The Voynich Manuscript: A New Documentary Takes a Deep Dive Into the Mysteries of the Bizarre Manuscript

If you’re a reg­u­lar read­er of Open Cul­ture, you know we like to bring you the lat­est attempts to deci­pher the leg­endary Voyn­ich Man­u­script, a strange medieval book whose lan­guage has baf­fled schol­ars for cen­turies. Like many oth­er ear­ly 15th cen­tu­ry texts, the Voyn­ich seems to com­bine med­i­cine, alche­my, her­bol­o­gy, botany, zool­o­gy, astrol­o­gy, and oth­er forms of folk knowl­edge in a com­pendi­um. But it’s filled with bizarre illus­tra­tions (see an online ver­sion here) and writ­ten in a lan­guage no one can read. Is it a lost ances­tor tongue? The secret code of a cult? Is it a hoax? Why was it made and by whom?

Researchers have tried to trans­late the Voyn­ich lan­guage as vari­ant forms Latin, Ara­bic, and Sino-Tibetan. An AI iden­ti­fied it as Hebrew. This year a father and son team con­vinc­ing­ly made the case for Old Tur­kic. No Voyn­ich trans­la­tion has been defin­i­tive­ly accept­ed by a schol­ar­ly con­sen­sus, and per­haps none ever will. This may say as much about the mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich as it does about the niche research area, in which aca­d­e­m­ic lin­guists, cod­i­col­o­gists, and all man­ner of ama­teur sleuths try to make a name for them­selves as Jean-François Cham­pol­lions of Voyn­ich stud­ies.

The hour-long doc­u­men­tary above tells the sto­ry of both the manuscript’s enig­mas and the cult of fas­ci­na­tion that has grown up around them. We first learn the ori­gin of the name: Acquired by Pol­ish book­seller Wil­frid Voyn­ich in 1912, the man­u­script passed into the care of his wife Ethel, an Irish artist and nov­el­ist, upon his death in 1930. Ethel died 30 years lat­er in New York, leav­ing the man­u­script behind, sealed in a bank vault. “Its fate had trou­bled both Mrs. Voyn­ich and her hus­band before her.”

Wil­fred Voyn­ich has often been sus­pect­ed as the man­u­scrip­t’s true author, but its mate­ri­als have been car­bon dat­ed to the ear­ly 1400s, and its first con­firmed own­er, an alchemist from Prague named George Baresch, lived in the 17th cen­tu­ry. Oth­er pro­posed authors have includ­ed Queen Eliz­a­beth I’s advi­sor John Dee, an alchemist and occult philoso­pher, and Fran­cis­can fri­ar and philoso­pher Roger Bacon, who was renowned as a wiz­ard almost two cen­turies before the extant Voyn­ich could have been pro­duced.

Evi­dence for these claims is often ten­u­ous, but the wealth of spec­u­la­tion to which the Voyn­ich has giv­en rise only deep­ens the mys­tery of its cre­ation. As more Voyn­ich schol­ars under­take frus­trat­ing, and often fruit­less, inves­ti­ga­tions, they add to the manuscript’s lore, itself so rich as to occa­sion anoth­er, two-hour, fol­low-up video from our doc­u­men­tar­i­an, who goes by the name The His­to­crat on YouTube. See the fur­ther “Deep Dive” on the Voyn­ich manuscript’s many his­tor­i­cal owners—both con­firmed and rumored—just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore Online the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Explained: British Researcher May Have Final­ly Cracked the Code

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness