The Voynich manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is filled with unknown writing and strange plant drawings. Radiocarbon dating places its parchment in the early 1400s, but no one has decoded it.

Context

The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a rare-book dealer who acquired it in 1912. It is now held at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which catalogues it as MS 408. It is a vellum codex of roughly 240 pages written in an unknown script, with illustrations that scholars group into sections such as plants, astronomy, bathing scenes and recipes.

Radiocarbon tests carried out in 2009 on samples of the parchment dated it to the early 15th century. That date applies to the animal skin, not directly to the writing, though the ink and style are generally considered consistent with that period.

Proposed solutions include an enciphered European language, a constructed language, a lost natural language, and an elaborate hoax. Statistical studies, including work by Claire Bowern and Luke Lindemann, find language-like patterns in the text, but that alone does not show that it carries meaning.

Many claimed decipherments have been published and none has won general acceptance. Yale has digitised the manuscript so researchers and the public can study every page.

Its later owners are traced through letters, including a 17th-century Prague scholar's correspondence, but the earliest history before that is uncertain.