Dee was not without ego neither, apparently, was Voynich. But why isn’t there a clue, a joke, a key of some sort? Great hoaxers usually claim authorship of their creations. With a few weeks and some old vellum, who knows what one could produce? Forging something like this would certainly be possible. Indeed, just the other day I was creating what we’ll call a ‘fictional document’ (not a novel – don’t ask). I’m a novelist who is fond of weird plants and dragons. In my novel PopCo I describe it as “like a book you’d find in a dream almost real but not quite”. It seems to want to tell us something – about organisms, reproduction, disease. The encryption we use for online banking works not because it is unbreakable, but because of the time it would take to perform the necessary calculations to break it.īut the Voynich manuscript is not made out of numbers. It is (currently) mathematically impossible to create an unbreakable code. Languages have been rebuilt from tiny fragments complex enemy messages decrypted with relative ease.

Why would it resist decryption? Every other time a strange document has been discovered, it has been deciphered somehow. Cryptologists have spent decades trying to work out what it means.

Or at least the parchment did.įorgery or no, it is one of the oldest unsolved riddles in the world.

Did John Dee create it to impress his European patrons? Did Roger Bacon write it? More plausibly, was it created by Voynich himself, a trained chemist with access to old vellum? In 2009 the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have come from the early 15th century. “Discovered” by Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in a monastery in 1912, and apparently once owned by Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, the manuscript’s mythic history reads like a Who’s Who of esoteric celebrities. There are astrological-style charts, authentically hairy tubers, a baby dragon eating a sort of alien chard, and naked women immersed in vats of green liquid in what could be an early modern version of The Matrix. It would resemble a medieval herbal catalogue if any of the plants in it were real. The 246 quarto pages contain words written in an unknown language, and pictures of things that look familiar, but do not actually exist. The original is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University - although a hi-res version of the whole thing has been available online for years - and it is one of the oddest things I have ever seen. This week a small Spanish publishing house secured the right to clone the Voynich manuscript.

Voynich manuscript cover