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The mediæval Voynich Manuscript has been pored over by generations of scholars, alchemists and cryptographers – and the essays alongside the facsimile only emphasise its enduring mystery

The Voynich Manuscript Ed. Raymond Clemens Yale University Press 2016 Hb, facsimile + essays, ind, US$50, ISBN 9780300217230

However much you’ve read about it before, two things come as a surprise when you first see the Voynich Manuscript – or (for most of us) a quality facsimile. First, how small and tatty it is; second, how quickly you become utterly mesmerised by its contents. Scholar Deborah Harkness mentions in her introduction to this facsimile that when she saw the Voynich MS, “at first glimpse it was oddly anticlimactic: small, worn and drab outside; cramped and confusing inside, with tiny handwriting and sprawling imagery”.

It must be the most famous book-that-no-one-has-a-clue-whatit’s-about in the world. There’s over 100 pages of botanical drawings, with text; the plants aren’t identifiable, and the text isn’t decipherable. Then there are pages of what appear to be astronomical and/or astrological drawings, but again the star patterns aren’t identifiable. And then there are pages of detailed text, with marginal drawings of women in baths, and odd pipework. Then we’re back to plants, but with what appear, perhaps, to be recipes rather than just descriptive text. The final section is about 30 pages of short individual statements (sayings? aphorisms? verses?) rather than continuous text, with a small star (or flower?) in the margin before each one.

There are so many questions about the Voynich MS. Who wrote it? And why? What on earth is the script it’s written in? Is it actually a language in itself, or a symbol-transcription of another language – in which case which? What are the plants in all the detailed botanical drawings? And what is going on with the drawings of naked women in baths…? Basically, what the hell is it all about?

Many hands have held the book, says Harkness, “mathematicians, botanists, alchemists, cryptographers, clerics, university professors – yet none of them have managed convincingly to solve its mysteries”.

This facsimile is from Yale University, which now owns the manuscript. The page size (12" x 9", 330mm x 230mm) is quite a bit larger than that of the manuscript (8½–9" x 6", 215–230mm x 150mm). One wishes the facsimile could have physically looked like a facsimile, but that would have been impractical; the original pages aren’t all quite the same size and some of them are torn. Full marks to the publishers, designers and printers for including a number of fold-out pages, some double- or triple-width or double-height; one, unfolded, is nearly six times the size of the book. These pages are impressive; they must have been a production nightmare.

So what do we learn from the collection of scholarly essays – the first since 1978 – accompanying this facsimile? We now know that the parchment has been carbon-dated to 1404–38. This rules out Voynich’s own favourite origin theory, that the 13th-century monk-scientist Roger Bacon was the author; he also thought that John Dee owned it at one point, apparently basing this on no more evidence than an historical novel. There’s some provenance in correspondence from the early 17th century, in which the then owner of the MS asked the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher if he could decipher it; Kircher looked at a few pages and said no.

The essays don’t “propose any new theories for unravelling the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript”. One looks at the earliest known owners, up to the Jesuits who Voynich bought it from in 1912. There’s no proof that John Dee ever had anything to do with it, but in the 16th century it was certainly at the court of Emperor Rudolf II of Prague, who was fascinated equally by art and alchemy; ultra-violet photography reveals the faded signature of his imperial chemist on the first page. (There’s a long technical essay on the physical state of the MS: its makeup, parchment, ink etc.)

Another essay explores Wilfrid Michael Voynich (1864–1930) himself; he came from a Polish family living in Lithuania, and seems to have been a bit of a rogue. He was imprisoned in Warsaw, exiled to Siberia, on the run in Mongolia. He hung out with Russian revolutionary groups in London and (after 10 years of cohabiting) married Ethel Boole, daughter of the creator of Boolean algebra, who became a successful novelist. Voynich opened his first antiquarian bookshop in Soho Square in 1898, moving to larger premises in Shaftesbury Avenue in 1905. The Voynich MS was one of several he bought from the Jesuit Collegio Romano; he sold all the rest of them, but described the MS as the “ugly duckling”, still unsold at the time of his death. Thirty years later it was sold to a mediævalist book dealer who, after seven years failing to sell it himself, donated it to a library at Yale University.

Another looks at the sofar fruitless attempts by cryptanalysts to crack the supposed cypher; “the best book-length introduction to ‘this elegant enigma’ was written by [a] government cryptologist… and published in-house by the US National Security Agency” – America’s equivalent of Britain’s GCHQ.

One of the most interesting essays compares the Voynich MS with alchemical works, in which illustrations sometimes show a man and a woman bathing, to illustrate the dissolution of gold and silver in a solvent – but the illustrations in the Voynich MS are predominantly of several women bathing, so the usual alchemical meaning is unlikely.

The Voynich MS has not only inspired generations of enthusiasts dedicated to deciphering it – none with any success – but also works of fiction and music. And this fascination continues; as editor Raymond Clemens writes, “it is likely to be one of the most viewed and discussed artefacts from the mediæval period, perhaps second only to the Shroud of Turin”. This beautiful facsimile will make it available for many more people to become enticed and entranced by it.

“Voynich’s origin theory was that monk-scientist Roger Bacon was the author”