The Beautiful and the Inscrutable

A page from the Voynich Manuscript

Who doesn’t love an unsolved mystery? Over the last few weeks a particularly beautiful one has been in the news—The Voynich Manuscript. Found by a Lithuanian bookseller in an Italian monastery in 1912, this book has been fascinating and frustrating scholars ever since. The ornate script remains unidentified, and various scholars have placed its origins in Europe, Asia, or South America. Some have speculated that the manuscript was created by Leonardo da Vinci, Roger Bacon or the bookseller Wilfrid Voynich himself. Another school of thought is that it is a very elaborate—and extremely well done—hoax.

It’s a beautiful object, and it has become an irresistible object that many want to claim, explain and understand. As Ruth Graham put it in her piece in the Boston Globe:

The Voynich offers more than just an uncrackable written code: Colorful illustrations depict fantastical plants, astronomical diagrams, and groups of naked women in bathtubs. You could embrace the book as a linguistic brainteaser, an antiquarian book novelty, a guide to a lost theory of the natural world, or a portfolio of outsider art.

Last month a botanist and a former Department of Defense information technologist proposed a new theory, claiming they have identified 37 of the manuscript’s 303 botanical illustrations as plants that would be found in a 16th-century botanical garden in Mexico. They have argued that the manuscript was written primarily in an extinct dialect of the Aztec language Nahuatl. Then last week a British applied linguist announced that he too had translated 10 of the words.

These recent discoveries have been met by the Voynichists with skepticism. What’s more, many consider any research into the manuscript as “academic suicide” mostly because studies of the manuscript must draw from a variety of different fields.

Graham’s article quotes from Nick Pelling, an author and Voynich expert:

“If you publish in a journal, there are boundaries you’re supposed to observe,” Pelling said. “It’s difficult to find a journal that fits those boundaries when what you’re studying goes across the boundaries.” He sees the Voynich as an indictment of the way many academic disciplines have fragmented over the course of the last century into smaller and smaller expertises. Pelling believes the answer to the manuscript will come from the field of intellectual history, whose practitioners look at historical evidence from a big-picture perspective, rather than the small-bore analysis of, say, botanists and statisticians.

Whether the Voynich is real or a fake, its fascination speaks to a human longing to understand and decipher. It is also a powerful symbol of what cannot be understand by just looking at its individual parts. Some things are simply beautiful and inscrutable—many works of art fall into that category for me—and there is an exquisiteness in just that.

______
Note: To see high resolution scans of each page, go to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library site.