Voynich manuscript (4)

http://www.ciphermysteries.com/the-voynich-manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript

Posted by nickpelling on Sep 10th, 2008

The infuriating Voynich Manuscript (A.K.A. “Beinecke MS 408″, or “the VMs”) contains about 240 pages of curious drawings, incomprehensible diagrams and undecipherable handwriting from five centuries ago. Whether a work of genius or madness, it is arguably the ultimate cipher mystery - one of those rare cases where the truth is many times stranger than fiction.
Its last four hundred years of history can be squeezed into eight bullet points (though there’s much more detail here if you’re interested):-

• Circa 1600-1610, it was (very probably) owned by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II
• Circa 1610-1620, it was (very probably) owned by Rudolf II’s “Imperial Distiller” Jacobus z Tepenecz
• Circa 1630-1645, it was owned by (otherwise unknown) German Bohemian alchemist Georg Baresch
• Circa 1645-1665, it was owned by Johannes Marcus Marci of Cronland
• For the next few centuries, it was (almost certainly) owned by Jesuits & moved around Europe
• In 1912, it was bought (probably for peanuts) by dodgy antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid Voynich
• He bequeathed it to his wife Ethel, who bequeathed it to Anne Nill, who sold it to H. P. Kraus in 1961
• In 1969, H. P. Kraus donated it to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

However, if you try to go back any further than that, things quickly get murky. In fact, the list of “very probably true” things we can say about the Voynich Manuscript’s art history is embarrassingly short:-

• The handwriting is most often described as being reminiscent of either Carolingian minuscule (800-1200) or its Italian Quattrocento revival form, the “humanist hand” (circa 1400-1500)
• Several of its drawings have parallel hatching (similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s); so it was probably made after 1410 if from Germany, after 1440 if from Florence, or after 1450 if from elsewhere
• Two owners have added writing in fifteenth century hands; so it was probably made before 1500
• Some marginalia (in the zodiac section) appear to be in Occitan, where the spelling most resembles that known to be from Toulon; so the manuscript probably spent some time in South West France
• There is strong codicological evidence that the current page order and binding differ from the original i.e. that both the folio (leaf) numbers and quire (group) numbers were added at a later date
• A few of its plant drawings do seem to depict actual plants (f2v has a water lily, for example)

It should be pretty clear that we have two quite separate types of historical data here – pre-1500 (codicological) and post-1600 (archival) – with no obvious way of crossing the roughly century-long gap between them. Hence, the list of things we don’t know about the Voynich Manuscript remains awkwardly long:

• We don’t know how it got to the Imperial court circa 1600 (i.e. who sold it to the Emperor)
• We don’t know where it was for the preceding century (apart from the Occitan marginalia hint)
• People used to think it was owned by John Dee, but there is no evidence for this
• People used to think it was a fake/hoax circa 1590, but the dating seems a century too early
• People used to think it was written by Roger Bacon, but the dating seems two centuries too late
• Though its text (“Voynichese”) resembles a simple “monoalphabetic” cipher, it’s far more complex
• Though its ‘herbal’ drawings do resemble plants, most cannot be solidly identified
• Nobody can definitively date it
• Nobody can definitively place it
• Nobody can definitively attribute it to any author or group or milieu
• Nobody can definitively say what it contains

And, most importantly…

• Nobody can read a single word of it

Putting all the factuality to one side, most VMs accounts fail to mention the sheer intellectual romance of such a substantial mystery object, the tragi-comedy of all the mad theories surrounding it, let alone the blood-spattered trail of ruined reputations and wasted lives dripping behind this inscrutable “Sphinx”. For centuries, it has been little more than a blank screen for people to project their own demented historical / cryptological / novelistic fantasies onto, or if not that then an academic cliff to throw your hard-earned reputation over: yet recently there are signs that a few people are (at long last) starting to look at the VMs with (relatively) clear eyes. Better late than never, I suppose.
Arguably the biggest question to face up to is this: when people try to understand the VMs, why does it all go so wrong? I suspect that this confusion arises from the central paradox of the Voynich Manuscript – the way that its text resembles some unknown (perhaps lost, secret, or private) simple language while simultaneously exhibiting many of the properties you might expect to see of a complex ciphertext (i.e. an enciphered text). Any proposed explanation should therefore not only bridge the century-long historical gap, but also demonstrate why the VMs appears both ‘languagey’ and ‘ciphery’ at the same time.
To illustrate this, here are some practical examples of the way Voynichese letters ‘dance’ to a tricky set of structural rules. Individual letter-shapes frequently occur…

• …as the first letter of a page (e.g. the ornate “gallows” letters, EVA “t”, “k”, “p”, “f”)
• …as the first letter of a paragraph (e.g. EVA “t”, “k”, “p”, “f”)
• …as the first letter of a line (e.g. EVA “s”)
• …as the last letter of a line (e.g. EVA “m” or “am”)
• …as the first letter of a word (e.g. EVA “qo”)
• …as the last letter of a word (e.g. EVA “y” or “dy”)
• …as separated pairs on the top line of a page (e.g. EVA “p” or “f”)
• …as a paired letter (e.g. EVA “ol”, “or”, “al”, “ar”)
• …unrepeated, except in EVA “ee” / “eee” / “ii” / “iii” sets.

…and so on. From a code-breaker’s point of view, this basically rules out Renaissance polyalphabetic ciphers, because they use multiple alphabets (or offsets into alphabets) to destroy the outward signs of internal structure – and what we see here has even more signs of internal structure than normal languages. Yet just to be confusing, some of the letter-shapes resemble shorthand both in their shape and their apparent position.
So… is ‘Voynichese’ a language, a shorthand, a cipher, or perhaps some carefully-orchestrated jumble of all three? Right now, nobody can say – but I suspect that it is this ‘hard-to-pin-down-ness’ that has managed to keep the Voynich’s mystery alive for all this time.