I recently published the outcome of a comprehensive research in several archives in Europe and found what I've been looking for – a possible previous owner of the Voynich manuscript which may help to track down the provenance further.

Cool. What is the status of decrypting the manuscript?

Really cool! I’ve been interested in the Voynich manuscript for over 20 years - as a kid I had a bunch of printouts I’d look at over and over ( as if I’d figure anything out).

Do happen to have any theories as to the origin of the manuscript or it’s writing?

I still say it's a very early sourcebook for somebody's TTRPG. The thing looks like and feels/"reads" like a Monster Manual.

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Thanks, XKCD!

No, really.

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I think this is a rabbit hole you're best off going down yourself 😉

There have been many people that claimed they deciphered it, but so far every one of them turned out to be wrong. Theres also a lot of people claiming it to just be nonsense, but proving that is nearly impossible. Comparing the number/frequency/combinations of glyphs in the manuscript to real languages/alphabets shows that it behaves very similar to natural languages in many ways which would indicate it to be a code or cypher, but it also significantly differs from how natural languages behave in many other ways, so its very difficult to say if its a code or not.

The most important step to deciphering it would be to figure out what language it is in, but afaik there hasnt been a conclusion reached in regards to that.

Really interesting!

So assuming it really belonged to Leonhard Rauwolf... his life seems fairly well researched (just judging from Wikipedia). Do you think there's a chance to trace the ownership of the manuscript even further?

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Congratulations, that's really cool!

I've got to ask since you've studied it more than a little I'm assuming, do you think it's a fraud?

Analysis of the book binding, the illustrations and some color annotations in German narrow down the area to the wider Alpine region. Could be southern Germany, northern Italy, hard to say.

In my opinion the content is much less spectacular than most people think: A recent study shows that is probably dealing with "women medicine", i.e. fertility, abortion, sexuality etc. There a numerous examples that these topics have been censored or encrypted in manuscripts of the time.

No, really a LOT of statistical analysis on the writing has been done in the last year which rule out that the text was just meaningless gibberish. It has properties of a language, but it could either be an an unknown language, an unknown short hand system, an unknown cipher or a mixture of these (the latter impossible to crack).

Yes, there are still thousands of letters of physicians and scholars scattered in archives through Europe that have not been indexed. I believe that there might be a letter out there where Carl Widemann or someone else is mentioning the manuscript who certainly already looked interesting to a 16th century scholar. I spend almost two years and tracked down a lot of previous unknown letters but without any direct mention so far.

That's very interesting, I'd basically just dismissed it as a fraud at this point!

I do wonder what the hell it's one about though, you got any good bets?

I always thought it might be some sort of esoteric manual given the waxing and waning fortunes of such material, writing it in code would probably be of use to anyone who knew what it said

If none of those, perhaps an Alchemical Manuscript. They used tons of allegory and code.

Why hasn’t AI solved this!??

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Lo sabía , sabía que lo había tenido Rauwolf. Era por pura lógica. Lo sabía.

Nothing is more complex or as beautiful as this manuscript. I have had a fascination with it since I was a teen.

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I'm surprised with all of our computer technology if that is the case that we couldn't get a computer to do it.

The link to your paper in the article isn’t working for me. Can you pls share it here?

Really though? That seems so unlikely just based on simple human nature. Why go to such a great length to encrypt it in a way that no one can understand, if you actually want it to be understood? Are any of the other examples encrypted with nearly the same amount of care? What do we know of people who would have used manuscripts like this?

Is that really what you think after working in the field so long? It seems to me that it's such a long book with such elaborate and strange drawings, how could the answer be that "simple"? The drawings especially and how no one seems to be able to decode it with their help just immediately scream "whoever made this wanted people to have a hard time reading it".

What about all the plants? Aren't many of them nonexistent? Shouldn't those that exist have some known use in women's medicine if this theory holds true?

Thanks for the study though, fascinating read.

This set me down a rabbit hole. I just looked at every page of the voynich and I can't see it being woman's secrets. As the author of the paper says, the longest suspected encrypted document of woman's secrets would be a maximum of six pages if it was even ever encrypted. The thing is, anything that could be said about the topic back then couldnt possibly be stretched to so many pages. Also, the drawings of the women have basically no anatomical meaning (there are no clear drawings of anatomy, or of child birth, or of any medical procedure). The drawings of the women are extremely repetitive. I can't see how information can really be encoded in them. If the tubes and such are supposed to somehow be symbolic anatomical clues, the repetitive women posing a hundred times on the page are not needed.

One thing struck me the whole time looking at those pictures: they are extemely ugly, the author couldn't draw for shit. It literally looks like how i would draw if i was trying to make something look deep and metaphorical, but didn't really have any meaning to it. There's a lot of "symmetry" and repetition in the pictures that don't seem to possibly encode information.

Then again, some illustrations are made with such detail, that it seems unlikely they aren't.

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Problem is they're working backwards. They know Zipfs law is a thing so they know their gibberish producing technique should follow it.

They're going to need to be able to produce known hoaxes from the time period of the Voynich manuscript that have gibberish following Zipfs law when it was unknown for their claim to have any shred of legitimacy.

Yes, some papers elaborate on this, but the most recent studies on this (like the ones presented in November on the International Voynich conference) make clear that it is not some man-made gibberish.

It also makes absolutely no sense to spend such amount of time (and parchment) for such a hoax in the early 15th century. Who would be the audience? An early modern hoax made by alchemists to swindle Rudolph? This sounds imaginable, but not for the Voynich Manuscript which is without doubt a product of the early 15th century.

https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper16.pdf

In medieval Europe some topics where just too risky for a person to write about (see Keagan Brewer's excellent overview on encrypted gynaecological or sexological texts in the time period the Voynich manuscript was written).

Yes, a lot of plants seem hard to identify, but so are other illustrations in other medieval manuscripts as well. And just think of a person copying an illustration from another source without any botanical background. Usually manuscripts were illuminated by specialists, but obviously including a third-party professional wouldn't have worked out if the author/copyist wanted to have it secret. So he or she went for the (less skilled) in-house option. The quality of the illustration is clearly way below the usual quality in herbaria of the time.

What also is often forgotten: Things vanish in hundreds of years. We just see a single manuscript here. No one knows if there used to be a couple of codices in this writing system and a small group of person was used to work with it.

I ended up looking through the entire voynich manuscript and reading the whole study. I'm sorry but there's no way to me that this is the answer..in the study the longest comparable encryption was like a page, and there was a suggestion that another work may have also been encrypted with no proof. Every other comparable manuscript only had small parts erased. None of them carried even nearly as much info. I could see some of the text being about the topic but the whole thing?

The work is way too long. There are no comparable works from the time that deal only with female anatomy or women's secrets. The illustrations of the women seem symbolic rather than too encode any information. If it's supposed to be hidden anatomical knowledge there's no need to include naked ladies in the first place. Also, i feel like there's an undeniable "spiritual" or "religious/esoteric" quality to the illustrations.

The plants are undoubtedly not real for the most part, syntheses of different plants. When reading the manuscript it does feel like the illustrator is using their fantasy a lot to construct the illustrations, if these were medicinal plants, there would not be so many of them and such long texts accompanying. It's nothing like similar medical or pharmaceutical treatises of the time in scope.

It's possible to imagine that there's some (maybe anatomic or procedural) information encoded in the illustrations of the interconnecting tubes, but then what are all the repeated illustrations of the women for, and if the purpose is to hide the

In the other examples of encryptions, erasures and censoring, it's always limited passages About certain things the author was too morally concerned to expose. It's hard to imagine that the whole thing contains taboo knowledge.

Isnt it true that right when this was written, was the beginning of curious valuable books that also pushed taboos such as sorcery, alchemy etc. What this seems like to me is someone painstakingly making an esoteric book to sell for a lot of money. The suggestion that the language-like qualities of the voynich can be generated by using a grid and writing syllables, seems so much more likely to me than that someone came up with a code that still hasn't been cracked.

Really my main question would be if you think it's real, why do you think we haven't been able to crack it? Humans are usually great at cracking deliberately encrypted things especially when they are encrypted without the help of technology. the manuscript is undoubtedly of European origin and while it's possible it's not encrypting a European language, you'd expect that we could crack any code someone came up with in the 1400's with this much time and effort going into it.

I can see this being an elaborate fake, it looks to me like an esoteric book of sorcery, which seem to have been popular at the time. And it was sold for a lot of money various times, so it likely worked.

Thank you. Do you have a Twitter account or anything I can follow for when further developments occur?

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I think I’ve figured out the code based on this page.