The famous Voynich Manuscript — a medieval manuscript written in an unknown alphabet — has remained undeciphered for more than a century, partly because its pages were bound in the wrong order as early as the 15th century. This is the conclusion reached by researcher Colin Layfield and paleographer Lisa Fagin Davis. The work was published in the journal Digital Medievalist, reports the Guardian, writes UNN.
Details
The manuscript’s parchment, preserved in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, was dated by radiocarbon analysis to 1404–1438. The authors established that the sheets originally existed as separate folded bifolios — “singletons.”
Later, in the mid-to-late 15th century, they were sewn together again into nested quires, disrupting the original sequence. As a result, the text and illustrations were read in the wrong order for five centuries, which partly explains why all attempts to decipher the manuscript repeatedly failed.
To restore the original sequence, the researchers applied latent semantic analysis — a method that identifies similarities between textual fragments on different pages and makes it possible to infer which sheets were originally located next to one another. In addition, the scholars relied on instrumental analysis of the ink and marginal marks, as well as the placement of water stains, which can reveal how the bifolios were nested inside one another.
Davis notes that the common perception of the manuscript as the work of a single “mad genius” is not supported by the material evidence.
Many people wanted the Voynich Manuscript to have been created by a single mad genius. In fact, the evidence points to a more collective object
The conclusion that the manuscript was bound incorrectly is important because most decipherment attempts are based on the current order of the pages: if that order was disrupted, then both the statistics of recurring combinations of symbols and the connection between the text and drawings of plants, astronomical diagrams, and human figures could have misled researchers for years.
The authors hope that the restored sequence of the sheets will provide more meaningful material for those continuing attempts to read the text, and they plan to release the code and data openly.