Dan Snow's History Hit - The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Matt Lewis continues his Mystery Month on Gone Medieval with another tantalising enigma of the Middle Ages - possibly the most mysterious manuscript that exists anywhere in the world. Carbon-dated to the early 15th century, the Voynich manuscript is hand-written in an unknown script, embellished with illustrations and diagrams, showing people, fantastical plants and astrological symbols.Yet the origins, authorship, and purpose of the manuscript continue to baffle experts, which have even included British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Matt finds out more from Raymond Clemens, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Yale University.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store >

Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. As part of our series on mysteries, we're going to take a closer look at one of the period's greatest riddles. The Feunich manuscript has been bemusing, stumping and frustrating scholars for centuries. It's a book, it's full of illustrations that can be hard to identify, and nobody knows what the text of it says. Does it hold secrets we might unlock? Is there ancient wisdom in the words, evidence of a lost culture? Or was it an exercise, a bit of fun, or maybe even a prank? To try and get to the bottom of what all this is about,

I'm delighted to be joined by Ray Clemens, who is curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale University. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Ray. Thank you, Matt. Good to be here. Thank you very much for joining us. So let's start off with what is the Voynich manuscript? It's not a mystery that I know very well, so I'm looking forward to finding out more. So when was it discovered and how did it end up where it is today? So it was discovered in the modern period, in the early part of the 20th century, by a man named Willifred Voynich, who was a bookseller. And he was in Rome and he sold a collection of books from the Jesuits. The Jesuits had a library there, a private library.

And they sold a number of books to Voynich, The Jesuits had a library there, a private library, and they sold a number of books to Voynich, which he came to the United States and then sold to universities all around the country. So almost every major university in America has a Voynich manuscript of some sort or another, but they tend to be Thomas Aquinas and other sort of known authors. The Voynich manuscript itself is named after him probably in large part because he was never able to sell it. It was a manuscript that remained with him throughout his life. He then willed it to his wife and eventually it passed to the bookseller H.P. Krauss, who in 1970 donated it to the Beinecke Library at Yale University. So the book itself has never been sold,

but in the 1970s it did come to live at the Beinecke, and we are its custodians. We don't know what it means ourselves, and we're happy to explore it, but we don't actually validate people's claims about it. And there are many claims to be made about it. It looks, honestly, like a typical 15th century medieval manuscript, and it is from the 15th century. We know that because we've carbon dated the pages, and all the carbon dating comes back between 1404 and 1438. So we know that the material it is made on

is in fact from the early 15th century. We've also tested all of the inks, and we've researched the binding, and everything about this manuscript comports with early 15th century. The earliest part of it is what's called an herbal. And an herbal was a medieval collection of information about plants and it also contains pictures of those plants. What's interesting is that in the manuscript era you didn't have to have one column for images and one column for text. Instead what you did is you put a plant in the middle of the page and then you'd write the text around the plant. So it has this really interesting snake-like quality where the text surrounds all of the images. That's the majority of the manuscript. About another third of the manuscript is devoted to what we call celestial

maps. And these are round circles with stars in them that we think represents the view of the heavens from Earth. And these were usually used for prognostication in the Middle Ages. So if you knew the date you. So if you knew the date you were born and you were able to use one of these charts, then it would supposedly tell you what your future would be. It has another section that has no visual analog in the medieval world. And that's a section with naked women bathing. And there's nothing salacious about the images. They're very plain. And they just show women in baths. Lots of women in lots of different baths, and the baths are all interconnected with what looks like canals

of one sort or another. And then the last section of it looks like a pharmaceutical manual. So if you take those same images from the beginning and you cut them up into roots and leaves, that's what the last section looks like. It's a bunch of collections of these roots and leaves. That's what the last section looks like, is a bunch of collections of these roots and leaves. What makes it unique is one, the images of the women. So that's not something we've seen before or since. The other thing is that it's written in a language with a script that we do not understand and we do not recognize. And that's what's really troubled people since the time that Voynich rediscovered this manuscript. But in fact, all the way back in the 17th century, this manuscript was known. An early owner of it, his name is in the very front of it. And he is the individual who actually, he and his friends wrote to a man named Athanasius

Kircher. There's a famous book about him called The Last Man Who Knew Everything. And he studied Egyptian hieroglyphs, and he studied all sorts of ancient languages. And they sent him a piece of the book and said, can you help us? And he never wrote back, at least as far as we can tell. And sometime around 1665, they send the entire book to Kircher. And Kircher puts that book in the Jesuit archive. And that's how it ends up with us today. But since it's been rediscovered, linguists have worked on it. Codebreakers, especially after World War II, were very interested in seeing if they could break the code. But so far, nobody has, as far as we know, even come close.

Every year, there's another person that's discovered a way to make it make sense, and it simply doesn't. What's odd about the script, though, is it looks like a Latin script. There's a type of non-destructive ink analysis called spectrography, mass spectrography. And what we were hoping to find was inks that had been made with berries or flowers or something that would have been localizable. Unfortunately, all of the inks in the Voynich manuscript are dead standard. They're mostly made out of azurite, copper, iron, very basic minerals and metals that can be found anywhere in Europe. The binding is very simple. The only unusual thing about the binding is that it has several pages that unfold. And that's common

today. We often have picture books that unfold, but in the Middle Ages, you normally would not have a book that had folding pages. This one has several folding pages, particularly those star charts that I mentioned are on a pretty massive opening. But the binding, it's European. The only thing we know about it that localizes it at all is that the first owner, this man named de Pence, he works at the court of Rudolf II of Habsburg. And so we know that the manuscript itself was in Prague, that's by the 17th century we don't know where it was from the early 15th to the 17th century it's so frustrating that there's so much unusual about this book except anything that we could test that would tell you anything about it so the way that it's laid out the illustrations and the language are so unusual and yet the ink and the binding in paper and everything else is so bog standard

that it gives you no hints of what it is. Exactly. And the other frustrating thing, normally historians look at the binding for historical information, and unfortunately, have a feeling that it has a binding from probably the early 20th century. When the Jesuits, their library was consolidated in 1873 throughout Italy, all the private libraries were consolidated of the religious orders. And they were only allowed to keep their personal manuscripts. They weren't allowed to keep fancy manuscripts or nice manuscripts. And so I have a feeling that at that point, they took off whatever cover might have been on this and just stitched on the plainest. It's called lymph vellum.

It's just a piece of cow skin that's been folded and placed on there. So any information about its early history was probably lost when that happened. But yeah, if you were to look at this and you didn't know its unusual language, you probably wouldn't give it a second look. It's not a spectacular manuscript in a traditional sense of the word. It's striking that it's probably the most famous of Voynich's collection. It's the one he couldn't sell. He was stuck with it all of his life and it was given away and given away and given away. And now it's a huge centre of a mystery. What's fascinating about that is that he had several people that wanted to buy it that were

at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the first people who thought he had a solution for it was a man named Neibolt. And unfortunately, what Neibolt thought he had, he thought each character was in fact, several Greek characters that were randomly arranged. And what he ended up doing was essentially making up words in Greek and then translating them into Latin. And so he actually fooled himself. We don't think he was trying to fool anybody, but he ended up convincing himself. But he could never get the library to pay for it. And it's very interesting because today we think the manuscript would probably be worth a lot of money on the market because scientific materials are invoked. And so if Krauss had been able to hold out for another 20 or 30 years, he probably would have seen a wonderful return on this. But the fact of

the matter is, is that it's very hard to sell to a library when you'd have to go to the board and say, I have a book, but we don't know what it says. And it's got pictures in it, but we're not really sure what they're pictures of. It's hard for a curator to sell that. And I think that was probably part of the problem. When I was reading around a little bit about this manuscript, I read somewhere that there's illustrations of castles, for example, that some people are to some degree convinced might be real castles that you can pinpoint, but you can never actually get close enough to say it's definitely this castle. There's always something a little bit different, which I think maybe helps to locate it in Eastern Europe,

perhaps, but not to pin it down to any specific region or time period. And I also read, I don't know if this is correct, that some of the botanical illustrations, some are identifiable real plants, but there's lots of things that simply we don't recognise as anything that occurs in nature. So both of these are true. The castle drawings are in those star charts that I mentioned, and unfortunately they're very small and they're also very plain. There's not a lot of detail. And unfortunately, all medieval castles in drawings were standardised. And if you look at these, they look to me like an absolute standard drawing for a town, which is a walled castle. The problem is, like that and with the plants, is that everything looks a little bit like it, and you need to account for the fact that

something's a little bit off. I've heard many people say that certain plants are found in the Voynich, but the fact of the matter is that we can't be sure. And part of the reason we can't be sure, of course, is that we would need the text to tell us what that's describing. And again, the plants, they're not drawn like a botanist would draw them. They're fairly rough. And so, yes, there are plants that certainly look like those in the Voynich. There are also plants that don't look like anything that would occur in nature as well. They're not unrealistic. They're just odd, if I can put it that way. And people for years have thought that if they could get one of the

plants, they could reverse engineer the text and say, okay, so if this plant is English ivy, and that's one of the famous ones, is a number of people think that one of these plants is English ivy. If we know the name of it, then certainly we can look at other botanicals and reverse engineer the text. Unfortunately, that has gone nowhere. And other botanicals and reverse engineer the text. Unfortunately, that has gone nowhere. And I'm not sure if it's because they have the wrong plant or because the text doesn't work that way. Anyone who wants to disappear down a rabbit hole of decades of trying to work out what this manuscript says. If you're one of those people that likes to solve puzzles, it's infuriating because, as I've said, it looks close enough to Latin.

You're thinking it's got to be a letter substitution. Most cryptography is letter substitution before the modern era. And so it looks so tantalizingly close to something you'd understand. But yeah, as the sun begins to rise and you've lost another day to the manuscript, you realize it probably isn't going to break that way. Who knows? Maybe one of your listeners is that one in a million person that has that insight. It has happened before with linear B and other languages that sometimes it just takes the right person. Yeah, but it is quite kind of Da Vinci code-ish, except that it's real. You feel like if only I was clever enough and I looked at this for long enough, you know, the letters would arrange themselves in my head to mean something. But I feel like you'd look at it for days and

weeks, which would slip into months and years and still be kind of no further forward with it to the star charts for example are they accurate star charts or are they also a mixture of some things that are accurate and some things that appear made up for the star charts you really are outside of my knowledge so what i'm relying on is what other people have told me which is that these resemble the star charts that other people were using and i've seen other star charts but i don't have the ability to actually look at them and know what they're representing. So unfortunately, that's one of those things where you need to leave it to a specialist to take a look at it. And the frustrating thing about it, like the language, the images do look like things that we see in other manuscripts, like the plants and the pharmaceuticals.

But again, we're not able to say, oh, this is exactly that. With the star charts, though, the one thing that we can recognize is that in the center of most of them, there are 12 of them, and there are zodiac symbols in the center of them. And so we are able to see the zodiac symbols very clearly. And a later hand has actually written in something like Provençal the names of the month for that zodiac. I think April is visible and something like that. So other people have definitely tried to figure it out that way. I don't know how close they got and I don't know how many layers are there. One of the other things is how many people have interfered with this manuscript over time. The guy whose name is in the front of it has been scraped off and we were only able to see that by using a tool called multispectral imaging, which allows us to look at light outside of the human spectrum. And with the computer, put all those images together. And that's how we were able to see that. But that has been scraped off. There has been some intervention. There are pages missing. We can

see where the pages have been cut off. There's a whole choir, which is a gathering of pages that's missing, which we know because the page numbers are not sequential. Oh, that's even more of a mystery. Yeah. There are probably pieces of the Voynich manuscript in a European archive somewhere. People have thought maybe Kircher's archive, the Jesuits in Rome, although a lot of people have looked at that but they're private and we don't know entirely. Parchment is rarely thrown out. It's expensive and it's recycled and used in things like bookbinding so there's always the possibility that we'll find more sheets of this out there somewhere. There's another mystery for everyone to go chasing down.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Can we read anything at all into the way that the book is structured?

As you mentioned, there's kind of the herbal section, astronomical, cosmological, pharmaceutical, I think some things that are described as recipes in there. Is that a normal structure for a book or is that unusual about the Voynich manuscript as well? So the only thing that's unusual is the section with women bathing. There are bathing manuals, they just look very different. And the plants, the bathing, the recipes, all of these are the sorts of things that you would expect in a medical manual. So in one sense, we do think that's what the type of manuscript this is meant to resemble, is something medical. We've had alchemists look at it, and it doesn't look like anything that an alchemist would have used. But it does have, if you were a doctor and you had a practice, you'd want to know what various plants did.

You'd want to know what the star charts are, because you actually harvest different medicines at different times. And those things might also be related to illness. And so different illnesses came out at different seasons and things like that. And then the recipes and the pharmaceuticals at the end are again, something that we find in medical manuals like this. We don't have anything that's a composite like that, just in the way it's laid out. But the individual sections are all something that we associate with medical materials. It's almost like someone's bringing an awful lot of stuff together, but then writing it in this frustrating language that you can't understand to see what they've brought together. Yes. And I want to hear it as well. And that's the other thing is we don't know what it sounded like. And we're beginning to think that it's less

and less a code. Most of its history, they assumed that this was a cipher manuscript. And after World War II, all the minds that worked on the Enigma machines and the Japanese codes actually spent their weekends with the Voynich trying to work it out. And none of them were able to crack it. And people using the sort of super bit sort of normally breakdown codes have also gotten nowhere with it. And so I think, and this is Claire Bowen's work at Yale, is a language of some sort or is imitating a language and probably not likely a code. But again, if it's a language, we've never seen script like this. So we're still at a loss. Wow. And you said that you don't endorse any of the many, many theories that are out there about

what the Voynich manuscript is. But could you tell us about a couple of them what kind of thing do people think this might be sure I'll share my theory with you that was ruined and that is that I thought that this was the work of some clever thief and what they did was they made up a nonsense manual that looked like it was in code and they sold it to a gullible person who thought oh if it's so secret, it must be very powerful and was willing to buy it. I'm not alone in that, but that was the one I liked. And then Lisa Fagan Davis is a paleographer. So she looked at the writing of the code and it turns out that there were at least four people involved in writing the manual. And it's a very professional hand. And so that means you would

have had to train four people to write this identical script over and over again. And that's not realistic. Frauds don't work that way. Frauds don't put that kind of work into something. And so that was my pet theory. My favorite theory is that it's the work of an alien who was on Earth for a while, a teenage girl, and that she left it behind when her alien family took off back into space. I think that's the most creative. I've heard ideas that it's written in angelic language, which is interesting because we don't have an angelic language, so it's equally unprovable, it might be.

What are we going to compare that with? And then there are several people that think that it might be related to a lost European peoples or language group that we just for some reason only have this one example of. So those are some of the ones, all of them, except for the alien are certainly possible. But yeah, people, they like to play with it. They like to suggest. But what the library does is we make it available for people to study. We probably wouldn't know if you solved it anyway, unless it a pretty obvious solution and so what we do is we make the materials available but we don't comment on solutions but the library itself doesn't really want to be in the game of adjudicating all of those entries

yeah scoring people's guesses as to what it might be are there high resolution images available of this that people can go and find on the internet to have a look for themselves yeah absolutely it is the most downloaded images that the Yale library has. And so if you just search point-inch manuscript or look at the Wikipedia entry, there'll be a link. And those are very high resolution images. You can blow those up and spend hours getting lost. In 2016, I think, we published a photo facsimile as well. Unfortunately, that's $50, but it's very high resolution photos with the layout so that you can read it like the original book with essays about the history of

the book in it. And that should be available from any library. So those are the best ways to do it. There's a site called Voynich.nl, which is Rene Zandenberg, who is an engineer originally now an historian, and he runs a very interesting site for people to explain their ideas and find a forum for other people that want to talk about it. I found a few websites around with lots and lots of information and lots and lots of collections of theories.

And I think it's one of those things that, as you say, you can almost claim that it's anything and no one can prove you're wrong, but no one can prove you're right either. Yeah, it's a Rorschach in some ways. It probably tells us a lot more about ourselves and what we think is important, like the alien girl sort of theory or the fraud theory. I'm one of those people that's very suspicious. I suspect

people are frauds. My job is to make sure that we don't buy things that are not real because we purchase medieval manuscripts. And part of my job is to make sure that we're not faked out by things like that. So I do think it's interesting. And I think you're right. It tells us a lot about us. Can I ask you some of the interpretations that you found most interesting? I don't know. I mean, I guess the obvious one is that someone is writing in a code that we just haven't cracked yet, that is so ingenious that we can't crack it.

It's a fairly, I don't mean boring, but, you know, a bog standard medieval manuscript that we just haven't managed to translate yet. I mean, the con man theory, did someone just write something that looked like you said from a distance like a latin script so someone who couldn't read but wanted to look like they could and have posh manuscripts but that's an awful lot of time and effort and cost to create something that was for a con that you may never get a buyer for? I mean, Voynich never got a buyer for it. Is it someone who was reading Near Eastern, Middle Eastern manuscripts in a different language and was trying to copy it and just couldn't get the scripts, so tried to approximate it? You know, there's kind of all of those things buzzing around. But I think the more I looked at theories, the more I was struck by, we could have something here that is, like I mentioned before, ancient wisdom that has been lost to us, lost civilisations and answers to big questions that is just sitting there in Yale University's library.

But at the other end of the scale, this could just be a massive prank, somebody having a joke or a laugh or practising their script. And it could be anywhere in between those two kind of far ends of understanding it I didn't know much about it when I started looking around and I do think it's one of those rabbit hole things that you can just get sucked into it and lose days because you can look at you know a sentence and think I could crack that and it's next to a picture so how difficult can it really be so if it's a picture of a town or a castle, can I find a word that might be town, castle, building, place? You know, it seems like it should be so easy, but yet you say, you know, people after World War II, people who cracked the Enigma code, couldn't work out what this was,

so I don't know why I would think I could. Yeah, it's nice that it's the one remaining mystery we have for the Middle Ages. There have been several codes, all of them have been cracked most recently, and almost all of those were letter substitution codes where, you know, one letter, one symbol stands for another letter. This is not that. We know that because everybody has tried every possible combination of letters. So if somebody's having us on, I hope he or she is still laughing. But I am fascinated by the fact that we have supercomputers. We can sail to Mars. But this thing that was created in the 15th century, we still don't even know what to call it. We don sail to Mars. But this thing that was created in the 15th century, we still don't even know what to call it. We don't even know its title.

If you look in Yale's catalogue, the title comes in square brackets. And if you're a librarian, you know that square brackets mean we have no idea what this is and the cataloguer made something up. And so that's why we don't have a title for this thing. We just call it the Voynich Cipher Manuscript in square brackets because that describes it,

but it's certainly not its title. Yeah, it's what it is rather than what it's actually called. So just to end on, big question, impossible to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you think we'll ever solve the mystery of the Voynich manuscript? Do you think there'll ever be a time when we can say that's what it is and we know that now? So I think to answer that is, again, a reflection on where you see yourself. And having read a lot of these theories of you have and having seen some of the best minds work at this for many years, I have the presentist confidence. OK, if we can't do it, then nobody can. We've thrown all of our best stuff at it. But I also think that's a foolish thing to do because so many times in life,

things do take a while. It does take another technology. It takes finding another similar document. There's a role of serendipity. And I don't know, but my hunch would be that we do figure this thing out. And certainly what we will have eventually is more knowledge about what it is than where we are now. So we're chipping away at it. We may never solve it, but we're going to come closer and closer. Only in the last 20 or 30 years did we know when it was written, right? Because carbon dating used to be very destructive. Now carbon dating is really minimally destructive. It takes just a tiny little bit of it. So I think part of it may be in technologies. Maybe we're able to find impurities in some of those inks and we might be

able to locate another manuscript that has those same impurities that's 20 or 30 years away at least at the rate we're going but we're still going to get there eventually whether we solve it whether we figure out the mind that put this together i don't know i'm not there i think sometimes the thing with all of these mysteries is part of you wants it solved but part of you doesn't want to lose the mystery as well it's nice to have something that we don't know i would be sad well i'd be thrilled to be in on the joke or in on whatever it is but then yes we would lose this last remnant of middle ages spoofing us and that is interesting whenever you get somebody that thinks they know everything it's hey this thing

was written over 500 years ago and you can't read it. That's a challenge. That's a lot of fun. It's a good one to throw at know-it-alls at parties. Put them down the rabbit hole. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us, Ray. It's fantastic. It's been really interesting to talk about it. And it's been really good of you to give us some of your time to introduce us a bit more to the Voynich manuscript.

As you mentioned, it's on Yale University Library's website. Anybody can go and look at the high-res images and try to work out what it is for themselves and you can spend many many days as I have sifting through the theories of the people who have tried to work out before what it was so thank you very much Ray it's been great

thank you you can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcasts including Spotify. It does help new listeners to find us out. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life you can subscribe to History Hits

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