Voynich Manuscript

The oldest document kept with the Voynich manuscript is a Latin letter sent from Prague on August 19, 1666, by Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of Prague University, to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome. Yale's catalog allows that the year may be 1665. Marci wrote that the book had been left to him by a close friend, who worked on it without rest and gave up hope of reading it only when he died. He passed on what a Dr. Raphael had told him: Emperor Rudolf II had paid 600 ducats for the book and believed the Englishman Roger Bacon wrote it. "I suspend my judgment here," Marci added. He sent the book on because, as he put it, "such sphinxes obey no one but their Kircher."

The book

The manuscript measures 23.5 by 16.2 centimeters and runs to about 240 pages, bound in vellum. Several leaves fold out, the largest to six panels. The text is in an unidentified script. The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library sorts the drawings into six sections: plants, astronomical and astrological diagrams, women bathing in pools and tubes, cosmological medallions, pharmaceutical herbs and roots drawn beside jars, and a final run of text marked with small stars, possibly recipes. The library's older catalog lists 113 plant species, all unidentified. The early foliation skips 14 leaves.

A 2009 materials analysis by McCrone Associates found that the text and the drawings were in all probability made with the same iron gall ink, and that the blue paint is ground azurite.

The date

Greg Hodgins of the University of Arizona cut four slivers of parchment, each about 1 by 6 millimeters, from the edges of four pages. "I sat down with the Voynich manuscript on a desk in front of me, and delicately dissected a piece of parchment from the edge of a page with a scalpel," he said. The radiocarbon results, announced in 2011, date the parchment to between 1404 and 1438.

The test dates the parchment. Hodgins said the inks could not be dated the same way, because they sit on the surface in trace amounts and some are ground minerals with no carbon in them. The Beinecke's current page says the materials are consistent with manuscripts made in the 1400s, while its opening line still places the book at the end of the 1400s or in the 1500s. The older catalog entry argued the book could not predate 1493, because some of its plants had been identified as New World species.

Owners

The first leaf carries an erased name, "Jacobi de Tepenecz," for Jakub Horčický of Tepenec, a Prague pharmacist and alchemist who died in 1622. Wilfrid Voynich noticed the faded signature on a photograph and, around 1914, applied chemicals to the page to bring it out, which left a dark stain in the margin. Multispectral images published in 2024 confirmed the reading.

By 1637, the book belonged to the alchemist Georgius Barschius, who left it to Marci. The next firm record is 1912, when Voynich, a Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, bought it from the Jesuit college at Frascati, near Rome. He died in 1930 without deciphering it. His widow, Ethel, left it to their friend and assistant Anne Nill, who sold it in 1961 to the New York bookseller H. P. Kraus. Kraus gave it to Yale in 1969.

The library's current page calls Rudolf II the first confirmed owner and repeats the 600 ducats. The source its catalog cites for both is the line in Marci's letter, passed on from Dr. Raphael, under which Marci suspended judgment. The older catalog entry also said Rudolf very likely got the book from the English astrologer John Dee, citing page numbers in the corners that matched Dee's hand. The current page says research has cast serious doubt on Dee's ownership.

Who wrote it

In a 2020 study, the paleographer Lisa Fagin Davis identified five different scribes. In 2024, she published multispectral images of the first page, taken at Yale in 2014 and never fully studied. Under ultraviolet light, three faded columns appear in the right margin: a Roman alphabet, a column of Voynich characters, and a second Roman alphabet shifted by one letter. Davis matched the handwriting to Marci and calls the columns a possible early attempt at decoding.

The authors, the language, and whether the text carries meaning at all are still open. The Beinecke says cryptographic approaches have failed "to decipher the text, if it is indeed encoded."

Claimed solutions

In 1921, William Romaine Newbold announced that Roger Bacon wrote the book in a shorthand hidden in tiny strokes inside each character. In 1931, John Manly argued in Speculum that the strokes were cracks in old, dried ink, and wrote that "Newbold's claims are entirely baseless and should be definitely and absolutely rejected."

In 2016, Bradley Hauer and Grzegorz Kondrak published a computational paper whose results "suggest Hebrew as the language of the document."

In September 2017, the Times Literary Supplement published Nicholas Gibbs's claim that the book is a women's health manual in abbreviated Latin. Davis told The Atlantic that the two lines he decoded were not grammatical: "It doesn't result in Latin that makes sense."

In 2019, the journal Romance Studies published Gerard Cheshire's paper reading the text as proto-Romance, an ancestor of the Romance languages, written on Ischia around 1444. On May 15, 2019, the University of Bristol, where Cheshire was an honorary research associate, promoted the paper. Within days, it removed the story, citing concerns "about the validity of this research from academics in the fields of linguistics and medieval studies."

None of these readings has been accepted. In 2023, Davis said she "would be thrilled if a solution were published that stood up to review." The Beinecke says it "does not systematically compile, evaluate, or publish research about it."

Where it is now

Since Yale received the book in 1969, it has left the building once, for the Folger Shakespeare Library's 2014 to 2015 exhibition "Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers" in Washington. In 2024, more than 150,000 people searched for it in Yale's online collections, the library's third most popular search.

The manuscript is not on display, and it is not part of the Beinecke's current or announced exhibitions. The library restricts access to the original because of its fragility and the number of requests, and shows it to researchers only "in exceptional circumstances," on a written proposal.

The public exhibition hall on the ground floor and mezzanine is free, with no reservation. A Gutenberg Bible and two volumes of Audubon's The Birds of America are on permanent display, and the glass book tower holds the 1742 Library of Yale College. The main entrance is a revolving door on Hewitt Quadrangle, across from Woolsey Hall; the accessible entrance faces Wall Street. There are no public restrooms in the building, and the nearest are in Bass Library and Sterling Memorial Library.

The exhibition hall opens at 9am on most weekdays and closes at 7pm Monday through Thursday and 5pm on Friday. On Saturday and Sunday it is open 12pm to 5pm. Free 45-minute tours leave the welcome desk on Saturdays at 1:30pm and 3pm. The building closes for several holidays and for Yale's winter recess, which runs from December 24, 2026, to January 3, 2027.

Every page of the manuscript is scanned in Yale's Digital Collections, free to zoom and download. Registered readers can ask to see the 2016 Yale University Press and 2017 Siloé facsimiles in the reading room, open weekdays until 4:30pm. Researchers from outside Yale can register.