The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma

The reader may well wonder, “What still another paper on the Voynich manuscript?” So much has been written already on that most studies, most curious, and most mysterious manuscript upon which so many researchers have exhausted their faculties in vain. As a relatively recent newcomer to the ranks of Voynich manuscript research, the author retraced the steps of all his predecessors, rediscovering their sources, repeating their experiments, growing excited over the same promising leads that excited them, and learning only later that all these things have already been tried and had failed, often several times. The author does not wish to imply that he regrets any of his efforts. In fact, he little suspected, when he was first introduced to the problem of the Voynich manuscript at Brigadier Tiltman’s lecture in November 1975, that he would spend all his spare time for the next year on an intellectual and spiritual journey spanning so many centuries and ranging over so many aspects of art, history, philosophy, and philology. The fact remains that, in spite of all the paper that other have written about the manuscript, there is no complete survey of all the approaches, ideas, background information and analytic studies that have accumulated over the nearly fifty-five years since the manuscript was discovered by Wilfrid M. Voynich in 1912. Most of the papers have been written to advance or to refute a particular theory, providing in passing a brief glance at others’ efforts, primarily to sweep them out of the way. Much vital information is to be found only in unpublished notes and papers inaccessible to most students. The author felt that it would be useful to pull together all the information that he could obtain from all the sources and present them in an orderly fashion. This monograph is arranged in four main sections. First, the presentation of a survey of all of the basic facts of the problem: the “givens,” as it were. Second, coverage of all the primary avenues of attack and the information relevant to each, the external characteristics of the manuscript itself, the drawings, and the text. Third, a survey of the major claims of decipherment and other substantial analytic work carried out by various researchers. Fourth, a sketch of collateral and background topics which seem likely to be useful.