The last few days have seen a huge flurry of Voynich-related Internet interest: a University of Arizona press release on radiocarbon testing the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum sparked a Discovery News item and a hundred or more slightly-edited reposts, with even Fox News getting in on the act yesterday. Sadly, though, it’s all the “same old same old”: you’d be forgiven for concluding that – the UofA’s whizzy new dating aside – there has been nothing new under the Voynich research sun since Mary D’Imperio’s (1976) “An Elegant Enigma”.
But actually, we know a huge amount now. For example, I think I can now prove to the satisfaction of 99% of historians that the Voynich Manuscript is indeed a ciphertext. Even though I first described the following in 2006 (The Curse of the Voynich, Chapter 10: “Secret Numbers”), nobody seems to have picked up on it as a basic historical proof.
So here’s my argument why it’s a ciphertext, one rock-solid step at a time.
(1) Medieval page references.
To make a medieval book, you fold a small double-width set of vellum or paper leaves around a single central line: this unbound-gathered-together nested set is called a gathering. Then, you pass off a set of gatherings to a binder, each gathering with its own sequential mark – typically ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, etc – so that you can be sure the binder will bind them together in the right order. Once sewn and bound, the gatherings become known as quires. Within each quire, the individual folios (leaves) are typically numbered ‘i’, ‘ii’, ‘iii’, etc, while the two sides of each folio were referred to as recto (front) and verso (back), usually abbreviated to ‘r’ and ‘v’ respectively.
So, when medieval writers wanted to refer to individual pages, the ‘address’ of that page was its quire index (a/b/c/…), its folio number (i/ii/iii/…) and its side (r/v). For convenience, these three elements were usually fused together into a short string, i.e. the first few pages of the first (i.e. the a-th) quire would be referred to as air, aiv, aiir, aiiv, aiiir, aiiiv, etc. Everyone who worked with manuscripts knew these were medieval page references: this was the cultural norm.
(2) Voynichese appears to be full of medieval page references.
For someone circa 1450 looking at the Voynich Manuscript, one single feature of its mysterious text would have almost jumped off the page – the medieval page references, all apparently to the first (a-th) quire. For example, here you can see an “aiiv” group with an “air” group immediately below it:-
Whether you like it or not, there it is: the Voynich is utterly stuffed full of these medieval page references. However…
(3) These don’t function like medieval page references.
If you count these up, you discover that aiv/aiiv/aiiiv (1675/3742/106) occur more than eight times as often as air/aiir/aiiir (564/112/1). Simply put, the stats are wrong. Also, there appear to be no references to other quires, just to the a-th quire.
(4) These are not medieval page references
So, if these things so closely resemble medieval page references (but aren’t), what are they? The famous WWII codebreaker Brigadier John Tiltman wondered whether these might actually some kind of obfuscated Roman numeral scheme, but the stats were wrong for that idea too. Hence they don’t match any obvious numerical or referential scheme.
(5) These appear to be integrated within the text
Even if we cannot directly read them, we can see that they recur throughout the text, and – as in the example shown above – that they are often integrated with other Voynichese letters into words. But… if they appear as consistent groups, are integrated within words, and resemble something that they clearly aren’t (i.e. medieval page references), then the only rational historical inference is that…
(6) These are cipher shapes.
QED. But… if even one element of the writing scheme is written in cipher, then the conclusion has to be that…
(7) The Voynich Manuscript is a ciphertext.
Again, QED. However, even though medieval page references were known circa 1450, their heyday had passed: they were far more part of the medieval world of the monastery scriptorium than the emerging Renaissance world. Hence the presence of fake medieval page references in its ciphertext inexorably leads (I believe) to a further curious conclusion:
(8) Voynichese was constructed to resemble a medieval document in a fake archaic language
I contend that this is the only logical conclusion consistent with the radiocarbon dating: an early Renaissance mind looking back at the Middle Ages, cunningly appropriating medieval textual tropes for his/her ciphertext’s alphabet.
Now, please tell me – which part of this argument do you disagree with?
