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The Voynich manuscript (, VOY-nitch) is an illustrated codex, hand-written in an undeciphered script referred to as 'Voynichese'.

Stylistic analysis has indicated the manuscript may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The origins, authorship, and purpose of the manuscript are still debated, but currently scholars lack the translation and context needed to either properly entertain or eliminate any of the possibilities. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. The manuscript consists of around 240 pages, but there is evidence that some of the pages are missing. Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations and diagrams, some crudely coloured, with sections of the manuscript showing people, unidentified plants and astrological symbols. Since 1969, it has been held in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In 2020, Yale University published the entire manuscript online in its digital library. The Voynich manuscript has been studied by both professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II.

From the various numbering gaps in the quires and pages, it seems likely that in the past, the manuscript had at least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912.

Bowern also concludes that the statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript are not consistent with the use of a substitution cipher or polyalphabetic cipher. The "language" Voynich A appears in the herbal and pharmaceutical parts of the manuscript. There are minor variations between Voynich A and Voynich B.

Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript, among them Roger Bacon, John Dee or Edward Kelley, Giovanni Fontana, and Voynich.

The assumption that Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that John Dee sold the manuscript to Rudolf.

Furthermore, Baresch's letter and Marci's letter only establish the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one mentioned. These letters could possibly have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript, assuming that he was aware of them; however, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the June 1999 discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher as having eliminated this possibility.

Voynich (and many other people after him) concluded that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript prior to Baresch, and he drew a link from that to Rudolf's court, in confirmation of Mnishovsky's story.

According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters.

The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some little-known natural language, written plaintext with an invented alphabet.

The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript words led William F. This feature could then explain the repetitive nature of the Voynich text; however, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.

They found that the resulting text was often highly non-random and exhibited many of the same unusual statistical properties as the Voynich manuscript, supporting the idea that some features of the text could have been produced in a hoax.

In 1978, John Stojko published Letters to God's Eye, in which he claimed that the Voynich manuscript was a series of letters written in vowelless Ukrainian.

Contemporary classical composer Hanspeter Kyburz's 1995 chamber work The Voynich Cipher Manuscript, for chorus & ensemble is inspired by the manuscript.

Sthitapragya Chakraborty, "The Voynich Manuscript is a Strange Medieval Book That Nobody Has Been Able to Read for More Than 100 Years", Skip Boring, March 14, 2026.

Quick Facts

• The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912.
• According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters.
• From the various numbering gaps in the quires and pages, it seems likely that in the past, the manuscript had at least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912.
• Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript, among them Roger Bacon, John Dee or Edward Kelley, Giovanni Fontana, and Voynich.
• Since 1969, it has been held in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Voynich manuscript". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.