The Voynich Manuscript Has Stumped Codebreakers for a Century and Counting

The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten, illustrated book about 240 pages long, in a script no one recognizes, illustrating plants no one can identify and naked women bathing in green tubs no one can explain. Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought it in 1912 from the Society of Jesus at the Villa Mondragone outside Rome, in a sale of duplicate books from the Roman College's library. He took it to be a thirteenth-century work by Roger Bacon and spent the rest of his life failing to confirm that.

In 2009, the University of Arizona radiocarbon-dated four samples of the manuscript's vellum and got a tight cluster between 1404 and 1438. That single result killed most of the popular theories. A nineteenth-century forgery would have required someone to acquire fourteen calfskins of unused early-fifteenth-century parchment and write 38,000 words in a fluent invented script across them. A Bacon attribution was off by 150 years.

What remains is just the puzzle. The script — "Voynichese" — uses 20 to 25 primary characters whose statistics resemble a real natural language but match no known one. William Friedman, the Army cryptanalyst who broke Japan's Purple cipher, worked on it for decades and concluded he didn't know what it was. John Tiltman at GCHQ failed too. Modern claimants reappear every few years with proposed solutions; none has held up. The book continues to do exactly what it has done since 1912: refuse to translate.