Unfortunately, because its well-known contents are fairly prosaic, they would seem to be an unlikely source for anything to be found in a heavily-enciphered book of secrets. It was widely copied in manuscript, and in 1471 became an early print best-seller. Its twelve chapters covered (1) where to place buildings, (2) where to plant crops, (3) cereals and granaries, (4) viticulture and vinification, (5) & (6) arboriculture and horticulture both for medicine and food, (7) meadows and woods, (8) gardens, (9) animal husbandry and apiary, (10) hawking / hunting, (11) a summary of (1)-(10), and (12) an agricultural calendar, arranged by month. One book on agriculture dominates the medieval era: the Ruralia Commoda (~1305) of Pietro Crescenzi. If this surprising idea is true, it would place the herbal part of the Voynich Manuscript within a completely different written tradition – books of agriculture. And so the widspread presumption that it is some kind of enciphered herbal has little to commend it.īut recently, Glen Claston has put forward a radical new suggestion: that the Voynich’s plant drawings might actually be encoding secrets of herbal gardening, such as how best to prune individual plants.
Voynich manuscript solved 2017 full#
The relatively recent digitization, with the resultant increased exposure of the full text to a much wider audience was likely an important factor in its solution.For several centuries, people have looked at the Voynich Manuscript’s mysterious pictures of plants and wondered how on earth they fit into any of the traditions of medieval herbal manuscripts.Ĭertainly, there are a handful of places where you can just about see similarities: but though (for example) the heads in the roots of the plant on f33r do vaguely resemble stylised illustrations of mandragora, the plant depicted there is nothing at all like mandrake. One cannot help but wonder if the fact that this was such an uncrackable mystery for so long may have been in part due to the fact that it concerned women's affairs, but that would be idle speculation. The full tls article linked therein looks like it will be a somewhat substantial read, and I have not yet dived in.
The whole Boing Boing article is a somewehat short and quick read that provides enough information on the contents of the tls article to both titillate and perhaps satisfy one's curiosity regarding this fabled 15th century mystery. This is followed by what appears to be a blockquote from this article: Nicholas Gibbs, a history researcher, says that he has decoded the Voynich Manuscript, a legendarily mysterious 15th century text whose curious illustrations and script have baffled cryptographers, historians, and amateur sleuths for decades.Īccording to Gibbs, the Voynich Manuscript is a cobbled together compendium of largely plagiarized women's medical advice and treatments, and the odd script is just an idiosyncratic version of a widely used system of Latin abbreviations.
The Boing Boing article leads in to some material from another source as follows: The Voynich Manuscript appears to be a fairly routine anthology of ancient women's health advice at this link: No, not clickbait, but not guaranteed either, I suspect.