
proved to be a hoax, but again it seems that the Voynich manuscript is not meant.
The correspondence of Kircher with the cryptanalyst Gustavus Selenus can be found on the web sit of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.
The three people who discussed the manuscript with Kircher are Barschius, who only wrote one
letter that has survived, and Marci and Kinner, who corresponded with him for years.
More than twenty people associated with Prague are known to have written to Kircher, some of whom
were friends of Marci and part of his intellectual circle.
This is a list with summaries of their letters. Some
of them may well have seen the manuscript but only Barschius, Marci and Kinner mention it.
What we know of Kircher's Prague correspondents mainly comes
from the literary historians Balbin and Wydra. I have also consulted reference works on German
and Jesuit history.
From Bohuslaw Balbin, Bohemia Docta:
Pontanus is significant because he owned a book previously in the possession of Horcziczky.
From Stanislaus Wydra, Historia matheseos in Bohemia et Moravia cultae:
Fifteenth and sixteenth century material
Historical background
On the evidence of the Marci letter, the Voynich manuscript was in Prague during the reign of Rudolph II and remained there until 1665. Since this turbulent period spans the reigns of five emperors and the Thirty Years' War, some historical background may be useful.
Rudolph II
The earliest possible owner of the manuscript for whom there is documentary evidence is Rudolph II (1552-1612, Holy Roman Emperor from 1576), a notable collector of books, particularly on alchemy. Rudolph maintained two separate libraries, his private library and the library of his museum or Kunstkammer in Prague Castle, and he also appears to have owned books which were housed in neither collection. The catalogue of the Kunstkammer has been preserved and it does not list any book recognisable as the Voynich manuscript. However, many alchemical manuscripts once owned by Rudolph survive and provide evidence about where he acquired his collection. The most striking thing about them is that not a single manuscript was more than 100 years old in Rudolph's day, and that a great majority of them originated within Germany.
John Dee
Before Rudolph II, all candidates for ownership or authorship of the manuscript are purely speculative. One name frequently mentioned is John Dee, who visited Prague in 1584 and was granted an audience with Rudolph. Dee, a learned courtier of Elizabeth I of England was at this time under the spell of the alchemist and charlatan Edward Kelly, who channelled guidance to Dee from supposed spirits which he claimed to see in a magic stone. Dee was motivated by a thirst for mystical knowledge and kept a detailed record of his actions in a series of manuscripts which were printed after his death as A True and Faithful Relation. We also have his private diary and the catalogue of his library at his house in Mortlake. In fact, an examination of this material reveals no evidence that he owned the Voynich manuscript: it is not in the library catalogue, and esoteric books mentioned in the diary and Relation have been otherwise identified. Dee is known to have met Rudolph on a single occasion, when he did not sell but gave Rudolph a book of his own composition: indeed, there is no record of Dee ever selling a book. The financial transaction involving 630 ducats, which has sometimes been linked to the 600 ducats which Rudolph is said to have paid for the manuscript also proves to be irrelevant. There remains the categorical statement of the distinguished palaeographer Andrew Watson that the Voynich manuscript is foliated in Dee's handwriting. Assuming this to be true, the most likely explanation is that Dee had access to the manuscript while in Prague but that he did not bring it there.
Johann Trithemius
The German monk Johann Trithemius (1462-1516) is remembered as the inventor of steganography (the technique of concealing a secret message in the plaintext of a longer document), which caused him to be suspected of occult practices, and also as a book collector and the father of bibliography. He is a candidate for authorship of the Voynich manuscript for two reasons. The first is the ciphers disguised as incantations which he invented and published in his books Steganographia and Polygraphia. Extended texts in unidentified languages are extremely rare in mediaeval and renaissance literature, and the Trithemian ciphers are the closest thing we have to the ciphertext of the manuscript. The second reason is the word mvsdel found on folio xx of the manuscript. This inscription appears to be in a fifteenth century hand and the form of the word mvsdel, a variant of High Geman Musteil, is phonetically characteristic of Rhineland dialect. Trithemius came from, and took his surname from, Trittenheim near Trier. It must be said, however, that we have many examples of his handwriting and that he did not write the mvsdel inscription himself: also, the radiocarbon date of 1421 appears to exclude him.
Giovanni Fontana
There exist exactly two Western manuscripts written entirely in cipher between 1000 and 1500. Both were the work of the Venetian writer Giovanni Fontana (c. 1395-c. 1455) .
The works of Giovanni Fontana
Description of Secretum de Thesauro
A first look at Fontana
Comparative material
A corpus of exotic languages in mediaeval and renaissance literature
| Arabic: |
ibn-Hayyan, Picatrix, Almagest, Lostafel, al-Buni, al-Dasuqi, al-Idrisi, Darb al-Mandal
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| Hebrew: |
Psalterium Cusanum, Essener Sakramentar, Carnot 30, clm 17142, clm 7955, Petrus Nigri, Bibliander Paternoster, Judeneid
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| Western: |
Odo of Cluny, Guido of Arezzo, Barbara celarent, Speculum Floron, Hypnerotomachia,Lorem Ipsum, Steganographia, Polygraphia, Ghent 1021A, Enochian, Tuba Veneris, Utopia, Rabelais,
Baner
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A list of mediaeval manuscripts containing cipher text
A checklist of early works on cryptography
The alchemical herbals
Analysis of the manuscript
The marginalia of the Voynich manuscript
Construction of the manuscript
Cipher or language?
Structure of the Voynich ciphertext
Was the Voynich manuscript enciphered on a grid?
I have long believed that the Voynich manuscript is written in a cipher which used some kind of grid which restricted the occurrence of each character to certain positions within a Voynich 'word'. These pages illustrate the idea by displaying the text in three different transcriptions.
Three transcriptions: v101, NEVA and NEVA spaced
Links
The Voynich Manuscript Rene Zandbergen's authoritative site, which these pages are intended to complement.
Cipher Mysteries My friend Nick Pelling's blog on Voynich related matters.
Voynich Manuscript Jim Reeds's site, not updated in years but contains useful information including the study by Prescott Currier.
The Journal of Voynich Studies A grand title for a mixed bag, but some worthwhile material.
The Voynich Manuscript Site Facts and speculation from Jan Hurych.
Historical Publications (Miscellaneous) - NSA/CSS The NSA website with download of the indispensible The Voynich Manuscript: an Elegant Enigma by Mary d'Imperio.
About myself
I am an Englishman, born in 1961, with a lifelong passion for language and linguistics. I read Classics and Modern Languages at the Queen's College, Oxford, and then wrote a doctoral thesis on mediaeval German. For some years I was a researcher into natural language processing and then became a technical author in information technology. I live in South London.
You can contact me at philipneal underscore vms at hotmail dot com.
Copyright information
These pages mostly contain material which is by its nature second hand, either being out of copyright or quoted under fair use. My aim is not to make money but I expect an acknowledgement if you quote or reuse any material actually written by me.
Original material in these pages copyright © Philip Neal 2002-2009.