The Voynich Manuscript

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Welcome to The Voynich Manuscript textbook!

[edit] Introduction

The Voynich Manuscript is a 200+ page book generally thought to have been written roughly half a millennium ago. Yet despite all the supposed power of our modern analytical methodologies, what it actually is remains a complete mystery - not one word can be read with any certainty. Is it written in a code, a cipher, or an unknown shorthand? Is it written in a lost, obscure or artificial language? Is it a pathological "word-salad" manuscript? Is it "writing in tongues", or written in an angelic or channelled language? Or is it some kind of devious Renaissance (or even modern) hoax?

Despite this, you may already have made your mind up what the Voynich Manuscript is - if so, you may do well to consider Francis Bacon's aphorism, that "if we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and we are patient in them, we shall end in certainties."

Perhaps the appeal of Voynich research is that (a) it is truly cross-disciplinary, and (b) it rewards endeavour and persistence. This wikibook is intended to help you get started on what has already been (for some) a long road of (self-)discovery - the page you may find most useful at first is the Guide To Voynich Jargon.

[edit] Page-by-page commentary

See: The Voynich Manuscript/Page-by-page commentary

The Voynich Manuscript has more than 200 pages, divided up into twenty quires (as per the following links). The first 7 quires are standard quires consisting of 4 nested bifolios each. Quire 8 once consisted of 5 such bifolios but only 2 remain. From quire 9 onwards, quires often consist of only one or two multiple folding bifolios. Exceptions are quires 13 (5 standard bifolios) and 20 (7 standard bifolios of which 6 remain). Further details are available at the description of each quire.

The web-pages linked onwards from there are intended to summarise the debate relating to individual pages - what could they mean? To what are they similar? What interesting (visual or statistical) properties do they have? (etc)

Main herbal section - Quires 1-7

Mixed quire - Quire 8

Astronomical/cosmological section - Quires 9-10 (note that quire 10 also contains the start of the zodiac section!)

Zodiac section - Quires 11-12

Biological/balneological (bathing nymph) section - Quires 13-14 (contains the "9-rosette" fold-out page)

Pharmacological+herbal section - Quires 15-19

Recipe / calendar / almanacke section - Quire 20