Pages from the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408). Image: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
The Voynich Manuscript is a small illustrated book, made in the early 1400s, written in a script that nobody has ever been able to read. It belongs to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it is catalogued as MS 408. In 2016 a small Spanish publisher, Siloé, received permission to produce 898 full-size facsimiles that copy every stain, worm hole and patch of the original. Yale University Press brought out its own scholarly facsimile the same year, and the entire manuscript can now be viewed free online.
So, can you read it? Not yet. More than a century after it surfaced, the text remains undeciphered, and no proposed solution has won acceptance from specialists. This guide explains what the book is, where it came from, why the replica project mattered and how to judge the "solved at last" headlines that appear every few years.
What the Voynich Manuscript actually is
Physically, it is modest: a vellum codex roughly 23.5 by 16 centimetres, about the size of a paperback, with around 240 surviving pages. Some quires are missing, so the book was once longer. Several leaves fold out into larger sheets, the most famous being a big cosmological diagram that opens into a panel of nine circular "rosettes".
Scholars usually split the contents into six parts, based on the pictures rather than the words:
- Herbal – by far the largest section, with one or two plants per page, most of which botanists cannot match to real species.
- Astronomical and astrological – circular charts with suns, moons, stars and figures that resemble zodiac signs.
- Balneological – small nude female figures bathing in pools linked by pipes and tubes.
- Cosmological – medallion diagrams, including the fold-out rosettes.
- Pharmaceutical – drawings of roots and leaves beside objects that look like apothecary jars.
- Recipes – dense pages of short paragraphs, each marked with a little star-like flower.
The writing runs left to right in a smooth, practised hand. It uses roughly two dozen distinct characters that do not belong to any known alphabet, and words are separated by spaces, which already makes it look less like a scrambled cipher and more like a language.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
This page from the "bathing" section shows a chain of tube-like vessels pouring liquid into a green pool crowded with small human figures. Pictures like this have been read as medicine, alchemy, women's health or pure fantasy, which shows how little the images alone can settle.
How old it is, and who owned it
For a long time the book was credited to Roger Bacon, the 13th-century English friar with a reputation for experiments and forbidden knowledge. That idea collapsed in 2009, when the University of Arizona radiocarbon-dated the vellum to between 1404 and 1438. The ink could in theory be younger than the skin it sits on, but analysis of the pigments found nothing out of place for a 15th-century work.
The ownership trail is unusually rich for such an obscure object:
- A 1665–66 letter says Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576–1612) paid 600 ducats for it. The Beinecke treats this as a report rather than proven fact.
- The Prague alchemist Georg Baresch owned it by the 1630s and mailed samples to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, hoping for help with the script.
- Jan Marek Marci inherited the book and sent it to Kircher in Rome; it then sat in Jesuit hands for more than two centuries.
- In 1912 the Polish-born book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought it from the Jesuits at Frascati, near Rome, and made it famous.
- After passing to his widow Ethel and then to Anne Nill, it was sold to the dealer Hans P. Kraus in 1961. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus gave it to Yale in 1969.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Part of the large fold-out from the cosmological section. Its circles of petals, stars and tiny buildings have inspired readings ranging from maps to diagrams of the heavens.
Why the 2016 replicas made news
Because of its fragility, the original is almost never handled. It has left the library only once, for an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2014–15, and researchers must now make a special case to see the real thing. That rarity is what made Siloé's deal remarkable.
Reports in 2016 said the publisher had spent about a decade asking Yale for access. The plan was to print 898 copies at a price reported at around $8,000 each, with about 300 already pre-ordered before production began, and roughly 18 months of work to match the parchment, colours and damage. Siloé's editor Juan José García described the experience of handling the original simply: "Touching the Voynich is an experience."
The copies were never meant to crack the code by themselves. Their value is closer to that of a museum cast: libraries and collectors gain a physical object that shows how the pages are folded, how the colours sit on the vellum and how text and pictures interact, things that are harder to judge on a screen. The Beinecke now keeps both facsimiles in its reading room.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
A typical herbal page: a single invented-looking plant with spiky leaves and odd root structures, framed by short blocks of text. Labels like these looked like an easy route into the script, yet they have not yielded a reliable reading.
Why nobody has deciphered it
Serious attempts go back a long way. During and after the Second World War, the American codebreaker William F. Friedman organised study groups and later an NSA team to work on the text. They produced careful transcriptions but no translation; Friedman came to suspect a constructed, artificial language.
Statistical studies since then point in two directions. Word frequencies roughly follow Zipf's law, the pattern found in natural languages, which suggests real content. On the other hand, the text repeats words far more than ordinary languages do, sometimes three times in a row, and certain characters only occur in fixed positions. In 2003 the psychologist Gordon Rugg showed that very similar-looking gibberish could be produced with a simple table and a cut-out grille, reviving the idea of a hoax.
The novelist Reed Johnson, who spent years on the puzzle, compared it in a 2013 NPR interview to a climbing wall whose handholds turn out to be painted on. That image captures the frustration well: apparent clues, like plant labels, fail to give any grip.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
A wider view across several herbal and pharmaceutical leaves, showing coloured jars and root drawings lined up beside the text.
Myths and "solved" claims to treat with care
Leonardo, aliens and other famous authors
The dating rules out Roger Bacon and makes a young Leonardo da Vinci (born 1452) impossible as the scribe of 1404–1438 vellum. Alien authorship is not a serious hypothesis; the materials are ordinary medieval calfskin and inks.
Headlines announcing a breakthrough
Several claimed solutions have drawn wide coverage. Linguist Stephen Bax proposed a partial reading of a few plant and star names in 2014, offered openly as provisional. Writer Nicholas Gibbs argued in 2017 that the text was abbreviated Latin about women's health; manuscript expert Lisa Fagin Davis responded that the result does not produce Latin that makes sense. Gerard Cheshire's 2019 "proto-Romance" theory was criticised by specialists, and the University of Bristol withdrew its publicity about it.
A good rule of thumb: a real decipherment would let other people read new passages consistently using the same method. Until a proposal passes that test, it is a hypothesis, not a solution.
Is it a hoax?
Possibly, but a hoax would still need explaining: someone in the early 15th century spent a lot of money on vellum and paint to produce over 200 fluent pages. Many researchers now lean toward a real, if unknown, writing system or a deliberately constructed language.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Another herbal leaf, with red flower heads above green leaves and a tangle of roots. The text wraps around the plant, a layout found throughout the book.
How to explore the manuscript yourself
You do not need a facsimile to start. Yale's digital library offers every page in high resolution with a zoom viewer and a bulk download option, and the Beinecke page links to a chemical analysis of the inks and pigments. Begin with the herbal pages to get a feel for the script, then compare the labels in the astronomical section, where the same "words" sometimes appear next to different stars. Community transcriptions, built on Friedman's early work, let you search the text by word.
Above all, enjoy it as a genuine open question. Few objects of its age have stayed this stubbornly private, and every serious attempt to read it has taught researchers something about medieval books, codes and languages along the way.
Sources: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library: Voynich Manuscript; Wikipedia: Voynich manuscript; Smithsonian Magazine (2016): replicas of the Voynich manuscript; NPR (2013): A manuscript that refuses to give up its secrets; original report via ScienceAlert. Images: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Looks like the Codex Seraphinianus
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