Alumna joins the long search to unlock an enigmatic 15th-century manuscript
The library’s mysterious “Voynich Manuscript” continues to intrigue. Scholars and skeptics have long debated the meaning of the cryptic ciphers and pondered the 500-year-old manuscript’s origins and purpose.
In the September issue of “The Atlantic,” Ariel Sabar writes about the groundbreaking investigations of medieval scholar Lisa Fagin Davis, PhD ’93.
Davis was immediately fascinated by the 234-page manuscript when she first saw it during her days as a doctoral student at Yale. Later, as executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, circumstances led Davis to forge a deeper connection to the manuscript, as she began to take a closer look at the oddities that have raised so many questions for so long.
The “Voynicheros”
Davis’s interest was revived in 2016 when Yale University Press invited her to peer-review The Voynich Manuscript, a fully illustrated facsimile edition of the parchment codex, edited by Raymond Clemens, former curator of early books and manuscripts at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Hoping to quiet once and for all the ongoing controversy and speculation among amateur enthusiasts—dubbed “Voynicheros”—Beinecke Library’s then director Edwin C. Schroder welcomed the idea of an authoritative volume of well-researched essays on the topic.
Despite Davis’s rave review and the book’s subsequent popularity, “codebreakers” persisted in proposing new theories and solutions to the puzzle. Davis continued to field the onslaught of inquiries, tweeting responses to her eventual following of more than 10,000.
In 2018, in another attempt to stem the tide of suspect research, Davis presented a paper to the International Congress on Medieval Studies, providing her expertise in ancient handwriting and the properties of old books. She published “How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript” in the journal “Manuscript Studies” in 2020. Davis’s breakthrough research led her to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript was the handiwork of not one but five different scribes—perhaps a cloistered community that had developed its own language.
The search continues
Davis’s significant findings raised new questions, prompting new lines of inquiry. In 2022, computer scientists and other specialists formed the Voynich Research Group. The group continues to explore the history, literature, paleography, linguistics, cryptology of the manuscript to uncover its secret—some even turning to computer technology and AI to decrypt the Voynich.
Davis believes the manuscript has meaning yet to be discovered. “It’s an actual object, it exists in space and time, it has a history, it has physical characteristics, and because of that, it has a true story. We just don’t know what that true story is yet.”
The Voynich Manuscript is fully digitized and available online through Yale Library Digital Special Collections. In 2024 alone, more than 150,000 online users have searched for the Voynich Manuscript—the third-most popular search. The library also has a high-quality facsimile that may be requested for viewing in the reading room. For more information, visit the library’s FAQ pages. There are also several copies of Raymond Clemens’s book in the library’s collection.
Read the recent article about Lisa Fagin Davis’s Voynich research in “The Atlantic” magazine.
Read more about the Voynich Manuscript on the library website.
—Deborah Cannarella
Image: Pages from the “pharmaceutical” section of the Voynich Manuscript, showing four apothecary jars among a selection of herbs. Cipher manuscript (Voynich manuscript), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
