What if you came across a book written in a language that nobody knows how to read? There is such a book at Yale University that has baffled historians for years. It is called the Voynich Manuscript. It is believed the 240-page book was written in 1420, by persons who remain unknown. The writings are accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations that are nothing short of fantastical.
At first, it mainly attracted humanities scholars. In 1921, William Newbold, a philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania who had an interest in cryptography, claimed that a 13th-century friar wrote it as a scientific treatise. Newbold believed each arcane letter was actually a collection of minuscule symbols readable under proper magnification, which would have meant the microscope was invented centuries before we thought. After Newbold’s death, John Manly, an American literature professor and fellow codebreaker, disproved Newbold’s theory, showing that his methods were arbitrary and scientifically unreliable.
Since its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women’s health that’s mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.
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