A new approach to the Voynich Manuscript

August 11, 2024 4:20 PM

Everyone's favorite mystery text, the Voynich Manuscript, is finally getting careful attention from leading medievalists

The Voynich Manuscript (previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, and previously)
is a mysterious 15th century text held at Yale's Beineke Library. Despite the efforts of generations of scholars, nobody has yet been able to to deceipher its alphabet and figure out just what it's about. The manuscript has become a favorite obsession of legions of would-be cryptographers, historical linguists, and especially cranks and conspiracy theorists. Because of this, very few trained medievalists have given it careful study, shying away from the text because of its reputation as "the place where academic careers go to die." Now, however, Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, has turned her attention the manuscript, seeking not to deceipher it but to analyse its material qualities -- the scribal hands that wrote the text, the parchment upon which the words and drawings were created, and more. The results are exciting, and open up new ways of understanding this celebrated book.

posted by pleasant_confusion (20 comments total)

I haven’t been able to read this article, but I can absolutely vouch for Dr. Davis and her knowledge of Voynich. It’s been the subject of innumerable “solutions” ranging from dubious to crackpot, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t real scholarly work to be done with it.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:44 PM on August 11 [2 favorites]

Oops, sorry. I used https://12ft.io/proxy to get past the paywayll.
posted by pleasant_confusion at 4:56 PM on August 11 [2 favorites]

I was frightened this was going to be a "so we ran the Voynich Manuscript through ChatGPT and--" and was so happy that it was not, in fact, that! (But not for lack of trying!) What a fascinating article!
posted by mittens at 5:24 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]

That was interesting, thanks for posting. The 12ft link doesn't work for me, but the article is on the Internet Archive.
posted by paduasoy at 5:25 PM on August 11 [7 favorites]

“Oh my God! You did it! Here’s a cookie!”

🍪
posted by HearHere at 7:16 PM on August 11 [2 favorites]

Nice post!
I had completely forgotten about this, and now I want a facsimile of the manuscript. Though mostly, it reminds me of the art some people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia make, which is not a bad thing. I'm sure there were people with mental health issues in the 15th century, and maybe if their family was rich and powerful, they could be allowed to sit somewhere and make a book.
posted by mumimor at 1:06 AM on August 12 [2 favorites]

Mod note: [Hi, Voynich fans! This persistent mystery has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!]
posted by taz (staff) at 3:09 AM on August 12 [3 favorites]

Lisa Fagin Davis makes a persuasive case, based on palaeographical evidence, that there were no less than five scribes involved in copying the manuscript. (Academic paper, conference paper (pdf), YouTube presentation.) Even if this doesn't get us much closer to actually reading the damn thing, it's a big advance in our understanding of it. I like mumimor's theory that it's the work of some medieval schizophrenic (like Opicinus de Canastris, maybe?) 'sitting somewhere and making a book', but that's not what the evidence suggests. Whatever the manuscript may be, it's a collaborative production, not just the work of a single person.

As one of the contributors to the 2016 facsimile edition, it came as a nice surprise to learn from this article that it's sold 55,000 copies (that's at least 20x more than anything else I've ever written or published), even if it does make me wish I'd asked for royalties rather than a one-off fee ..
posted by verstegan at 3:49 AM on August 12 [22 favorites]

verstegan, how generous of you to participate in the discussion! So nice to meet someone who actually knows what they are writing about.

Unlike me, I was literally just saying the first thing that came out of my mind without knowing anything about the manuscript or the research. So that is that. I did read the article, though, and noticed the "five hands" thesis, and I read the conference paper you linked to (thanks again). And while I'm not going to cling to my unfounded theory, I will note that people with mental health issues -- and not just those with a schizophrenia diagnosis -- can have wildly different handwriting styles, well within the range Dr. Davis describes.

What I am saying is that it might be interesting to widen the range of disciplines involved in these studies even further. I also noted the lack of contemporary art historians which is odd given that the drawings are both unusual and stunning. There is a whole field of research out there including both psychiatrists and art historians who know something about the art of mental health patients, it would be so interesting to see how they analyse the manuscript.
posted by mumimor at 6:54 AM on August 12 [2 favorites]

I love Davis' result because it seems so solid. And informative. The Atlantic article does a great job describing the crankery that surrounds the manuscript. And the toxic masculinity, unfortunately.

I tinkered with the Voynich a bit back in the 90s when computer analysis of text was a novel idea. It's a fun puzzle for cryptographers with a great mystery story and cool illustrations. Of course I never got anywhere but I remember being very excited to discover some diagrams or something. It's a fun thing to play with.

My belief is it's a medieval forgery. The information it's from five different hands doesn't really seem to be evidence for or against that hypothesis.
posted by Nelson at 8:05 AM on August 12

One of the more interesting details that doesn't get mentioned a lot is that the manuscript contains no corrections. Not once did any of the five(?) transcribers write the wrong character, then scrape it off or scribble it out. That's basically unheard of in actual texts. You can interpret that in lots of ways, but it's unusual.

My favorite theory is that it's basically someone's weird art project, and they would be thrilled to know that people are still arguing about it.
posted by echo target at 8:20 AM on August 12 [7 favorites]

verstegan, I had no idea a MeFite was one of the contributors to that book! I lectured about the Voynich last year for our university lifelong learning program, and your book was our textbook. Many thanks.
posted by ikahime at 10:04 AM on August 12 [2 favorites]

The crankery that swirls around the Voynich Manuscript is part of what makes it so interesting. One of the most recent would-be sleuths, Gerard Cheshire, made international headlines in 2019 when he claimed to have finally decoded the text with some very dodgy historical linguistics. Despite his near unanimous dismissal by the entire scholarly community, he still pops up about once a year on the various email lists and discussion fora for medieval and early modern Iberian studies, doggedly flogging his theories in a continuous stream of articles. I've come to look forward to these posts and rather admire his persistence and willingess to charge on ahead, actual facts or even historical plausibility be damned. But I'm even more excited about the new direction that scholars like Davis are taking the manuscript. It's a great example of what the so-called Material Turn can do with difficult materials or topics that seem exhausted or played out.
posted by pleasant_confusion at 10:48 AM on August 12 [1 favorite]

Dr. Davis taught one of my library school classes, and before our final presentations we were served sugar cookies with voynich symbols printed on the frostings. It didn’t lower my opinion of her as a medievalist.
posted by Hypatia at 11:58 AM on August 12 [10 favorites]

I dimly recall some of the character-level analysis finding that the statistics of the letters or n-grams were different in different sections of the manuscript. Do those symbol-level differences line up with five scribes' hands identified in Davis' work? Or maybe I misremember the symbolic analysis.
posted by Nelson at 2:14 PM on August 12

This was so interesting. Thanks for the post.
posted by fruitslinger at 2:43 PM on August 12

echo target: Could it be that there are corrections that we don't recognise? Some kind of punctum delens that looks integrated with the script, e.g. maybe the upward swashes? … at least that could be tested with n-gram statistics.

Nelson: That sounds like Currier's two "languages", in which case yes (p. 179): four scribes write in one, the fifth in the other.
posted by finka at 10:33 PM on August 12 [1 favorite]

I want a facsimile of the manuscript.

(Yale has the entirety online if you want to take a crack at it. The 2017 book is surprisingly affordable)
posted by BWA at 5:10 AM on August 13 [3 favorites]

Thank you finka, that is what I was thinking of. For posterity here's the relevant paragraph from the linked paper

It was Currier who first determined that Scribe 1 writes in Dialect A and that Scribe 2 writes in Dialect B. The other three scribes I have identified—3, 4, and 5—also use Dialect B, at least according to the tests developed by Currier. I have sent my preliminary results to a professor of linguistics who is running several different linguistical analyses on the Voynich as part of a long- term class project and her own research. I have suggested that the work of the five scribes be analyzed separately to look for patterns that may distinguish them further. The preliminary results of these analyses are forthcoming

Here's older info on Currier's two languages. Currier also wrote on scribes hands.

A closer examination of many sections of the manuscript revealed to me that there were not only two different hands; there were, in fact, only two languages, but perhaps as many as eight or a dozen different identifiable hands. Some of these distinctions may be illusory, but in the majority of cases I feel that they are valid.

My memory from Voynichology is that Currier is not a crank. He did a lot of cryptography-informed work in the 70s and is responsible for one common transliteration of the manuscript into ASCII characters. Interesting that Davis' work more or less lines up with Currier's analysis.
posted by Nelson at 10:20 AM on August 13

My favorite theory is that it's basically someone's weird art project, and they would be thrilled to know that people are still arguing about it.

xkcd's Randall Munroe had an idea along very similar lines.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 4:39 PM on August 13 [1 favorite]