Voynich Manuscript: Medieval Mystery Explained

A page from the mysterious Voynich manuscript, which is undeciphered to this day.

Early History

Much of the Voynich Manuscript’s earliest history is lost to us. No colophon, ownership mark, or contemporary reference tells us who commissioned it or where it was first kept. On the basis of its script, page layout, and illustrative style, scholars generally agree that it is a European production, probably from the cultural orbit of late medieval and early Renaissance central or southern Europe.

Radiocarbon Dating

In 2009, researchers at the University of Arizona subjected samples of the manuscript’s vellum to radiocarbon dating. The results placed the creation of the parchment between 1404 and 1438, firmly anchoring the object in the early fifteenth century. This finding rules out any modern forgery and indicates that, whatever its purpose, the codex was produced in the same broad period as the later Middle Ages’ transition into the Renaissance.

Materials Analysis

A separate materials study by McCrone Associates in Westmont, Illinois, examined the pigments and inks used in the manuscript. The analysis showed that the paints were composed of materials typical of late medieval European manuscripts, with no modern synthetic pigments present. Some commentators have suggested that the ink may have been applied relatively soon after the parchment was prepared, but this point is not specified in McCrone’s published report. Taken together, the dating and materials evidence strongly support the conclusion that the Voynich Manuscript is an authentic fifteenth-century artefact, even if its script and contents remain opaque.

First Confirmed Owner

The first confirmed owner of the Voynich Manuscript was Georg Baresch, a 17th-century alchemist in Prague. For years, the mysterious codex sat in his library, a “Sphinx” he could neither read nor classify. Intrigued yet exasperated, he turned to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher of the Collegio Romano, who was renowned for his ambitious (if not always accurate) decipherments.

In his correspondence, Baresch complained that the strange book had been “taking up space uselessly” among his alchemical volumes, a mute riddle even to learned visitors who pored over its pages in baffled silence. Unable to match its script or plants to any known authority, he copied out samples of the text and sent them to Kircher, asking for clues. Kircher expressed interest in acquiring the manuscript itself, but Baresch declined to part with it, keeping the enigma in Prague even as he appealed to Rome for help in solving it.

Passing of Ownership

Upon Baresch’s death, the manuscript was passed on to his friend Jan Marek Marci, then rector of Charles University in Prague. A few years later, Marci sent the book to Kircher, his long-time friend and correspondent. Marci also sent Kircher a cover letter (in Latin, dated 19 August 1665 or 1666) that was still attached to the book when Voynich acquired it:

Reverend and Distinguished Sir, Father in Christ:

This book, bequeathed to me by an intimate friend, I destined for you, my very dear Athanasius, as soon as it came into my possession, for I was convinced that it could be read by no one except yourself.

The former owner of this book asked your opinion by letter, copying and sending you a portion of the book from which he believed you would be able to read the remainder, but he refused to send the book itself. To its deciphering, he devoted unflagging toil, as is apparent from attempts of his which I send you herewith, and he relinquished hope only with his life. But his toil was in vain, for such sphinxes as these obey no one but their master, Kircher. Accept now this token, such as it is and long overdue though it is, of my affection for you, and burst through its bars, if there are any, with your wonted success.

Dr Raphael, a tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, then King of Bohemia, told me the said book belonged to Emperor Rudolph and that he presented it to the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon, the Englishman. On this point, I suspend judgment; it is your place to define for us what view we should take thereon, to whose favour and kindness I unreservedly commit myself and remain

at the command of your Reverence,

Joannes Marcus Marci of Cronland

Prague, 19th August 1665 [or 1666]

Dr Raphael Identified as Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky

The “Dr Raphael” mentioned in connection with the Voynich Manuscript is believed to be Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky. The sum of the transaction involving this individual is estimated to be around 2 kilograms of gold.

Matching Transaction in Rudolph’s Records

The only transaction that matches the description of the transaction involving Dr Raphael can be found in the records of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. In 1599, he made a purchase of “a couple of remarkable/rare books” from Karl Widemann for 600 florins. Widemann was known for collecting esoteric and alchemical manuscripts, making it plausible that he owned the Voynich Manuscript, although this has yet to be proven.

If the report relayed by Raphael Mnishovsky is accurate, the manuscript once sat amid Emperor Rudolf II’s famed Kunstkammer in Prague – a cabinet of curiosities where rare minerals, automata, exotic beasts, alchemical instruments, and strange books were gathered as a microcosm of the world. To pay 600 ducats – roughly equivalent to several years’ salary for a skilled court official – for an undeciphered codex fits Rudolf’s reputation as a ruler who poured vast sums into alchemy, astrology, and esoteric knowledge. The Voynich Manuscript, in that setting, would have been less a practical handbook than a prized enigma, a physical embodiment of the hidden wisdom he hoped to unlock.

Discrediting of Bacon Authorship Theory

Although Wilfrid Voynich took Raphael’s claims about the authorship of the manuscript at face value, the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the Voynich Manuscript has since been largely discredited.

Other Authorship and Origin Theories

Although the Roger Bacon hypothesis has largely been set aside, Rudolf II’s court and later generations of scholars produced a small gallery of alternative candidates. None has attracted universal acceptance, but together they show how fiercely people have tried to anchor the Voynich Manuscript to a known mind.

One of the most enduring stories centres on John Dee (1527–1608) and his associate Edward Kelley. Dee was a mathematician, astrologer, and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, with a formidable library that included many works by Bacon. Voynich himself came to believe that Dee had once owned the manuscript and sold it to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague for the famous sum of 600 ducats. The tale has a certain dramatic logic: Dee and Kelley are documented at Rudolf’s court in the 1580s, Rudolf was an avid collector of occult books, and Dee later left Prague in financial difficulty with a suspiciously large amount of ready money. Yet Dee’s surviving diary and inventories never mention such a sale, and no contemporary record conclusively links him to the manuscript. Today, most historians treat the “Dee and Kelley” story as a tempting but unproven anecdote that reflects Rudolf’s tastes more than it reveals the manuscript’s true author.

Other suggestions look not at particular courts, but at close visual and technical parallels. Some researchers have pointed to the work of Giovanni Fontana, a 15th-century Italian engineer and physician, whose manuscripts are filled with fantastical machines, siege engines and mnemonic devices written in cipher. A few of Fontana’s diagrams – wheels, pipes, mechanical contraptions accompanied by mysterious symbols – do faintly resemble the hybrid plants and apparatus in the Voynich Manuscript. Fontana, however, used a relatively simple substitution cipher that has long been deciphered, and his script is completely different from “Voynichese”. For that reason, Fontana is better seen as evidence that enciphered “books of secrets” existed in northern Italy at roughly the right time, rather than as a serious front-runner for authorship.

A different line of thought shifts the focus from individual authors to the kind of language the manuscript might contain. In the 17th century, Europe saw a brief fashion for constructed or “philosophical” languages – artificial systems designed to mirror the structure of knowledge more perfectly than Latin or the vernaculars. Some modern commentators have wondered whether the Voynich Manuscript might be a much earlier, private experiment along similar lines: a home-made script and language devised by a single scholar or circle, perhaps to record medical or alchemical lore in a way outsiders could not easily read. The difficulty here is chronological. Radiocarbon dating places the parchment between 1404 and 1438, nearly two centuries before the better-known universal language projects, so any “constructed language” theory has to posit an otherwise unknown, pioneering effort.

Beyond these historically grounded hypotheses lie more speculative ideas. Over the years the Voynich Manuscript has been claimed as a pure hoax, as the product of unstructured glossolalia, as a New World herbal written in an indigenous language, and even – on the fringes – as an “alien” text. Such theories say more about the modern imagination than about the manuscript itself. What the current evidence supports is modest but firm: a genuine 15th-century codex, probably European and perhaps Italian in origin, whose script and language remain unidentified. Between the discredited Bacon attribution and the wilder modern claims, the author recedes once again into the shadows, reminding readers that for now the Voynich Manuscript is best approached as an open historical question, not a solved puzzle.

Signature of Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz

However, there is evidence supporting Rudolph’s ownership of the Voynich Manuscript in the form of a now almost invisible signature or name on the first page of the book. The signature belongs to Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, who was the head of Rudolph’s botanical gardens in Prague. Rudolph died with outstanding debts to de Tepenecz, and de Tepenecz may have taken the book or been given it as partial payment for his debts.

Further examination of the first folio under ultraviolet light has confirmed that faint traces of the inscription “Jacobi de Tepenecz” survive along the lower margin. This name corresponds to Jakub Hořčický of Tepenec (Latinised as Jacobus Sinapius), Rudolf II’s imperial distiller, personal physician, and director of the botanical gardens in Prague. Most scholars interpret the inscription as an ex libris mark, suggesting that the manuscript passed from Rudolf’s collections into Jacobus’s private hands, perhaps as partial payment of the emperor’s debts. Although some comparisons with other surviving signatures attributed to Jacobus have raised questions about the handwriting, the mark remains the strongest physical clue linking the Voynich Manuscript to Rudolf’s Prague court.

Disappearance from the Collegio Romano Library

It is not known what happened to the manuscript for the next 200 years, but it is believed to have been stored with Kircher’s correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University).

When the city was captured by Victor Emmanuel II’s troops in 1870 and the Papal States were annexed, the new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. One important clue to this period is an ownership stamp: the manuscript’s binding bears the ex libris of Petrus Beckx, the Jesuit Superior General and rector of the Collegio Romano, indicating that by the mid-nineteenth century it formed part of his private library rather than the main college collection.

Before the confiscation, many books from the university’s library were transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty and were exempt from confiscation. The correspondence of Kircher, including the Voynich manuscript, was among these books.

Storage in the Villa Mondragone

The manuscript was stored in the private library of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and rector of the university at the time. To shield these books during the secularisation and confiscation of Church property after 1870, Beckx’s collection was moved out of central Rome to the Jesuit country house at Villa Mondragone in Frascati, south of the city. There, among shelves of theological, scientific, and correspondence volumes, the Voynich Manuscript seems to have lain largely unnoticed for several decades until it was quietly offered for sale, together with other manuscripts, in the early twentieth century.

When the Jesuits quietly offered a group of manuscripts for sale from Villa Mondragone in the early twentieth century, Wilfrid Voynich was invited to inspect the lots. Among learned commentaries and theological volumes, one thick quarto stood out: crammed with unknown plants, naked bathers, and swirling diagrams, all captioned in an alphabet he did not recognise. Voynich later recalled the shock of realising that even his considerable experience with rare books did not prepare him for this one. It was this codex he chose to champion, convinced that if its mystery could be solved, it would become one of the most remarkable manuscripts in the world.

Sale to Wilfrid Voynich

In 1903, the Society of Jesus was short of money and decided to discreetly sell some of its holdings, including the Voynich manuscript, to the Vatican Library in 1912.

Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript among 30 others and attempted to interest scholars in deciphering the script for the next seven years.

Inheritance and Transfer to Yale University

The manuscript was inherited by Wilfrid’s widow, Ethel Voynich, after he died in 1930 and was later passed down to her friend Anne Nill.

In 1961, Nill sold the manuscript to the renowned antiquarian bookseller Hans P. Kraus, who priced it ambitiously but soon discovered that even his elite clientele balked at an expensive codex no one could read. After several years of failed attempts to place it with a collector or institution, Kraus did something unusual for a dealer of his stature: he gave up on selling it. In 1969, he donated the manuscript to Yale University, where it was catalogued as “MS 408” in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – effectively ensuring that, if it could not find a private owner, it would at least have a permanent scholarly home.