Academic cracks the code of mysterious Voynich manuscript

An academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed – by cracking the code of one of the world’s most mysterious texts, the Voynich manuscript.

Although the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars for over a century, it took Dr Gerard Cheshire two weeks, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity.

The Voynich manuscript is a medieval, handwritten and illustrated text that has been carbon-dated to the mid-15th Century. It is named after Wilfrid M Voynich, a Polish book dealer and antiquarian, who purchased the manuscript in 1912.

It is currently housed at Yale University in Connecticut where it is filed as item MS408 in the Beinecke library of rare books and manuscripts. Among those who have famously attempted to crack the code are Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park.

The FBI also had a go during the Cold War, apparently thinking it may have been Communist propaganda.

Dr Cheshire, a research associate at Bristol University, described how he successfully deciphered the manuscript’s codex and at the same time revealed the only known example of proto-Romance language.

Proto-Romance, ancestral to today’s Romance languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in official documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government.

The next step is to use this knowledge to translate the entire manuscript and compile a lexicon.

A map from the manuscript.