Cutting-edge technology has just uncovered hidden secrets within one of the world’s most mysterious medieval texts. Multispectral imaging has revealed previously invisible details in the Voynich manuscript, offering new clues about this undeciphered enigma that has baffled scholars for centuries.
The Voynich manuscript is one of the most famous and mysterious manuscripts from the Middle Ages. This hand-written codex, which dates to the 15th century and is now kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, has puzzled scholars with its still undeciphered script. Dozens of theories have been put forward over the years, ranging from it being a medical text to a modern-day forgery.
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Lisa Fagin Davis, the Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America and a leading scholar of the Voynich manuscript, has just published a set of images from 10 pages of the codex on her blog, Manuscript Road Trip. These were multispectral scans that show what the pages looked like under ultraviolet and infrared light. These scans were actually taken ten years ago at Yale University but have never been fully studied or put online until now.
The scans are of folios 1r, 8r, 17r, 26r, 47r, 70v1, 71r, 93r, 102v1, and 116v—all images are available here—and have already revealed some previously hidden details about the manuscript. The most important of these can be found on its opening folio, where three columns of lettering have been added: the Roman alphabet (a-z), a series of Voynich characters, and another Roman alphabet offset by one letter.
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Davis believes that these were added by Johannes Marcus Marci, a Prague doctor who owned the Voynich manuscript between 1662 and 1665. It may have been an early attempt to decode its mysterious lettering. Davis adds:
Regardless of their purpose, I do know one thing: these alphabets will likely not help us actually decipher the manuscript. This is because linguists like Claire and other researchers have established that the manuscript is almost certainly not encrypted using a simple substitution cipher, and the substitutions in these columns result in nonsense anyway. Even so, they do add an interesting and new chapter to the early history of the manuscript. I look forward to hearing from other researchers about this new evidence, especially from experts in cryptography who may have ideas about why Marci or any other early-modern decrypter would need three columns of alphabets to do their work.
The three columns of lettering discovered on the Voynich manuscript – image courtesy Lisa Fagin Davis
The other pages that have been scanned also offer new details, including words that have faded into almost complete obscurity as well as more details to some of its images. Furthermore, the scanned images show no sign that the manuscript had previously been written on and later reused. Davis notes:
This is important because if there HAD been underwriting, it would have been critical evidence for refining the date of origin of the manuscript. The question of the date of origin of the manuscript is not entirely resolved, but Carbon-14 testing dates the parchment, with a high level of confidence, to ca. 1425. The style of the illustrations is consistent with that date, so I consider the manuscript to have been written in the early fifteenth century, although not everyone agrees.
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The previously hidden details discovered through multispectral imaging also provide more evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a genuine medieval document, according to Davis. It would have been highly unlikely that a modern-day forger would have wanted to, or even could have, created extra lettering and images that could only be seen under special technology.
These fascinating images will undoubtedly lead to calls for the remaining 230 pages of the Voynich manuscript to also be scanned with multispectral imaging. Until then, Davis urges Voynichologists and curious minds alike to explore these newly uncovered images, which may hold the key to unraveling one of the Middle Ages’ greatest unsolved mysteries.
Cutting-edge technology has just uncovered hidden secrets within one of the world’s most mysterious medieval texts. Multispectral imaging has revealed previously invisible details in the Voynich manuscript, offering new clues about this undeciphered enigma that has baffled scholars for centuries.
The Voynich manuscript is one of the most famous and mysterious manuscripts from the Middle Ages. This hand-written codex, which dates to the 15th century and is now kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, has puzzled scholars with its still undeciphered script. Dozens of theories have been put forward over the years, ranging from it being a medical text to a modern-day forgery.
Lisa Fagin Davis, the Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America and a leading scholar of the Voynich manuscript, has just published a set of images from 10 pages of the codex on her blog, Manuscript Road Trip. These were multispectral scans that show what the pages looked like under ultraviolet and infrared light. These scans were actually taken ten years ago at Yale University but have never been fully studied or put online until now.
The scans are of folios 1r, 8r, 17r, 26r, 47r, 70v1, 71r, 93r, 102v1, and 116v—all images are available here—and have already revealed some previously hidden details about the manuscript. The most important of these can be found on its opening folio, where three columns of lettering have been added: the Roman alphabet (a-z), a series of Voynich characters, and another Roman alphabet offset by one letter.
Davis believes that these were added by Johannes Marcus Marci, a Prague doctor who owned the Voynich manuscript between 1662 and 1665. It may have been an early attempt to decode its mysterious lettering. Davis adds:
Regardless of their purpose, I do know one thing: these alphabets will likely not help us actually decipher the manuscript. This is because linguists like Claire and other researchers have established that the manuscript is almost certainly not encrypted using a simple substitution cipher, and the substitutions in these columns result in nonsense anyway. Even so, they do add an interesting and new chapter to the early history of the manuscript. I look forward to hearing from other researchers about this new evidence, especially from experts in cryptography who may have ideas about why Marci or any other early-modern decrypter would need three columns of alphabets to do their work.
The other pages that have been scanned also offer new details, including words that have faded into almost complete obscurity as well as more details to some of its images. Furthermore, the scanned images show no sign that the manuscript had previously been written on and later reused. Davis notes:
This is important because if there HAD been underwriting, it would have been critical evidence for refining the date of origin of the manuscript. The question of the date of origin of the manuscript is not entirely resolved, but Carbon-14 testing dates the parchment, with a high level of confidence, to ca. 1425. The style of the illustrations is consistent with that date, so I consider the manuscript to have been written in the early fifteenth century, although not everyone agrees.
The previously hidden details discovered through multispectral imaging also provide more evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a genuine medieval document, according to Davis. It would have been highly unlikely that a modern-day forger would have wanted to, or even could have, created extra lettering and images that could only be seen under special technology.
These fascinating images will undoubtedly lead to calls for the remaining 230 pages of the Voynich manuscript to also be scanned with multispectral imaging. Until then, Davis urges Voynichologists and curious minds alike to explore these newly uncovered images, which may hold the key to unraveling one of the Middle Ages’ greatest unsolved mysteries.
You can read Davis’ blog post Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript and also view/download the images. You should also check out the recent article in The Atlantic on the Voynich Manuscript, which profiles Lisa Fagin Davis and the work she is doing.
Top Image: These images and videos are courtesy Lisa Fagin Davis.
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