The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma

The Unbreakable Code

People love a puzzle. The enduring popularity of the mystery novel from the golden age to today witnesses to the sustained appeal of a good mystery. Season after season, the most popular TV shows are gritty police procedurals, the results of their investigations often turning on the complicated?read: mysterious?forensic evidence that clinches a case. DNA is the code that condemns elusive criminals and exonerates the wrongly convicted. And if the plethora of books following in the wake of the phenomenal best-seller, ?The Da Vinci Code? is any evidence?and it is?people love mysteries hidden in codes, forensic or otherwise. A growing awareness of steganography has alerted us to the fact that messages can be hidden in commonplace objects such as digital photographs, and we may never even know they are there without the key. Even more compelling, and chilling, is the developing science of quantum cryptography. Secret communications, codes that dissolve at any attempt to break them, espionage, and hidden wisdom?these are the stuff that dreams (and nightmares) are made of.
Everything about the Voynich manuscript is mysterious. No one associated with it since the early seventeenth century (the date of its first documented appearance in history) has been able to break its code and read it; or understand the meaning of its numerous illustrations. No one knows who wrote it or when it was composed. And, since its contents are unintelligible, no clue exists as to why it was written.
The manuscript's provenance is almost as mysterious as its contents. The first documented appearance of the book is at the Prague court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who reigned from 1576 to 1612. From there it makes its way through several hands until, in 1665, Marcus Marci mentions it in a letter to Father Athanasius Kircher, S.J. (1601-1680), a Roman scholar whose fame at being able to decipher previously unintelligible languages made Marci think he would like the strange book. Marci says he is sending the book to Kircher with his letter. There is, however, no acknowledgment from Kircher that he ever received the manuscript, and no reference to it anywhere in his carefully documented journals. Likewise, there is no mention of it in the catalogs of his extensive holdings made after his death, when his books and scientific instruments were put on display in a specially created museum.
The book enters physically and permanently into history in 1912, when American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich acquired it as part of a collection he was offered at the Villa Mandragone, where the late Jesuit General Pieter Jan Beckx's books were made available to him. During its ownership by Voynich?and later, after it was donated to Yale University's Beinecke rare book library?numerous attempts have been made at deciphering the intractable language of this most mysterious volume. Scholars, cryptanalysts, and dilettantes have all put forward possible solutions to the manuscript's multiple puzzles. None has proven satisfactory, and no one has successfully made any in-roads to a solution of the mysterious code.
?The Voynich Manuscript?An Elegant Enigma? by M. E. D'Imperio is a comprehensive account of the attempts at breaking the code and coming to an understanding of the meaning of the book. In the introduction, the author notes that she has arranged the text into four sections: the ?givens? of the case; primary avenues of attack; the major claims of decipherment; and a ?rapid sketch of collateral and background topics which seem likely to be useful? (p. ix). Each section is full of concise, yet comprehensive information.
In the first section, one of the questions raised is whether or not the whole thing is a hoax. Here D'Imperio's assessment supports the conclusion of several of the expert analysts: ?All scholars competent to judge the manuscript . . . agree that it is definitely not a hoax? (p. 6). Another consideration is whether or not the book contains any really useful?or even interesting?information regarding, perhaps, insights into early modern science or any special wisdom. Again, the consensus is that the hidden text will have sufficient relevance to repay the efforts required to decipher it.
?Avenues of Attack? is divided into two chapters, one on the illustrations that adorn the book, the other on the text. The Voynich manuscript is heavily illustrated with botanical images, many of them including small figures of naked women either intertwined with the plants or actually a part of them. Few of the images can be related to known herbals of the Middle Ages, though one researcher tried to link them with illustrations in the work of Hildegarde of Bingen. Of this, D'Imperio says, ?I cannot see any really close kinship between [Hildegarde's] drawings and those of the Voynich manuscript? (p.14).
The second section on ?Avenues of Attack? concerns the text. The Voynich manuscript is just under 200 pages in length, and the cryptic alphabet covers many pages not given over to the illustrations. Numerous attempts have been made to relate the text to common language patterns, with little success. The question of whether more than one person was involved in writing the text is posited. Although there is some evidence of multiple hands, D'Imperio concludes, ?none of the sources . . .present any definitive evidence supporting a different . . . authorship . . . ? (p.25). And so it goes?attempts at identification, rejection of those efforts, new ideas put forward, reasoned rejection again leading us nowhere.
The bulk of the book is devoted to the efforts at decipherment. D'Imperio gives a comprehensive survey of all the noted scholars and cryptanalysts who have worked on the text. A number of these men and women worked for government offices such as the National Security Agency, where veteran code-breakers took shots at the text, all with no result. The efforts of more than a half a dozen significant scholars and analysts, most of them luminaries in the science of cryptography, are summarized and evaluated in this section. A final section reproduces a few of the illustrations and examples of the letters of the code in which the work is written.
D'Imperio's work is indispensable to anyone interested in the Voynich manuscript and the efforts that have gone into breaking its code. But her book contains some mysteries of its own. There is no date of publication. Internal evidence (the date appended to the Foreword, and dates of cited research given in the text) indicate a publication date close to, or in, 1976. And who, exactly is (or was) M. E. D'Imperio? John H. Tiltman, author of the Foreword, merely says, ?I have acted as a sort of . . . coordinator . . . working on the problem. When Miss Mary D'Imperio told me of her interest, I suggested that she should assume this responsibility? (p.vii). No other identification is offered. Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, in ?The Friar and the Cipher? [Doubleday, 2005] have this to say: ?D'Imperio personally (if she was in fact a real person and not an NSA phantom) has faded back into the NSA mist, never to be publicly seen or heard from again? (p.284).
Whatever secrets lie concealed in the Voynich manuscript remain hidden in its cipher, and the efforts at unlocking them continue?sometimes with people as mysterious as the book itself.