Voynich manuscript

Codicology The codicology, or physical characteristics of the manuscript, have been studied by many researchers. The manuscript measures , with hundreds of vellum pages collected into 18 quires. The total number of pages is around 240, but the exact number depends on how the manuscript's unusual foldouts are counted. The quires have been numbered from 1 to 20 in various locations, using a style of numerals consistent with those used in the 15th century, and the top right corner of each recto (righthand) page has been numbered from 1 to 116, using a style of numerals that originated at a later date. From the various numbering gaps in the quires and pages, it seems likely that in the past, the manuscript had at least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912. There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in the book's history, and that its pages were originally in a different order than the order they are in today. Parchment, covers, and binding Samples from various parts of the manuscript were radiocarbon dated at the University of Arizona in 2009. The results were consistent for all samples tested and indicated a date for the parchment between 1404 and 1438. The parchment is made from "at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins". The goatskin binding and covers are not original to the book, but date to its possession by the Collegio Romano. This indicates the manuscript was handled or paged through a great deal and likely served some routine function such as a medical manual or celestial almanac. Its heavy usage also suggests it had a workmanlike role rather than anything sacred or ceremonial. The holes in the parchment from scabs, wounds, or insect bites, and the lack of any luxurious touches such as gold leaf, support this interpretation. Text The manuscript has roughly 38,000 words, of which 9,000 are unique. • f1r: A sequence of Latin letters in the right margin parallel with characters from the unknown script; also the now-unreadable signature of "Jacobj à Tepenecz" is found in the bottom margin. • f17r: A line of writing in Latin script in the top margin. • f66r: A small number of words in the bottom left corner near a drawing of a nude man have been read as , a High German • f116v: Four lines written in rather distorted Latin script, referred to as Michitonese, except for two words in the unknown script. The words in Latin script appear to be distorted with characteristics of the unknown language. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the late 14th and 15th centuries, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language. Whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text or were added later is not known. Voynich Manuscript (3).jpg|f1r Voynich Manuscript (33).jpg|f17r Voynich Manuscript (206).jpg|f116v ("Michitonese") Transcription Various transcription alphabets have been created to encode Voynich characters as Latin characters, to help with cryptanalysis, such as the Extensible (originally: European) Voynich Alphabet (EVA). The first major one was created by the "First Study Group", led by cryptographer William F. Friedman in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card to make it machine readable. Statistical patterns The text consists of over 170,000 characters, The structure of these words seems to follow phonological or orthographic laws of some sort; for example, certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels), some characters never follow others, or some may be doubled or tripled, but others may not. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: Some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end (like Greek ς), and some always in the middle section. There are a number of patterns of word length, frequency, etc. found in the manuscript that are consistent with natural language (i.e. languages that occurs organically in a human community). The word found most frequently in the manuscript appears roughly twice as often as the second-most-common word, and three times as often as the third-most-common, (following Zipf's law). The mix of word lengths and the ratio of unique words to total words are similar to languages found around the world. Certain words seem to follow one another in predictable order, as if following rules of grammar. Just as one would expect in a normal book whose chapters focused on different subjects, the different sections of the manuscript (based on the drawings of plants, stars, bathing women, etc., accompanying them) have different sets of overrepresented words. Professor Gonzalo Rubio, an expert in ancient languages at Pennsylvania State University, stated: Stephan Vonfelt studied statistical properties of the distribution of letters and their correlations (properties which can be vaguely characterised as rhythmic resonance, alliteration, or assonance) and found that under that respect Voynichese is more similar to the Mandarin Chinese text of the Records of the Grand Historian than to the text of works from European languages, although the numerical differences between Voynichese and look larger than those between and European languages. Practically no words have fewer than two letters or more than ten. Some words occur in only certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. Few repetitions occur among the thousand or so labels attached to the illustrations. There are instances where the same common word appears up to five times in a row but rather is likely to be an encoded natural language or a constructed language. Bowern also concludes that the statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript are not consistent with the use of a substitution cipher or polyalphabetic cipher. As noted in Bowern's review, the writer or writers of the manuscript may have used two methods of encoding at least one natural language. The "language" Voynich A appears in the herbal and pharmaceutical parts of the manuscript. The "language" known as Voynich B appears in the balneological section, some parts of the medicinal and herbal sections, and the astrological section. The most common vocabulary items of Voynich A and Voynich B are substantially different. Topic modeling of the manuscript suggests that pages identified as written by a particular scribe may relate to a different topic. Bowern's review also notes that multiple scribes may have written the manuscript. • Astronomical, 17 pages: Contains circular diagrams suggestive of astronomy or astrology, some of them with suns, moons, and stars. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly nude, and each holds what appears to be a labelled star or is shown with the star attached to either arm by what could be a tether or cord of some kind. The last two pages of this section were lost (Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly February and January), while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages. • Pharmaceutical, 16 pages: Many labelled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.), objects resembling apothecary jars, ranging in style from the mundane to the fantastical, and a few text paragraphs. despite the fact that botanical observations militate against this identification The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine; however, the puzzling details of the illustrations have fuelled many theories about the book's origin, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. Only a few of the plant drawings can be identified with reasonable certainty, such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern. The herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of them, except that missing parts were completed with improbable details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third. Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting, and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript; however, interpretation remains speculative, apart from the obvious zodiac symbols and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets. == History ==

, who sent the manuscript to Athanasius Kircher in 1665 or 1666 Much of the book's early provenance is unknown, though the text and illustrations are all characteristically European. In 2009, University of Arizona researchers radiocarbon dated the manuscript's vellum to between 1404 and 1438. In addition, McCrone Associates in Westmont, Illinois, found that the paints in the manuscript were of materials to be expected from that period of European history. There have been erroneous reports that McCrone Associates indicated that much of the ink was added not long after the creation of the parchment, but their official report contains no such statement. Whether Kircher answered the request or not is not known, but he was apparently interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch refused to yield. The "Dr. Raphael" is believed to be Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky, Widemann was a prolific collector of esoteric and alchemical manuscripts, so his ownership of the manuscript is plausible, but unproven. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 of these manuscripts, among them the one which now bears his name. He spent the next seven years attempting to interest scholars in deciphering the script, while he worked to determine the origins of the manuscript. In 1930, the manuscript was inherited after Wilfrid's death by his widow Ethel Voynich, author of the novel The Gadfly and daughter of mathematician George Boole. She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill sold the book to antique book dealer Hans P. Kraus. Kraus was unable to find a buyer and donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969, where it was catalogued as "MS 408", sometimes also referred to as "Beinecke MS 408". Timeline of ownership The timeline of ownership of the Voynich manuscript is given below. The time when it was possibly created is shown in green (early 1400s), based on carbon dating of the vellum. Periods of unknown ownership are indicated in white. The commonly accepted owners of the 17th century are shown in orange; the long period of storage in the Collegio Romano is yellow. The location where Wilfrid Voynich allegedly acquired the manuscript (Frascati) is shown in green (late 1800s); Voynich's ownership is shown in red, and modern owners are highlighted blue. == Authorship hypotheses ==

Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript, among them Roger Bacon, John Dee or Edward Kelley, Giovanni Fontana, and Voynich. Early history , portrait by Hans von Aachen|198x198px |234x234px Marci's 1665/1666 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his friend the late Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia for 600 ducats, of actual gold weight. Mnishovsky had died in 1644, more than 20 years earlier, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611, at least 55 years before Marci's letter; however, Karl Widemann sold books to Rudolf II in March 1599. According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was the 13th-century Franciscan friar and polymath, Roger Bacon. Marci said that he was suspending judgment about this claim, but it was taken quite seriously by Wilfrid Voynich, who did his best to confirm it. As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means, and a lost book by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. Furthermore, Baresch's letter and Marci's letter only establish the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one mentioned. These letters could possibly have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript, assuming that he was aware of them; however, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the June 1999 Giovanni Fontana It has been suggested that some illustrations in the books of an Italian engineer, Giovanni Fontana, slightly resemble Voynich illustrations. Fontana was familiar with cryptography and used it in his books, although he did not use the Voynich script but a simple substitution cipher. In the book ('Secret of the treasure-room of experiments in man's imagination'), written c. 1430, Fontana described mnemonic machines, written in his cipher. That book and his both used a cryptographic system, described as a simple, rational cipher, based on signs without letters or numbers. Other theories Sometime before 1921, Voynich was able to read a name faintly written at the foot of the manuscript's first page: "Jacobj à Tepenecz". This is taken to be a reference to Jakub Hořčický of Tepenec, also known by his Latin name Jacobus Sinapius. Rudolf II had ennobled him in 1607, had appointed him his Imperial Distiller, and had made him curator of his botanical gardens as well as one of his personal physicians. Voynich (and many other people after him) concluded that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript prior to Baresch, and he drew a link from that to Rudolf's court, in confirmation of Mnishovsky's story. Jacobus's name has faded further since Voynich saw it, but is still legible under ultraviolet light. It does not match the copy of his signature in a document located by Jan Hurych in 2003. As a result, it has been suggested that the signature was added later, possibly even fraudulently by Voynich himself. It has been speculated that these were both cryptographic tricks played on Kircher to make him look foolish. This has led to the speculation that Mnishovsky might have produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made Baresch his unwitting test subject. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected some kind of deception. == Language hypotheses ==

. Many hypotheses have been developed about the Voynich manuscript's "language", called Voynichese. Ciphers According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters. This was the working hypothesis for most 20th-century deciphering attempts, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s. A 2025 study proposed a historically plausible verbose substitution cipher ("Naibbe") that can encode Latin and Italian as ciphertext, would be possible with 15th century supplies, and exhibits many of the manuscript's known statistical properties, though the author stresses it is a proof of concept and does not claim it is the manuscript's actual cipher. Shorthand In 1943, Joseph Martin Feely suggested that the manuscript might be a scientific diary, written in a private shorthand system, using abbreviations, for a language such as Latin. According to Mary D'Imperio, "other scholars ... unanimously rejected" Feely's proposed readings of the text and the hypothesis that the text was composed using a "system of abbreviated forms" was "not considered acceptable". Natural language Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. Amancio et al. (2013) argued that the Voynich manuscript "is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts". The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some little-known natural language, written plaintext with an invented alphabet. He suggested Chinese in jest, but later comparison of word length statistics with Vietnamese and Chinese led him to take the hypothesis seriously. In many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai (Thai, Lao, etc.), morphemes generally have only one syllable. Child (1976), a linguist of Indo-European languages for the U.S. National Security Agency, proposed that the manuscript was written in a "hitherto unknown North Germanic dialect". He identified in the manuscript a "skeletal syntax several elements of which are reminiscent of certain Germanic languages", while the content is expressed using "a great deal of obscurity". In January 2014, Stephen Bax of the University of Bedfordshire published his research on using a "bottom up" approach to decipher the manuscript. His method involved looking for and translating proper nouns, in association with relevant illustrations, in the context of other languages of the same time period. A paper he posted online offers tentative translation of 14 characters and 10 words. He suggested the text is a treatise on nature written in a natural language, rather than a code, Tucker & Talbert (2014) published a paper claiming a positive identification of 37 plants, 6 animals, and one mineral referenced in the manuscript to plant drawings in the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis or Badianus manuscript, an Aztec herbal written in 1552. Together with the presence of atacamite in the paint, they argue that the plants were from colonial New Spain and the text represented Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. They date the manuscript to between 1521 (the date of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire) and circa 1576. These dates contradict the earlier radiocarbon date of the vellum and other elements of the manuscript; however, they argued that the vellum could have been stored and used at a later date. The analysis has been criticised by other Voynich manuscript researchers, who argued that a skilled forger could construct plants that coincidentally have a passing resemblance to theretofore undiscovered existing plants. Nahuatl specialist M. Pharao Hansen has rejected their proposed readings as resting on "pure speculation". Constructed language The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript words led William F. Friedman to conjecture that the text could be a constructed language. In 1950, Friedman asked the British army officer John Tiltman to analyse a few pages of the text, but Tiltman did not share this conclusion. In a paper in 1967, Tiltman said: The concept of a constructed language is quite old, as attested by Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes (fusional languages); as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitive nature of the Voynich text; however, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript. Hoax The fact that the manuscript has defied decipherment thus far has led various scholars to propose that the text does not contain meaningful content in the first place, implying that it may be a medieval hoax. In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay. The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, more than 100 years after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree. In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia supported the hoax hypothesis. Schinner posited that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic method, such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts. Some scholars have claimed that the manuscript's text appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. In 2013, Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester, published findings claiming that semantic networks exist in the text of the manuscript, such as content-bearing words occurring in a clustered pattern, or new words being used when there was a shift in topic. With this evidence, he believes it unlikely that these features were intentionally "incorporated" into the text to make a hoax more realistic, as most of the required academic knowledge of these structures did not exist at the time the Voynich manuscript would have been written. In 2021, researchers at Yale University, using the tf–idf analysis, further investigated the relation between clusters of subjects in the text and topics as they could be identified by illustrations and paleography analysis. Their conclusion is that clusters derived by computation match with the topics of the illustrations to some degree, thus providing evidence that the Voynich manuscript contains meaningful text. Other scholars have argued that such sophisticated patterns could also appear in hoaxed documents. In 2016, Gordon Rugg and Gavin Taylor published another article in Cryptologia demonstrating that the grille method could reproduce many larger-scale features of the text. In 2019, Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner published a paper arguing that the text was produced by a process of "self-citation" in which scribes copied and modified meaningless words from earlier in the text. Using a computer simulation of this process, they demonstrated that it could reproduce many of the statistical characteristics of the Voynich manuscript. In 2022, Yale University researchers Daniel Gaskell and Claire Bowern published the results of an experiment in which human participants intentionally tried to write meaningless text. They found that the resulting text was often highly non-random and exhibited many of the same unusual statistical properties as the Voynich manuscript, supporting the idea that some features of the text could have been produced in a hoax. Glossolalia In their 2004 book, Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill suggest the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), channelling, or outsider art. If so, the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which resembles stream of consciousness, either because of voices heard or because of an urge. This often takes place in an invented language in glossolalia, usually made up of fragments of the author's own language, although invented scripts for this purpose are rare. Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the Voynich manuscript and the illustrations that she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine, which can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of stars", and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the balneological section. The theory is controversial, and is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text. Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. In the culminating chapter of their work, Kennedy states his belief that it is a hoax or forgery. Churchill acknowledges the possibility that the manuscript is either a synthetic forgotten language (as advanced by Friedman), or else a forgery, as the preeminent theory. He concludes that, if the manuscript is a genuine creation, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author. == Decipherment claims ==

Since the manuscript's modern rediscovery in 1912, there have been a number of claimed decipherings. William Romaine Newbold One of the earliest efforts to decode the book's code was made in 1921 by William Romaine Newbold from the University of Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings discernible only under magnification. These markings were supposed to be based on ancient Greek shorthand, forming a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Newbold claimed to have used this knowledge to work out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before van Leeuwenhoek. A circular drawing in the astronomical section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which Newbold interpreted as a picture of a galaxy, which could be obtained only with a telescope. after John Matthews Manly of the University of Chicago pointed out serious flaws in his theory in 1931. For example, each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, and as a result there was no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all could be discerned from the microscopic markings. Although evidence of micrography using the Hebrew language can be traced as far back as the ninth century, it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Close study of the manuscript revealed the markings to be artefacts caused by the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum. Perceiving significance in these artefacts can be attributed to pareidolia. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography theory is now generally disregarded. Joseph Martin Feely In 1943, Joseph Martin Feely published ''Roger Bacon's Cipher: The Right Key Found'', in which he claimed that the book was a scientific diary written by Roger Bacon. Feely's method posited that the text was a highly abbreviated medieval Latin written in a simple substitution cipher. Robert S. Brumbaugh In 1978, Robert Brumbaugh, a professor of classical and medieval philosophy at Yale University, claimed that the manuscript was a forgery intended to fool Emperor Rudolf II into purchasing it, and that the text is Latin enciphered with a complex, two-step method. in which he claimed that the Voynich manuscript was a series of letters written in vowelless Ukrainian. The theory caused some sensation among the Ukrainian diaspora at the time, and then in independent Ukraine after 1991; however, the date Stojko gives for the letters, the lack of relation between the text and the images, and the general looseness in the method of decryption have all been criticised. He claimed the manuscript to be a treatise on nature, in a Near Eastern or Asian language, but no full translation was made before Bax's death in November 2017. Greg Kondrak Greg Kondrak, a professor of natural language processing at the University of Alberta, and his graduate student Bradley Hauer used computational linguistics in an attempt to decode the manuscript. Their findings were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in August 2017 in the form of an article suggesting that the manuscript's language is most likely Hebrew, but encoded using alphagrams, i.e. alphabetically-ordered anagrams, with Kondrak even claiming to have decoded the first sentence as "She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people"; however, the team admitted that experts in medieval manuscripts who reviewed the work were not convinced. Nicholas Gibbs In September 2017, television writer Nicholas Gibbs claimed to have decoded the manuscript as idiosyncratically abbreviated Latin. He declared the manuscript to be a mostly plagiarised guide to women's health. Davis added that she was "surprised the TLS published it." Other researchers concurred. He claimed the text was written using phonemic orthography, meaning the manuscript's author spelled out words as they were heard phonetically. The findings were presented at a conference related to Turkish World Studies. Ardıç began deciphering the manuscript four years earlier with the help of his two sons. Ardıç "noticed that the words in the book appeared to be built of repetitive roots with prefixes and suffixes added. It reminded him of his native Turkish ... At first he found seven characters that were the same as Old Turkic, and slowly the language revealed itself ... Other illustrations allowed them to match up Old Turkic words with the images pictured", reported The Canadian Press. Following criticism from linguist Koen Gheuens on the grounds of it being reminiscent of goropism akin to the Sun Language Theory, Ardıç released a 195-page paper attempting to clarify his position and accusing Gheuens of bias and ad hominem attacks. Gerard Cheshire In May 2019, Gerard Cheshire, a biology research assistant at the University of Bristol, claimed that the manuscript is written in a "calligraphic proto-Romance" language. He claimed to have deciphered the manuscript in two weeks using a combination of "lateral thinking and ingenuity." Cheshire has suggested that the manuscript is "a compendium of information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing, and astrological readings"; that it contains numerous descriptions of medicinal plants and passages that focus on female physical and mental health, reproduction, and parenting; and that the manuscript is the only known text written in proto-Romance. He further claimed: "The manuscript was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon." In June 2023, Cheshire published his translation of the foldout illustration on page 158. He claims that it depicts a volcano, and theorises that it places the manuscript's creators near the island of Vulcano which was an active volcano during the 15th century; however, experts in medieval documents disputed this interpretation vigorously. Approached for comment, Lisa Fagin Davis gave this explanation: {{Blockquote The University of Bristol subsequently removed a reference to Cheshire's claims from its website, referring, in a statement, to concerns about the validity of the research and stating: "This research was entirely the author's own work and is not affiliated with the University of Bristol, the School of Arts nor the Centre for Medieval Studies". == Facsimiles ==

Many books and articles have been written about the manuscript. Copies of the manuscript pages were made by alchemist Georg Baresch in 1637 and sent to Athanasius Kircher, and others were made by Wilfrid Voynich. In 2004, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library made high-resolution digital scans publicly available online, and several printed facsimiles appeared. In 2016, the Beinecke Library and Yale University Press co-published a facsimile, The Voynich Manuscript, with scholarly essays. The Beinecke Library also authorised the production of a print run of 898 replicas by the Spanish publisher Siloé in 2017. In September 2024, multispectral scans of ten selected pages were made public, revealing details unseen with visible light. == Cultural influence ==

The manuscript has inspired various works of fiction, including: • Between 1976 and 1978, Italian artist Luigi Serafini created the Codex Seraphinianus containing false writing and pictures of imaginary plants in a style reminiscent of the Voynich manuscript. • Contemporary classical composer Hanspeter Kyburz's 1995 chamber work The Voynich Cipher Manuscript, for chorus & ensemble is inspired by the manuscript. • In 2015, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra commissioned Hannah Lash to compose a symphony inspired by the manuscript. • For the 500th strip of the webcomic Sandra and Woo, published 29 July 2013, writer Oliver Knörzer and artist Puri Andini created The Book of Woo, four illustrated pages inspired by the Voynich manuscript. All four pages show strange illustrations next to a cipher text. The strip was mentioned in MTV Geek and discussed in the Cipher Mysteries blog of cryptology expert Nick Pelling as well as Klausis Krypto Kolumne of cryptology expert . The Book of Woo was also discussed in the 2017 book Unsolved! by , about the history of famous ciphers. As part of the lead-up to the 1,000th strip, Knörzer posted the translated English text on 28 June 2018, revealing the crucial obfuscation involved translating the plain text into the constructed language Toki Pona. • Seiman Douman's debut manga The Voynich Hotel (2006) is named after the manuscript. • In Hernán Diaz's novel Trust, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, a protagonist's diary is jokingly referred to as the "Voynich Manuscripts" due to the writer's indecipherable script. == See also ==