"Understanding" the Mystery: The Voynich Manuscript

After our visit to the wonderful Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library on campus, I have been reflecting on Galey's question regarding Lombard's Sententiarum, that say "we had enough Hebrew or Latin to parse out the words in sequence-does that mean we actually know how to read these books as objects, in all their formal complexity?"

This reminded me of a recent news article in the BBC about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, which is held at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (where you can read more about the book's intriguing history. At one point in history, it may have belonged to John Dee).  The manuscript was written during the 15th-16th century in an as of yet undecipherable language and strange drawings, and has been described by Beinecke as a magical or scientific text, "nearly every page contains a botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character."

The Voynich Manuscript, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale.

Professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, Stephen Bax, has been working with the manuscript, and recently discovered that the manuscript's illustrations of stars and plants, said he "was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at medieval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages," (BBC). 

On his website, he suggests "that these are the first signs and words to be successfully decoded, but of course the results are partial and provisional. I hope that other analysts will now be able to comment and perhaps build on the results published here," (Bax, 2014) and is planning a conference in London in June.

There is a fully digitized version of the manuscript you can look at here, with remarkable detail. I only found out about this manuscript recently, and I think this is one of the powerful tools of digitization. In making these texts widely available across multiple media, it allows for the facilitation of information to be discovered and accessed by more people, encouraging ideas, scholarship, and invites knowledge sharing and creation in the wider community to be part of these conversations.