Inside the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University is the Voynich manuscript: a book that has come to be known as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript.” Since a team of scientists has recently determined the age of the Voynich (pronounced Voy-nitch) manuscript, we relish the opportunity to discuss this enigma as well as some wonderful words around cryptography and linguistics.Consisting of 240 pages of detailed illustrations and a cipher (a method of secret writing using substitution or transposition of letters according to a key), the book has a unique and notorious quality. For decades, historians and scientists have studied its ancient pages but have been unable to decipher its text. Who wrote this manuscript and why? Is there a hidden message within the pages of this document?
A book dealer named Wilfrid M. Voynich discovered the manuscript outside of Rome in 1912, and it has been in the news because of the work of scientists at the University of Arizona. Using a technique called radiocarbon dating, the team of researchers concluded that the book was probably composed between 1404 and 1438 – earlier than previously thought.
