Welcome to Philip Neal's Voynich Manuscript Page
The Voynich manuscript, now MS 408 of the Beinecke library at Yale University, appears
to be a late mediaeval scientific compendium written in an unknown cipher script. It has been
dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries by experienced palaeographers.
Most cipher texts of this period have easily yielded to modern cryptanalysis,
but this one has defied experts for nearly 100 years.
This is a page where I post occasional thoughts on the problem.
It is not intended as an introduction to the subject but as a noticeboard for interested
parties.
I am not myself
a cryptanalyst, but my doctoral thesis concerned mediaeval German and
Latin and I have a fair idea of what a convincing solution should look like.
I have also worked in computational linguistics. My observations
on the Voynich manuscript focus on the 'biological' section, ff.
78r to 84v, because it is a self-contained piece of text thought to
represent the work of a single scribe in a single one of the two apparent
languages of the manuscript. I make use of existing work by other
researchers and of the transcriptions
made available by the admirable European Voynich Manuscript Transcription project, to
all of whom thanks and credit are due. Occasional criticisms
of views I do not share is not intended as disrespect for their authors.
For comprehensive information on the
manuscript, follow the links at the foot of this page.
Materials for the study of the manuscript
The Marci-Kircher correspondence
The letters of Johannes Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher transcribed:
the full context of some seventeenth century references to the manuscript.
The early evidence in translation
My translations of the early evidence for the Voynich manuscript
A corpus of linguae ignotae
A corpus of passages in unknown languages in mediaeval and Renaissance literature.
Other mediaeval manuscripts
Links to digitised manuscripts on the web relevant to the Voynich manuscript.
Other manuscripts containing cipher
A list of mediaeval manuscripts containing cipher.
The Fontana manuscripts: fifteenth century manuscripts written mainly in
cipher
The alchemical herbals
The alchemical herbals: possible Voynich analogues
My own observations
Hoax, language or cipher?
Why I think it is a cipher.
Autograph or copy?
Notes on the construction of the manuscript and why I think it is
a copy.
The Voynich 'language'
Notes on the structure of the words and sentences.
The marginalia
Notes on the key-like sequences and other marginalia.
Contact
I can be reached at philipneal underscore vms at hotmail dot com.
Original content in these pages copyright Philip Neal 2003-2008.