r/history • u/guardian • 6d ago
News article A medieval manuscript has confounded scholars for centuries. Have they been reading it wrong all this time?
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/06/voynich-manuscript-research-pages-wrongly-bound?referring_host=Reddit&utm_campaign=guardianacct191
u/arllt89 6d ago
the 'lone genius' idea is kind of out of the door.
I can accept the fact that nobody has thought of changing the order, but sounds very hard to believe that there would be several authors and nobody would have notice the variation of writing and "vocabulary", that would be one of the first tests anybody would run on any mysterious book. One person copying the whole book could explain a uniform writing, but a variation on the "vocabulary" and "grammar" would still be visible. The book has probably been through so many statically linguistic tests by now ...
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u/_notthehippopotamus 5d ago
People have noticed. They've had evidence of at least 4 or 5 different scribes for a while now.
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u/sinckstar 6d ago
It's been pretty well known in the voynich community for a while now that the ordering if the pages is funky. I don't know why we're pretending here this is some new revelation
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u/TheRecognized 6d ago
Because there’s a difference between “the order of pages in this untranslatable manuscript might be slightly off” and “hey we’re pretty sure we know how to actually order the pages now”
But don’t let that stop you from feeling some sense of superiority
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u/TheRecognized 6d ago
Considering we don’t know the potential language it’s almost impossible to tell those kinds of things.
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u/SteveCake 6d ago
This is cool- I did not think there was anything left with Voynich that hadn't been considered.
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u/TheoremaEgregium 6d ago
God, for a moment I was scared this might be about those TikTok witches that everybody's talking about on YouTube.
But it's Lisa Fagin Davis, she's top-notch and trustworthy.
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u/rushmc1 6d ago
I don't think I want to know...
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u/timpinen 6d ago
There was some TikTok person who claimed that it was some book about creating life with menstrual blood, and that the only reason why we didn't know earlier is because women didn't look at the book before (ignoring actual female scholarship). She is basically a grifter trying to sell merch
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u/tillandsia 6d ago
does anyone know if the images of plants are of actual plants?
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u/LastLemmingStanding 6d ago
From what I recall, no. Most if not all of the plants appear to be fantastical.
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u/_SolidarityForever_ 6d ago
This is wrong, while none of the plants can be unambiguously identified, a few have been reasonably identified. Such as the Maidenhair Fern and the Wild Pansy; both plants present contemporaneous to the radio-carbon dating of the manuscript's vellum, in the suspected area of origin (i.e. Northern Italy, Germany, Eastern France). This is relevant as some have (wrongly) asserted that the illustrations depict new world plants pre Columbian-exchange. The illustrations being stylised depictions of plants is not unusual for herbals of the time, and lines up the apparent origins of the language. With some having argued that features like the skeletal syntax, word entropy, etc of Voynichese shares similarities with Germanic and early/proto-Romance languages. This is also supported by the earliest provenance for the text being within the Holy Roman Empire. I dont feel like doing citations for a reddit comment so if you'd like further reading honestly id suggest the wikipedia entry for the Voynich manuscript is a decent place to start.
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u/_SolidarityForever_ 6d ago
The most boring answer seems the most well supported one, its just an obscure, possibly enciphered, unknown dialect of northern Germanic origin, of booklets about herbal medicine, balneology, and astronomy. Its just kind of an old book we have thus far lacked the ability to translate, in my opinion its still super cool! But its nothing fantastical or extraordinary. Just stylistion common for the time.
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u/GodwynDi 5d ago
Its not at all common for the time.
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u/_SolidarityForever_ 5d ago
The stylisation of plants in the Voynich manuscript's illustrations are broadly stylistically consistent with other herbals from the time period and general location, yes. Its not like fineing surrealism in a medieval tapestry, or expressionism in ancient Egyptian inscriptions. Its well within the conventions of the artistic trend it originates from.
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u/tillandsia 6d ago
To me that is the most interesting of all - all of these fantastic images, when there are so very many strange plants.
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u/almarcTheSun 6d ago
If this ends up being the case that'd be really cool. I've written it off as just some overanalyzed artistic conlang with illustrations made as someone's art project, but maybe there's something to it.
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u/wstd 5d ago
I still think it's a medieval forgery. Someone sold it for a pretty penny to wealthy collector, claiming it contained the secret to eternal life, how to turn lead into gold, or something similar, and maybe they also claimed that it once belonged to a famous figure like Roger Bacon. The buyer just needed to decrypt the text to unravel its secrets. Of course, the text and illustrations are complete gibberish. The plants are half made up, which is why it's so hard to match them to real-world species. Whoever created the book wasn't interested in scientific accuracy.
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u/ThreeMarlets 1d ago
I agree and also think it's a forgery but I don't think they even went so far to claim it contained some grand secret. They probably just said it was from China or some made up far away land. Being from some far away land was enough to make it worth a hefty sum in that era.
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u/CHull1944 6d ago
Two things:
- Digital Medievalist? That is an amazing name for a journal.
- If it's a collection or compendium or such, that could buttress the argument about the collected knowledge being passed along through the community. I think it could also buttress the hoax claim too though, right? Passing along a literary artifact, like a religious icon or relic, might imply some financial or celebrity value for anyone who contributes to the work back in the medieval period, so some writers/artists/etc would wish to jump on board.
Great work from Colin Layfield and Lisa Fagin Davis.
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u/dogboyboy 6d ago
Shouldnt this have been noticed way sooner?
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u/INITMalcanis 6d ago
Everything is obvious after someone thought of it...
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u/dogboyboy 6d ago
I mean, a book that was analyzed this much? “Page 50 has similar drawing to page 100” come one folks.
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u/INITMalcanis 6d ago
Could we get you to take a look at Fermat's Last Theorem?
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u/Barrington-the-Brit 6d ago
I know right? If only they got a handful of redditors from r/history on the case, could’ve had this solved in an afternoon
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u/chess_the_cat 6d ago
He didn’t say it should be obvious but that it should have been noticed way sooner. It should have. This book has been analyzed back and forth. It’d be like saying oh no one noticed the page numbers aren’t in order after 1000 students were told to tell us everything they could about the book.
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u/inchoatebloom 6d ago
It's been known for a fairly long time that a) the text was rebound at least once prior to Voynich taking ownership of it (ex.: MS sent to Athanasius Kircher and at least partially deconstructed in the process), with a number of folios outright missing in the received MS, and b) the order of the quires in the received manuscript is almost certainly not the original ordering, with some quires possibly having additional rearrangement of individual bifolios. I think the specific claim that it was originally constructed in singulion vs quire format is what's new in this case. Yes, it probably should have been noticed earlier, but there was already deep suspicion about the ordering of MS contents for years/decades.
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u/slanderpanther 6d ago edited 6d ago
“Our hypothesis fixes a lot of problems with the structure of the manuscripts in a really elegant way”, said Davis, an expert on medieval handwriting.
Dear The Guardian, Instead of posing article titles as a question or a mystery that's still unsolved, please just state what the result is. It's a thesis. You state exactly what the thing is up front. THEN you give supporting statements and evidence. Then you restate the conclusion based on the evidence. Don't try to coax me in. Hit me over the head with it. Get to the point. It's not history mystery hour. It's one small finding after another.
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u/Fabian_3000 6d ago
That"s not how journalism works, sorry.
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u/slanderpanther 5d ago edited 5d ago
This isn't an aspect of journalism but of editorial style. It's a choice, nontheless.
But you're right. Especially in the United States where we treat adults like they only need to read at an 8th grade level. Repeating the same basic details over three or four times in a single article. Pandering to readers is far worse in the US than it is in the UK. I love The Guardian because it raises the bar at least a little bit. But it's still pretty low.
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u/Fabian_3000 5d ago
It's very kind, that you replied so nicely! Thank you. I didn't consider my reply rude, when I wrote it.
I thought of it as rude a little later on though. Anyhow: Reading at an 8th grade level? I think I'm getting there :-)
A nice weekend to you!
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u/drmunklung 5d ago
The average US adult reads at a 6-8th grade level and the UK, where the Guardian is based it is 2 years lower. It’s sad but true. Also the Guardian is a mainstream, popular outlet not an academic journal. Expecting them to not use journalistic tricks to get you to look at their ad filled pages is laughable. While they may raise the bar a tad that bar is so low it might as well be subterranean. I’m old enough to remember and work hard enough to find good journalism to consume to know the Guardian, while fun and sometimes informative, isn’t all that great.
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u/ennuiinmotion 6d ago
If that's true then there's a new mystery: why would someone bind it incorrectly?
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u/GoblinRightsNow 6d ago
That’s only a mystery because you didn’t read the article
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u/ennuiinmotion 6d ago
The article doesn't say anything about why it was put together wrong. Unless I missed a quick line or something.
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u/underground_avenue 6d ago
If you look at the graphic, it looks a lot like a simple and very common way to join folded papers. Considering we still have no clue what is going on there, it's not unlikely that neither did whoever bound it in the first place.
Alas this is all speculation, because there iis simply no hard data to either support or rule out anything.
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u/AceOfGargoyes17 6d ago
It's not a common way to bind medieval manuscripts at all: most are bound in quires and then the quires are bound together. As the article notes, the only other manuscripts bound as singulions are North African Qurans.
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u/underground_avenue 6d ago
I think we both mean the same thing, though I might have phrased it better.
The way they were (incorrectly) joined is the common/simple one.
It's quite plausible some unknown book binder didn't know of singulions (and the cryptic nature of the scripts wouldn't be much help here). So he decided to bind them the way he bound everything else.
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u/Justwaspassingby 6d ago
When Chretien de Troyes died they went through his papers and put together his last work, the Perceval, that he had left unfinished.
But they didn’t realize those papers actually held two different works: the Perceval and the Gawain. It seems obvious in hindsight - in the mixed story there are two Easter celebrations during a single year, for example - but they made the mistake nonetheless. A similar mistake could have been made with the Voynich Manuscript.
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u/cupcakeheavy 6d ago
yes that is why they are confounded, otherwise it would have made sense immediately.
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u/guardian 6d ago
Hi r/history, this is Emma from the Guardian. We wanted to share a story we published this week about new research on a medieval manuscript that has confounded scholars for centuries. It reveals that everyone may have been reading the pages of the Voynich manuscript in the wrong order.
From our story:
It has been called the world’s most mysterious manuscript: a medieval set of pages filled with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, pictures of nude women and indecipherable text. Claimed at various times to be a book in a lost language, a musical score, an instruction manual or just an elaborate hoax, the so-called Voynich manuscript’s true meaning has defied cryptographers and codebreakers for centuries.
Now, new research offers an explanation for why a scholarly consensus over this enduring puzzle has been so hard to come by: not only because its truth is so profoundly mysterious – but because everyone has been reading its pages in the wrong order.
In an article published in peer-reviewed journal Digital Medievalist, Colin Layfield and Lisa Fagin Davis argue that the manuscript’s folded sheets may have originally been piled on top of each other as “singulions” – like a stack of Christmas cards – but were mis-bound in a more typical “nested” arrangement at some point in the mid to late 15th century.
While their finding does not immediately de-code the script, written in what has commonly become known as “Voynichese”, the authors say their finding radically changes our idea of the manuscript’s function.
“There are a lot of people who wanted the Voynich to have been created by one mad genius working in their attic in medieval London or wherever,” said Davis.
“In fact, the evidence suggests we’re talking about a more communal object, perhaps a set of booklets through which information was passed down from one generation to the next – the ‘lone genius’ idea is kind of out of the door.”
The manuscript’s unknown provenance has piqued scholarly interest ever since it surfaced in book collectors’ records in the 17th century. When it was bought in 1912 by Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish revolutionary and book dealer with a shop on London’s Soho Square, it was thought to be a scientific diary written by the 13th-century polymath Roger Bacon. Others have credited the codex to Leonardo da Vinci.
You can read the full story for free at this link.