Stories untold

The Voynich manuscript is written on vellum, a material no book today would use. Carbon-dating suggests that it was written sometime between 1404 and 1438. In 1912, antique bookseller Wilfrid Voynich purchased the book in Rome. When he realized that it contained hundreds of pages in a language that he, an educated connoisseur of old books, could not identify, he brought the manuscript to popular attention.

Since then, the Voynich manuscript has become a symbol: it is an unsolved puzzle, a physical object that hundreds of experts have seen, have held and have read, but have not understood. The images in the book are inconsistent and confusing:

The text is written left to right, but in no language known today. Intrigued by mystery it represented, scientists and cryptologist have studied the text in every way imaginable.

Athansius Kircher was a German Jesuit priest, born in 1603. In 1666, he was sent the Voynich manuscript by a fellow scientist and friend. His friend hoped Kircher could decipher the manuscript, but the closest the German got was tentatively proposing that the Voynich manuscript was an attempt to introduce a universal language.

William F. Friendman was a US Army cryptographer who cracked codes during World War II. After the war, he began to study the manuscript as a hobby. He spent four decades studying it, but was unable to establish a pattern or code in its writing.

Nick Pelling is a British computer programmer who in a 2006 book suggests that the Voynich manuscript was written by Italian renaissance architect. The architect, Pelling suggests, was travelling through dangerous territory and created the Voynich manuscript as an elaborate code that hid engineering and military secrets.

Today, the manuscript sits in a rare books room in Yale University. But don’t worry, Yale says. They’ve scanned the whole thing – you can read it online here: http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3519597

But this is a text with a history. It has the impressions of a thousand readers, men and women with diverse backgrounds, scientists who carbon-dated it, cryptologists who slaved over it. This is a text that has been handled for centuries and each encounter with a reader adds to its meaning. It is a text with words that we do not understand but I’ve just told you a story about it. It crafts a narrative with pictures we can’t contextualize and words we can’t interpret.

The Voynich manuscript demonstrates that the book as physical object has story to tell beyond cryptic language and colourful illustrations. Being there and understanding it is different from flipping through Yale’s online version, just the way talking to me about my work is different from having me explain it to you online. Are you interacting with me in this way? Are you adding to the narrative of the Voynich manuscript when you click that hyperlink and see it on Yale’s site? My work this term presents my answer to this question.