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Voynich refused to divulge the manuscript’s previous owner, leading many to believe that he had authored the text himself. The manuscript then disappeared for 250 years, only to resurface when it was purchased by Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. “uch Sphinxes as these obey no one but their master,” Marci wrote in an accompanying letter, according to Davis. When Barschius’ heir, Johannes Marcus Marci, inherited the manuscript, he sent it to an Egyptian hieroglyphics expert in Rome for help decoding the text. It then passed into the hands of Georgius Barschius, an alchemist from Prague, who referred to the book as “a certain riddle of the Sphinx” that was “uselessly taking up space.”

Rudolph II of Germany purchased the book for 600 gold ducats, believing that it had been written by the 13th-century English scientist Roger Bacon.

The Voynich first appears in the historical record in the late 16th century, as Davis writes on her blog Manuscript Road Trip. The manuscript’s early owners also found it very confusing It includes additional drawings of plants, followed by pages of writing in the manuscript’s mysterious language, which has been dubbed “Voynichese.” Some scholars believe that one illustration shows naked women hanging out on a pair of ovaries.Īnd finally, there is the pharmacological section. Illustrations depict naked women bathing in green liquid, naked women being propelled by jets of water, naked women supporting rainbows with their hands. The astrological wheels are dotted with little drawings of nude women, and in the subsequent balneological section, the nude drawings go wild. Then comes the astrological section, which includes foldout drawings of celestial charts that do not seem to match up with any known calendar. It is divided into four sections, each of them very weirdĪs Michael LaPointe explains in the Paris Review, the book begins with an herbal section featuring vibrant drawings of plants-but nobody is quite sure what sort of plants they are supposed to be. Why has the Voynich proved so baffling, so polarizing over the years? Here are six things to know about the elusive manuscript:

Some say the book is a nature encyclopedia. The manuscript has been attributed to everyone from ancient Mexican cultures to Leonardo da Vinci to aliens. The most recent interpretation of the Voynich Manuscript may not have been sound, but it’s certainly not the wackiest theory about the text’s contents and origin. Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, told the Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang that Gibbs’ decoded text “doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense.” But alas, experts and enthusiasts were soon poking holes in Gibbs’ theory. Gibbs claimed to have decoded two lines of the text, and his work was initially met with enthusiasm. The manuscript, Gibbs theorized, is a woman’s health manual, and each character of its elusive language represents medieval Latin abbreviations. And last week, a hullaballoo erupted over a Times Literary Supplementpiece by historical researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs, who claimed to have solved the enduring Voynich mystery. The text, written in a language that has yet to be decoded, has confounded scholars, cryptologists and amateur sleuths for centuries. Crumbling medieval texts do not usually make for the subjects of frenzied online debate, with the notable exception of the thoroughly bizarre, persistently impenetrable Voynich Manuscript.