In 1912, a Polish book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich was working through a collection of old manuscripts at the Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit college in the hills outside Rome, when he found something that stopped him. The book was small, handwritten on vellum, illustrated throughout, and covered from cover to cover in a script nobody had ever seen before. The illustrations were stranger still: plants that looked almost familiar but not quite, naked figures moving through interconnected pools, astronomical diagrams populated with unfamiliar animals, a large fold-out page covered in circular forms that might have been a map. Voynich purchased it immediately. He spent the rest of his life trying to find someone who could read it.
Nobody could. Nobody has since. The manuscript that now bears his name remains, after more than a century of sustained scholarly attention, completely undeciphered. That fact alone would make it remarkable. What makes it extraordinary is everything else.
The manuscript runs to around 240 vellum pages and divides into six distinct sections: plants, astronomical diagrams, figures in bathing pools, pharmaceutical vessels and preparations, a large cosmological fold-out, and what appear to be recipe sequences. Every page is covered in the same fluid, looping script. Not one word of it has been formally deciphered.
The Name on the First Page
Before Voynich found it, the manuscript had a history. A long one, and a strange one, most of it written in gaps.
The clearest fixed point is the court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled from Prague between 1576 and 1612. Rudolf’s court was a magnet for alchemists, occultists, and scholars of esoteric knowledge from across Europe, and Rudolf himself was a devoted patron of all three. He paid 600 gold ducats for the manuscript, an enormous sum, believing it to be the work of the thirteenth-century English friar Roger Bacon and expecting it to yield the kind of advanced natural or magical knowledge Bacon’s name promised.
The letter that records this transaction, written in 1666 by the Prague scientist Johannes Marcus Marci and found tucked inside the manuscript when Voynich purchased it, does not name the seller. From whom Rudolf acquired it is unrecorded. Voynich speculated it came from John Dee, the English mathematician and occultist who visited Rudolf’s court in the 1580s, but Dee’s own meticulous diaries make no mention of it and the connection has never been substantiated. The most plausible candidate identified by recent archival research is Carl Widemann, a physician and prolific collector of esoteric and alchemical manuscripts who sold books to Rudolf in 1599. The record does not confirm this either.
The Erased Name
Rudolf died owing money to a man named Jakub Horcicky of Tepenec, known by his Latin name Jacobus Sinapius: Imperial Distiller, curator of Rudolf’s botanical gardens, and one of his personal physicians. A specialist in plant medicine, trusted with the most sensitive corners of the imperial collection. The manuscript appears to have passed to him as partial payment of a debt the emperor never settled in life.
On the first page of the manuscript, folio 1r, a name was written and then erased. Under ultraviolet light it remains legible: Jacobi de Tepenecz. Looking at the facsimile without special equipment, the ghost of it is still visible at the bottom of the page. The handwriting, however, does not match Horcicky’s confirmed signature found elsewhere. Whether he wrote it himself, or whether someone else added it as a record of ownership, has never been resolved. The erasure itself has never been explained.
From Court to Cellar
After Horcicky the manuscript passed to Georg Baresch, a Prague alchemist who spent decades attempting to decipher it and wrote that it tormented him. Baresch eventually sent a copy to Athanasius Kircher in Rome: the most celebrated polymath of the seventeenth century, a Jesuit scholar who had claimed to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics and corresponded with learned men across the known world. Kircher kept the copy and said remarkably little about it. In 1666 Baresch’s friend Johannes Marcus Marci sent the manuscript itself to Kircher, tucking in the letter explaining what was known of its history. Kircher never published any findings. When he died in 1680 the manuscript passed into the holdings of the Jesuit library in Rome, where it sat undisturbed for over two centuries until Voynich found it in 1912.
The manuscript had passed through the hands of a court devoted to alchemy, a plant physician, a tormented alchemist, the most famous Jesuit scholar in Europe, and then into Jesuit institutional custody for two hundred years. At every stage it was treated as something significant. At no stage did anyone claim to have read it.
A Century of Failure
From the moment Voynich brought the manuscript to public attention, the attempts to decipher it have been serious, sustained, and uniformly unsuccessful.
William Newbold, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, spent years developing an elaborate theory that Roger Bacon had encoded microscopic text into the manuscript, visible only under magnification. The theory was demolished after his death when other scholars showed that the markings he had read as encoded letters were simply cracks in the ink caused by age. His lifetime of work dissolved. He was not the last. The United States National Security Agency examined it. Their declassified reports reached no conclusion.
Across the decades the proposed languages have included Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, constructed language, and deliberate nonsense. The proposed authors have included Roger Bacon, John Dee, Edward Kelley, Leonardo da Vinci, and Voynich himself. Researchers have variously identified it as a medical manual, an alchemical treatise, an astronomical guide, and an elaborate hoax. Statistical analysis confirmed that the script carries the structural properties of natural language, the frequency distributions and word-length patterns that distinguish meaningful text from random symbol strings. Something is being communicated. The field has never established what.
In 2020 palaeographer Lisa Fagin Davis identified five distinct scribes working across different sections of the manuscript. All five contributed to the herbal section, the largest portion of the document. The astronomical section belongs to one scribe alone. The bathing section to another. The recipe section to two scribes working in collaboration. Five people, working on different parts, with different levels of access to whatever the source material was. That has never been fully accounted for.
What the Plants Know
A century of cryptographic and linguistic analysis had approached the manuscript as a European puzzle. The botanical evidence reframed the question entirely. The vellum the manuscript is written on has been dated to the early fifteenth century, a finding that placed it firmly in pre-Columbian Europe and shaped that century of interpretation. The plants in the herbal section were assumed to be European, or fantastical, or too distorted by an incompetent illustrator to identify. That assumption has not survived scrutiny.
In 2013 the botanical researcher Arthur Tucker and information technologist Rexford Talbert published a paper comparing the plant illustrations systematically against specimens from the Americas. They identified 37 plants indigenous to Mexico and Central America. No European plants were identified. Tucker continued the work with horticulturist Jules Janick, and by their 2018 study the count had risen to 57 species, every one native to the Americas or circumboreal in range. They placed the manuscript’s composition between 1530 and 1571, at an institution in Mexico City where Franciscan missionaries were working alongside indigenous scholars to document the natural world of their region.
The Script and the Language
The botanical evidence does not stand alone. Researcher John Comegys independently identified examples of Voynich script characters in indigenous Mexican legal documents, including the Codice de Otlazpan and documents associated with the Codex Osuna, with historically attested sound values in Nahuatl.
The statistical properties of the language point in the same direction. Computer scientist Jorge Stolfi conducted a detailed analysis of the script and found it behaves like a natural tonal language, with short words and structured tonal patterns found in no European language. The Oto-Manguean family of Mexico, which includes Mixtec and Zapotec, is among the most tonally complex language families in the world and fits the statistical profile more precisely than anything in the European record.
The same layering appears in the astronomical section. Tucker and Janick found the zodiac diagrams show a clear amalgamation of Western and Mesoamerican content: a familiar zodiac wheel structure, but many of the traditional signs replaced by animals native to the Americas. The Pleiades star cluster appears prominently, central to Aztec cosmological and calendrical tradition. The large fold-out cosmological diagram, long treated as an abstract or fantastical image, contains what Tucker and Janick identified as a map of central Mexico, with nine connected regions, three volcanoes, and named cities including Huejotzingo.
A Document Out of Place
The plants are not European, not fantastical, and not the work of an incompetent hand. They are accurate records of Mesoamerican species, documented by someone with direct knowledge of what they were illustrating. Elements of its script have been identified in indigenous Mexican legal documents. Its language behaves like a Mesoamerican tonal language. The astronomical section carries Aztec content inside a European framework, and the cosmological fold-out has been identified as a map of central Mexico.
A manuscript holding all of that passed through the hands of a court devoted to alchemy, a plant physician whose name was erased from its first page, and a Jesuit institution that held it for two centuries. It has been in academic hands for over a century since. Nobody, officially, has read it.
