The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets.
Lisa Fagin Davis was starting her medieval-studies Ph.D. at Yale in 1989 when she got a part-time job at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her boss was the curator of early books and manuscripts, and he stuck her with an unenviable duty: answering letters from the cranks, conspiracists, and truthers who hounded the library with questions about its most popular holding.
In the library catalog, the book, a parchment codex the size of a hardcover novel, had a simple, colorless title: “Cipher Manuscript.” But newspapers tended to call it the “Voynich Manuscript,” after the rare-books dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it from a Jesuit collection in Italy around 1912. An heir sold the manuscript to another dealer, who donated it to Yale in 1969.
Davis grew up in Oklahoma City, transfixed by the fantasy worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. When the Beinecke curator first showed her the Voynich Manuscript, she thought, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Its 234 pages contained some 38,000 words, but not one of them was readable. The book’s unnamed author had written it, likely with a quill pen, in symbols never before seen. Did they represent a natural language, such as Latin? A constructed language, like Esperanto? A secret code? Gibberish? Scholars had no real idea. To Davis, however, the manuscript felt alive-with-meaning.
Flowering through the indecipherable script were otherworldly illustrations: strange, prehistoric-looking plants with leaves in dreamy geometries; oversize pages that folded out to reveal rosettes, zodiacs, stars, the cosmos; lists of apparent medicinal formulas alongside drawings of herbs and spindly bottles. Most striking of all were the illustrations of groups of naked women. They held stars on strings, like balloons, or stood in green pools fed by trickling ducts and by pipes that looked like fallopian tubes. Many of the women, arms outstretched, seemed less to be bathing than working, as plumbers in some primordial waterworks. Although the book’s parchment and pigments looked medieval, the drawings of the women had no close cultural parallel, in any era. Even the plants, which appeared to have the stems of one species and the roots of another, resisted identification.
Davis, then 23 years old, with a rosy sense of the world’s knowability, wanted to figure out what the Voynich Manuscript was, what it meant and where it came from, but people in her field saw the Voynich as a waste of time, a house-of-curiosities, and a gewgaw unworthy of the serious scholar, especially when so many legible manuscripts begged for study. In any case, scholars had already tried. The manuscript had reeled them in with what one cryptanalyst called a “surface appearance of simplicity”. The letters that looked glancingly Latin, words that repeated with language-like regularity, and handwriting that had the easy flow of a long-established script. But Renaissance-era intellectuals, Ivy League professors, and spy-agency code breakers, including William Friedman who cracked Japan’s World War II “Purple” cipher before becoming the National Security Agency’s chief cryptographer, all toiled in vain to unlock the Voynich’s secrets. So many headline-making “solutions” had been debunked over the years that the text had earned a reputation, in the words of a Beinecke librarian, as “the place where academic careers go to die.”
For all anyone knew, the manuscript was nothing more than the ravings of a lunatic, or a hoax to dupe some fool into paying a fortune for it. In his magisterial history of code breaking, the writer David Kahn called the Voynich “the longest, the best known, the most tantalizing, the most heavily attacked, the most resistant” of cryptographic puzzles. H. P. Kraus, the dealer who donated the manuscript to Yale, once likened it to the mythical Sphinx, “its lair strewn with the bones of those who failed to solve the riddle, and still awaiting the Oedipus who will give the right answer.”
Davis earned her Ph.D. in 1993. Then, in 2014, the Medieval Academy of America hired her as its executive director. She became the public face of a field that wanted little to do with the Voynich. But the Voynich wasn’t done with her.
Davis knew well the Voynich’s reputation as a career killer, but eventually she’d reached a point in her own career where she felt that she could take the risk. If she wanted to dignify the manuscript as worthy of serious scholarship, she realized, she would need to be more than just a critic. Davis is an elected member of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine, a prestigious guild of the world’s top paleographers and codicologists – experts in, by turns, ancient handwriting and the physical properties of old books. Of the Paris-based society’s 67 members, Davis is one of only four to be admitted from the United States.
She had never conducted a paleographic study of an illegible manuscript, and she wasn’t sure at first that she could. She couldn’t use the Voynich’s handwriting style to place or date it, because there was nothing in history to compare it to. Nor could she avail herself of the most basic paleographic skill: making sense of a scribe’s letterforms, abbreviations, and punctuation – the skill, that is, of reading. How could you read something whose alphabet lacked any known precedent? That left a single, slim line of attack: counting the manuscript’s hands. Even if a language was unreadable, a good paleographer could spot small, stylistic differences, distinguishing one scribe from the next. After months of analysis, she concluded that even if the Voynich had a single guiding vision, it was the handiwork of five different scribes She also concluded that it was meant to be used, not just viewed as a curiosity.
Davis presented her findings at the medieval-studies conference and published them in 2020 in the journal Manuscript Studies. She had hardly solved the Voynich, but she’d opened it to new kinds of investigation. If five scribes had come together to write it, the manuscript was probably the work of a community, rather than of a single deranged mind or con artist. Why the community used its own language, or code, remains a mystery. Whether it was a cloister of alchemists, or mad monks, or a group like the medieval Béguines, a secluded order of Christian women, definitely required more study. Also, the marks of frequent use signaled that the manuscript served some routine, perhaps daily function.
But what if the Voynich remains unsolvable? What if the manuscript is in some sense smarter than us all, its anonymous author, or authors, laughing from the grave at the hubris of reason?
At times Davis, too, still feels the tug of the manuscript’s ineffable magic. The Voynich is “not imaginary,” Davis has said. “It’s an actual object, it exists in space and time, it has a history, it has physical characteristics, and because of that, it has a true story. We just don’t know what that true story is yet.”
