The Voynich Manuscript (Yale University Press, 2016) *****

The world is strange and full of coincidences. Earlier this year I read "Solenoid" in which the narrator refers to Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole, who is the author of the novel "The Gadfly", which is an impactful book in the narrator's life (p. 161). Later this year, I read "Trust" by Hernan Diaz, in which the following lines are written: "Mrs Bevel had terrible handwriting". "We call them the Voynich Manuscripts", says the youngest of the three with a mysterious giggle. Librarian jokes." (p. 254). I'm usually a fast reader who does not dwell too long on details such as this one, but somehow it struck a chord in my memory. So my curiosity was raised, and I found this wonderful book with the complete content of "The Voynich Manuscript", with essays by scholars on what has been discovered about it over the centuries. 

It's fascinating and a mystery. The manuscript dates from the early XVth Century, and is written in an unknown language for its entire 230 pages. The book contains many drawings of bathing women, unknown plants, astronomical drawings. The book has circulated through the libraries of Emperors, the Vatican and the polymath Athanasius Kircher. It was bought by the Polish antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1907, whose name remained attached to the manuscript. Today it is kept in the library of Yale University in the United States. 

A fascinating book that is impossible to read, but a pleasure to skim through. Many scholars throughout the centuries have thought that it was written in some kind of code, yet it has not yet revealed any indicators to crack the code. If it is not a code, then who in his right mind would write such a long manuscript in an invented and unreadable language? It sounds totally insane, yet it might be the case. My initial personal interpretation was that the original author deliberately wrote it to deceive people and to create a mystery. There are far too many repetitions of the same words in the text to make it real (as in the example below). The same can be said for the capital letter at the beginning of many words: they are almost always the same, as if all words in this mysterious language would start with only a limited number of letters. Just have a look for yourself on the one page here below. 

The book comes with a number of essays at the back by scholars in various disciplines. Unfortunately, it did not include a linguistic analysis of the frequency of the words, which in my opinion should be the real standard to evaluate whether the writing is fake or not. The reasoning is that a fake language would show anomalies in the frequency of both letters and words that normal texts would not have. 

I did come across some interesting articles in this respect which did not find any abnormalities in the "Voynich" language compared to other existing languages, which should confirm its authenticity as a real (underlying) language (Colin Layfield et al. Word Probability Findings in the Voynich Manuscript, Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, 2020, and Montemurro MA, Zanette DH. Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis. PLoS One. 2013). 

Anyway, this should not spoil the fun. We love books, and this is a great publication with every single page of the original manuscript reproduced, including the covers and the spine. You won't understand a word of it. 

Enjoy!