The Voynich manuscript is a medieval book unlike any other. It remains a mystery, continues to keep its secrets intact, teasing scholars, linguists, codebreakers, and machines alike.
The book is so mysterious that the vast majority of its contents are incomprehensible to this day. It is a true enigma with endless possible explanations and even more conspiracy theories about its origins.
Now catalogued as Beinecke MS 408 at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the manuscript received its modern name from Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-Lithuanian bookseller who bought it in 1912. Radiocarbon testing of the book's calfskin dates its parchment to the early fifteenth century, from approximately 1404 to 1438. That means whatever the text says is at least from the late medieval period and is more than 600 years old.
Roughly 240 pages survive, with some being fold-outs. The sections are initially arranged to look familiar, then completely change. There are botanical pages featuring plants that resemble European species but also combine leaves, roots, and flowers in unusual ways, making them difficult to distinguish and determine if they are real or not.
Additionally, there are astronomical and cosmological diagrams, zodiac wheels, what appear to be bathing scenes with women in green pools, then pages that read like apothecary notes, and finally dense blocks of short "recipes" that no one knows what they describe.
The script is what makes this book a true scholarly provocation. It flows left to right in neat lines, built from about two dozen core glyphs with occasional tall characters that rise above the others like scaffolding. It appears to be a serious language written by a trained medieval writer, as it resembles other renowned manuscripts. All details are familiar: the ruling lines are visible, and the pigments and ink match what you would expect from a European workshop of the time. However, not a single word is understood.
The paper trail of the Voynich manuscript's history is thin but suggestive about its origins. In the seventeenth century, the manuscript was in circles connected to the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher in Rome. It was brought there through networks that stretched from Prague to the Papal States of the time. Earlier rumours linked it to the English friar Roger Bacon, an attribution now rejected by most historians. Despite that, this shows that people have always wanted the book to be the work of a famous mind who tried to trick everyone else.
Every attempt to read the text brings the reader into a paradox. Statistically, it behaves like a real language. Its word lengths, distributions, and repetitions follow patterns observed in natural speech, with common words frequently appearing and rare words occurring sporadically. Two broad "dialects" have been identified by experts who have studied the text extensively. As they are not connected to any of the known languages of this world, they are nicknamed Currier A and Currier B after the researcher who first noticed them.
These two "dialects" differ in letter and word frequencies. That is precisely the kind of variation you expect when a text is written by more than one scribe or compiled over time. Yet every proposed decipherment fails to reveal its secrets.
If you treat it as a simple substitution cipher, the letter frequencies you will get make no sense. Treat it as a medieval hoax, and you must explain how a prankster, working long before modern statistics and linguistic science, generated page after page of a text that obeys consistent rules, never descends into nonsense, and still defeats contemporary tools of deciphering.
World-class cryptanalysts, including figures associated with twentieth-century codebreaking, tried to solve its mystery without success. In our century, machine-learning models have been trained on the script, with some (Hauer & Kondrak) claiming that they can see patterns of Hebrew. Other artificial intelligence models, however, assert that it is a constructed language designed for the sake of privacy. None has delivered a translation that scholars can test across multiple pages with consistent results, making it all the more of a mystery.
Even the drawings have something peculiar about them. The zodiac includes labels that look Latin in style yet float freely from the surrounding script, as if more than one system of notation is at work. The baths have pipes and vessels that resemble practical diagrams, yet they do not correspond neatly to any known medical handbooks. The botanicals borrow medieval visual habits yet splice them into hybrids.
The result is a manuscript that is not about medicine, astronomy, or natural philosophy. It may be a women's health manual. It may be an encyclopaedia for a private circle. It could be anything. We don't know. What we can say with confidence is that it belongs to a moment when European scholars stitched together knowledge from many traditions and when secrecy was a widespread method of keeping a group's information or knowledge well-protected.
This is why the manuscript is not just a riddle but a true scientific peculiarity. It is a record of how medieval people used information, coded it for insiders, and imagined the world. The unanswered questions tell us as much as any translation might. If the text turns out to be a cleverly constrained system rather than a direct cipher, it would show us how writers engineered such a code. If it turns out to be a genuine language as yet unidentified, it would expand our map of how Europeans wrote and preserved specialist knowledge on the cusp of print.
Historians use the Voynich manuscript today to trace networks that connected Prague, Rome, and beyond. The same cultural trends were seen in the Byzantine world and the eastern Mediterranean, where scholars translated, glossed, and compiled texts for centuries. Cryptographers use it as a stress test for methods that often excel on modern ciphers but struggle when confronted with the unknown information of the past.
The Mediterranean context also matters for this particular manuscript. The fifteenth century was a time of great change and movement, encompassing everything from manuscripts and pigments to physicians and astronomers. Greece and its neighbors saw mass migration to the West due to the advances of the Ottomans, bringing a lot of new information to the academic circles and elites of central and Western Europe.