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Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds over 100,000 priceless books and historical documents. According to the library, it's home to one of the largest and most dynamic collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world. You would think that the collection's prized item would be its Gutenberg Bible from around 1454. The Bible is famously one of the West's first printed works.
But a different text in the stacks has proven to be one of the collection's biggest draws. Item MS-408. The Voynich Manuscript. Over 200 vellum pages contain indecipherable writing and peculiar illustrations. It has called Beinecke Library home for over 50 years. Since its modern discovery, no one has managed to decode the manuscript. They don't even know who wrote it.
Is the Voynich Manuscript a catalog of long-forgotten scientific knowledge? Do the encrypted pages contain secrets to understanding our world or even our universe? Or is it possible that the Voynich Manuscript is a 500-year-old hoax specifically designed to baffle linguists and codebreakers alike? Is the secret of the Voynich Manuscript simply that there is no secret?
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The Voynich Manuscript is 240 vellum pages of bizarre writing and strange illustrations of plants, animals, astrological symbols, and more. The writing is aligned to the left margin, which traditionally implies a Western language. However, the writing patterns defy traditional code-breaking techniques. There are no words of fewer than two characters, nor any longer than ten.
There's also no discernible punctuation marking where sentences begin and end. The illustrations are their own mystery. The plants depicted in the Voynich manuscript don't resemble any known botanical specimens, historical or modern. From start to finish, the book is confounding. And despite multiple attempts by different teams of codebreakers and scholars,
no one has been able to provide any definitive explanations of the Voynich Manuscript. The first widely publicized study was conducted in the mid-1920s by William Romain Newbold. His findings were published posthumously under the title "The Cipher of Roger Bacon." While Newbold is often credited with connecting the medieval philosopher Roger Bacon to the manuscript, it is likely that he was fed Bacon's name by someone else.
Wilfred Voynich, the rare book dealer who purchased the book from a Renaissance-era Italian estate and gave the manuscript its name. When the Voynich manuscript was first exhibited to the public in 1915, it was presented as "An Unsolved Cipher Manuscript by Roger Bacon, 13th Century."
Newbold's subsequent research was influenced by what he already suspected, that it was written by Roger Bacon. Newbold also claimed he'd cracked the manuscript's code, but his methods were incredibly dense and nearly as hard to understand as its source material. Looking at his writing today, his theory seems like a series of reckless leaps in logic to prove a conclusion he'd already made.
Newbold's work was discredited in 1931 by philologist John Matthews Manley. Ever since then, the connection between the Voynich manuscript and Roger Bacon has been accepted by historians with a hefty grain of salt. Newbold's findings have been discredited. But what if he was right about the connection to Roger Bacon, and it was just his methodology that was off?
Roger Bacon lived from roughly 1220 to 1292. Over the course of his life, he made extensive contributions to the fields of mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, and alchemy. Among his many accolades is the recipe for gunpowder. The substance had previously only existed in China, and Bacon's research helped introduce it to Europe.
In his work Opus Magus, Bacon described a device that used refractive lenses to enhance eyesight. He may well have invented eyeglasses. He could also read, write, and speak in many languages. He published alchemical studies of metals, their origins, and their qualities. He also wrote hypotheses about the potential existence of a philosopher's stone.
Alchemy was highly controversial at the time, as many officials in the church viewed it as tantamount to sorcery or black magic. Bacon made it one of his life's missions to showcase that alchemy was a purely scientific endeavor with no occult connotations. Later in life, Bacon joined the Catholic Church as a friar. Even then, he continued his scientific pursuits,
Bacon believed that academic understanding of geology, biology, and astrology helped us better understand ourselves and the natural world, therefore bringing us closer to God. Bacon's resume is vital to understanding his possible connection to the Voynich manuscript. Bacon was well-versed in a number of subjects. He could have written at length about any of them.
This is important to note because the Voynich manuscript has long been suspected as being some kind of instructional text. Bacon was a linguist and likely was able to translate and transcribe at a fast pace. Bacon had knowledge of astronomy and alchemy, both of which would seem to be relevant to the Voynich manuscript based on the illustrations that are included within it.
It's not a stretch to assume that Roger Bacon could have devised a bizarre code or even his own language. Only he or those he trusted would have been able to translate it. But just because Roger Bacon could have written the Voynich Manuscript doesn't mean that he did. Knowing what we do about Roger Bacon, we are still left with one major question. Why would Bacon want to write a manuscript like this?
During his lifetime, and for centuries after his death, Roger Bacon was associated with secret or forbidden knowledge. Alchemy, in particular, was a field of much suspicion and doubt among the more religious-minded Europeans of the 13th century. Many alchemists were compared to wizards. Adding flame to the fire was Bacon's association with the device known as a brazen head.
A brazen head, or a necromantic head, was an automated mechanical sculpture made of brass or bronze. According to some accounts, it was something akin to a man-made genie, which could correctly answer yes or no questions. In some interpretations, the head is possessed by an evil spirit associated with dark, forbidden, or twisted magic.
Now, as a side note, it isn't known if Roger Bacon actually built such a device. Rather, it was a 16th century play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which featured a fictionalized Roger Bacon who built a magical brazen head. But it's still assumed that Roger Bacon experimented with necromancy and other forms of unexplainable magic.
Therefore, he may have had some kind of secret or arcane knowledge that he wanted to conceal within a cipher. Perhaps he chronicled it in the Voynich Manuscript. This seems like conjecture. In 2009, 40 years after it was first donated to Yale University, the Voynich Manuscript underwent carbon dating.
Dr. Gregory Hodgins oversaw a team at the University of Arizona to determine the age of the document. Radiocarbon dating is a process by which carbon isotopes within organic material are dated. Recall that the Voynich manuscript is written on vellum, a form of medieval paper made from calfskin or animal membrane. When all was said and done,
The team was 95% certain that the pages were between 571 and 605 years old. That means it was likely written between 1404 and 1438. That's over a century after Roger Bacon died in 1292.
Now, this is a relatively new development in the saga of the manuscript. Since this kind of technology didn't exist in the 1920s, it does make sense why people like Newbold would connect the bizarre manuscript to someone like Roger Bacon.
It seems likely that Wilford Voynich somehow got fixated on the idea of Roger Bacon being connected to his manuscript and just couldn't get that thought out of his head. Then he passed that notion on to Newbold, who cemented the idea with his publication, The Cipher of Roger Bacon. But this brings up a new question entirely. If Roger Bacon didn't write the Voynich manuscript, who did?
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From its unveiling in the 1910s, the Voynich manuscript was associated with philosopher and linguist Roger Bacon. However, carbon dating performed in 2009 proved that the 600-year-old tome was likely written over a century after Bacon's death. But even if Bacon wasn't involved, there is still much we can surmise of the manuscript's suspected history.
With the information and technology available in his lifetime, Wilfred Voynich would have had no way to determine the exact date of the manuscript's creation. But one still wonders where he got the idea of Bacon's authorship in the first place. Well, now we have an answer. When Wilfred first purchased the manuscript, he found a letter, written in Latin, tucked away between the pages. It read,
"Reverend and distinguished sir, Father in Christ, this book bequeathed to me by an intimate friend I destined for you, my very dear Athanasius, as soon as it came into my possession, for I was convinced it could be read by no one except yourself. The former owner of this book once asked your opinion by letter. Accept now this token.
Dr. Raphael, tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, then king of Bohemia, told me the said book had belonged to the Emperor Rudolf and that he presented the bear who brought him the book 600 ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon, the Englishman.
On this point, I suspend judgment at the command of Your Reverence Johannes Marcus Marchi, Prague, 19th August, 1665.
This letter implies that at some point in the late 16th or early 17th century, the Voynich Manuscript was owned by Emperor Rudolf II, King of Bohemia, King of Hungary, Archduke of Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor. He is now regarded with some level of controversy. Some blame his poor rule for the Thirty Years' War that wracked Europe during the early 17th century.
Others credit him with supporting scientific advancement and learning that eventually gave way to the scientific revolution. It's the latter association that makes Rudolph a viable candidate for ownership of the Voynich manuscript. It's likely that during the Middle Ages, the document was seen as some kind of encrypted scientific treatise. This letter also seems to be the genesis of the Roger Bacon authorship theory,
So Wilford Voynich read this letter, assumed that Rudolf II knew what he was talking about, and thus spent the rest of his life trying to prove that the old emperor was correct. The message, if legitimate, makes Rudolf II the first confirmed historical owner of the Voynich manuscript. What's more, it establishes a paper trail that we can try to unravel to learn more about the document's history.
If true, then Rudolph II had to have purchased the Voynich manuscript from an unknown person. He would then have bequeathed it to someone after his death. So, let's try to determine where Rudolph II got the manuscript. The message that Voynich found indicated that Rudolph purchased the book for 600 ducats, a little less than $100,000 today.
Wilfred Voynich proposed that alchemist John Dee sold the manuscript to Rudolf II. Dee was a Welsh philosopher and mathematician who lived at the same time as Rudolf. He was known to collect works that were written by or associated with Roger Bacon. Given that Wilfred was convinced Bacon had written the manuscript, it tracks that he would assume John Dee had the document at some point before selling it to Rudolf.
The next question is: Who received the manuscript after Rudolf passed away in 1612? Let's consider the author of this letter, Johannes Marcus Marquis. Marquis was a doctor from Bohemia, or modern-day Czech Republic, who served as the royal physician to the Holy Roman Emperors in the early to mid-17th century. Marquis was only 17 in 1612 when Rudolf II died,
So it's unlikely he ever worked directly for the man, but he came into possession of the Voynich manuscript at some point in the decades after Rudolph II's death. Marquis was a renowned doctor and scientist during his lifetime. Like Roger Bacon, he devoted a good amount of effort to the study of optics and even predated Sir Isaac Newton in proposing the theory that color was a result of modified light.
All this is to say that Marquis was an incredibly intelligent and famed scientist. He studied the fields of science that many suspect are described in the manuscript. And yet, there's no record of Marquis ever trying to decipher the text himself.
It is possible that he simply didn't log his attempts so as not to immortalize potential failures. All we know is that in 1665, he gave it to his friend and colleague, Athanasius Kircher. Kircher was a renowned Jesuit scholar who, like Bacon and Marquis, was a polymath and expert in a number of scientific, historical, and literary fields. Among those specialties was linguistics.
His extensive knowledge of current and old languages made him one of the most skilled translators and codecrackers of his time. If anyone in the 17th century could figure out what the Voynich manuscript actually said, it was Kircher. But when he died in 1680, the manuscript remained unsolved.
It then presumably remained among Kircher's other writings and texts at the Collegio Romano and stayed there after he died. After that, we lose the thread of where the Voynich manuscript went until it reappeared in 1912 at Villa Mondragone.
There are some holes in the timeline that links the manuscript through the people we just listed. According to Wilfred, when he first recovered the Voynich manuscript from Italy, he discovered a faint signature that seemed to be in a different kind of ink from the rest of the writing. The signature, according to Voynich, read, Jakobi Atepenepsi.
This was assumed to be the signature of Jacobus Sinopius, a Czech doctor who served as Rudolf II's botanist during the early 17th century. Jacobus' close proximity to Rudolf at the time of the emperor's death does seem to track with his potential ownership of the manuscript. It's possible that Rudolf bequeathed the book to Jacobus, who then signed his name on the first page.
While the historical context indicates that this theory is certainly possible, there's a problem. Voynich accidentally erased the signature when he first conducted chemical tests on the manuscript in the mid-1910s. While there are rough photocopies that show the name there, there is no other proof that Jacobus had it.
Still, in the utter absence of any real facts about the Voynich Manuscript in the Gulf of Time between the 1400s until the 1900s, these sorts of scraps are all we have to go off of. Consider the rough timeline we have thus far.
It's claimed that Rudolf II purchased the Voynich manuscript at some point in his life. Wilfrid proposed that he purchase the book from John Dee. Rudolf II then bequeaths the manuscript to his botanist, Jacobus Sinapius. Jacobus presumably keeps the manuscript until his death in 1622, meaning someone else likely had it before it came into Marquis' possession in the 1660s.
The most likely candidate for that missing time is Czech alchemist Georg Beresh. He likely came into possession of the manuscript in the mid or late 1630s. We know that Beresh had it because of letters written on his behalf to none other than Athanasius Kircher. These letters indicate that Beresh first proposed the idea of sending the Voynich manuscript to Kircher for him to try and translate.
What we don't know is why this process took so long. Beresh died before 1662, likely leaving the manuscript to Marquis. Then Marquis, acting on Beresh's original idea, sent the document to Kircher. After Kircher's death in 1680, the manuscript was likely lost and forgotten among many of the volumes that he left behind in the Roman College.
It's all plausible, but again, plausibility is not the same thing as confirmation. While this timeline seems to make sense, given who these men were and how they related to one another, there's really nothing else in the primary historical sources to confirm any of it. The letter that Wilfred discovered in the manuscript is the genesis and the only evidence for this whole theory.
There's no record of John Dee ever selling the manuscript to Rudolf II, nor is there another record of the 600 ducats that Rudolf supposedly shelled out. The correspondence between Beresh and Kircher is the only proof we have of the manuscript's existence prior to 1912. Beyond that, all we really have to go off is Marquis' letter, which isn't even proven to be in his handwriting.
Wilfred never seemed to consider a likely possibility that Marquis' letter wasn't referencing the manuscript in which it was found. When you consider it, the only thing linking the letter to the Voynich manuscript was proximity. It's possible that the message referred to some other book. This is, of course, impossible to confirm, but the fact that it is possible demands consideration.
And it was Wilfred's own errors in judgment that led to the erasure of Jacobus' signature, which made the verification of the manuscript's history even more difficult to surmise. Wilfred's carelessness in this case seems to be born of fervor and of leaps in logic in order to accept beliefs that were not fully verified.
Much like the connection to Roger Bacon, all these threads and theories are no more than speculation on our part and of academics. And there's a bigger question here. Let's say this timeline is correct. Let's say all of these men did own or at least came into contact with the Voynich manuscript. All those scholars were among the brightest minds of their generations, and yet they couldn't decode it. How is that possible?
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The second is the hypothesized theory, the one we can only guess at, that links the manuscript to historical figures from the 16th and 17th centuries. For all of the attention the Voynich manuscript has received since it was unveiled to the world over a century ago, it has never been deciphered. It's never been determined whether the manuscript is written in a kind of code or if it's in a language lost to history.
We don't know what it says. We don't know why it's encrypted. We don't know who wrote it or why. What we do know is that at some point, some person or group of people had to sit down and write the thing. The sheer length of the text, as well as the density of the language, would imply that whoever authored the manuscript had a very serious message that they wanted to keep secret.
And perhaps it's that perception of real effort that leads scholars and historians to continually return to the manuscript in the hopes of finding meaning. But what if there's nothing to decode? What if the reason no one has cracked the code is because there's literally nothing to crack? From the time Wilfred first started showing the manuscript to his peers in the rare book dealer community, there were skeptics.
Some suspected that Wilfred himself had written the book in the hopes of selling it at a high price. Consider the facts. Wilfred was a successful and accomplished bibliophile who likely knew how much an encoded medieval manuscript written by Roger Bacon would be worth. On the other hand, Wilfred was already very wealthy at the time of the manuscript's discovery.
At the 1915 exhibition, it was estimated that Wilfred's collection alone was worth $8 million. So it's not likely he was strapped for cash and invented the Voynich manuscript as part of a scheme to get rich. And given that the manuscript is confirmed to be centuries old, it seems unlikely that he had a hand in its creation.
It is of course possible that Wilfred managed to find enough sheets of 500-year-old vellum upon which he very carefully wrote out the manuscript, but that seems unlikely. It's hard to find a real motive, unless what he really wanted was to create a mystery that we'd be making podcasts about over 100 years later. But just because Wilfred likely didn't fabricate the manuscript doesn't necessarily mean it's not a hoax.
The evidence for this theory was summarized rather neatly in a History Channel documentary series. On the program Weird or What, hosted by William Shatner, the Voynich Manuscript was examined by a number of modern scientists and scholars. Among them was Gordon Rugg, a British professor known for his scholarship on the Voynich Manuscript.
Rugg draws attention to a key detail that Wilfred and the other codebreakers over the years may have missed. Ask yourself this: When was the last time you wrote out a full page in ink and didn't make a single mistake? What about 200 pages? Rugg pointed out that across the history of medieval texts, there is always evidence of errors.
There are blots that trained eyes can detect, areas where the writer made an error and dabbed out the ink, or wrote over with a new letter. But there isn't a single obvious mistake in the entire Voynich manuscript. Rugg's conclusion is that whoever wrote the Voynich manuscript didn't correct their errors because it didn't matter. The writer knew they were writing gibberish, so there was no reason to stop and check their work.
Again, we're met with the question of why someone would do this. What could possibly possess someone to scrawl out over 200 pages in a made-up language? The answer is, of course, money. The European Renaissance was a cultural boom as the nations of Europe rediscovered and advanced the fields of history, literature, art, and science.
One key aspect of this vibrant period was an interest in pre-Christian writing and artifacts, especially anything related to Greek and Roman society. Many wealthy Europeans showed off their knowledge by acting as patrons to artists. In addition, they paid extravagant sums to own ancient historical artifacts or writings. There was a niche market for encoded or encrypted texts.
People like the idea of possessing forbidden knowledge. All of this is to say that there would have been a demand for an item like the Voynich Manuscript during the European Renaissance. But is it truly feasible that one person could sit down and write out a manuscript so dense that even the most advanced computers couldn't decipher it 500 years later? Again, Gordon Rugg has thoughts.
it's surprisingly difficult to intentionally write gibberish for a prolonged period of time. In an extended burst of writing, your brain eventually hits a point where you're on autopilot and you will naturally start repeating letters, words, or phrases. But recall that no such repetition exists in the Voynich manuscript. One of the biggest challenges that codebreakers have faced is finding recognizable patterns.
If the Voynich manuscript was an intentionally unreadable hoax, the writer was immensely deliberate in crafting the order of his letters, words, and sentences. Given the length of the manuscript, it would have taken the scribe a brutally long time to craft it. But Rugg has an answer to that mystery as well.
He oversaw an experiment to try and prove that an automated system could produce pure, un-patterned gibberish at a fast pace. His method employed an encryption tool known as a carden grill. A carden grill is made with a square grid and a small metal plate with holes in it. You write out every letter or character in its own cell on the grid. Then you place the metal plate on top of the grid.
Only a few letters are visible through the holes. As you move the plate across the grid or rotate it, changing which cells are exposed, it produces a random order of letters. Rugg's researchers transcribed the characters from the Voynich manuscript onto a grid and then used a metal plate to write out sentences and paragraphs in the Voynich script. Under Rugg's method,
it's conceivable that the 200 plus pages could be written in a matter of weeks. Now, his study has come under scrutiny. Mainly, his method of transcribing the manuscript seems rather conventional. It's almost certainly not how the medieval scribe composed the manuscript. Once again, this proposal is certainly possible, but there is next to nothing to prove it.
So, is the Voynich Manuscript really a hoax? With every passing year without an answer, it seems less likely that we'll ever understand the truth. And the conclusion that the Voynich Manuscript is a hoax, lacking entirely in meaning, isn't satisfactory to many. If it was, then it's unlikely we'd still be talking about it. One sad likelihood is that the Voynich Manuscript really is written in an ancient language.
But that language is so old, so lost to time, that there's no chance anyone will ever be able to recover it. The manuscript will likely never be translated. But the mystery of the Voynich manuscript will continue so long as at least one person thinks they can unlock it. Maybe someday in the future, new technology or understanding of the past will provide that ever-elusive clue
to decode the manuscript's secrets.
Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystoriesatspotify.com. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story.
And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written by Colin McLaughlin, fact-checked by Anya Barely, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boirot, our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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