Event to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the mysterious Voynich manuscript

On her wonderful page of "Famous Unsolved Codes and Ciphers" the game developer and recreational code-cracker Elonka Dunin describes the Voynich Manuscript, which is written in an as-yet uncrackable cipher:

At least 600 years old, this is a 232-page illuminated manuscript entirely written in a secret script. It is filled with copious drawings of unidentified plants, herbal recipes of some sort, astrological diagrams, and many small human figures in strange plumbing-like contraptions. Carbon-dated to the early 1400s, it was brought to modern attention in 1912 when it was purchased by Wilfrid Voynich from the collections at the Villa Mondragone, near Rome. Color images of all of the pages can be seen at archive.org and Yale's Beinecke Library website (the current owner of the manuscript). The script is unlike anything else in existence, but is written in a confident style, seemingly by someone who was very comfortable with it.

On Friday, May 11, a celebration commemorating the 100th anniversary of the re-discovery of the Voynich manuscript will take place in Rome. The program includes a number of presentations about the history of the Voynich manuscript, forensic investigations, word structure and statistical analysis, and an interpretation of its unusual drawings.

If any Boing Boing readers are attending, we'd love a report!

Conference: VOYNICH 100 -- A Hundred Years from the Re-discovery at Villa Mondragone

• [Lolotehe]

  I’d have a botanist look at it first. 

  • [Dv Revolutionary]

    Botanists have. The plants aren’t identifiable because they are the work of imagination. Can you identify the trees in a Dr. Susse book?

  • [iCowboy]

    They have. Of all the drawings in the book, there are only two possible matches with known plants. One might be a sunflower, the other (and it is reaching) could be a pepper – but that wasn’t known in Europe until after the Voynich was supposedly written.

    Likewise, people have looked at the constellations and maps in other sections of the book and found no matches with real data.

• [awjt]

  When I was a kid we started receiving crazy schizophrenic letters from some unknown person.  These things were like a hand-printed version of Dr. Bronner Soap labels, except even worse and not as happy-go-lucky.  They were single pages of copy paper plastered with all-caps writing every whichaway, densely packed, nearly devoid of meaning, but full of craze.

  It’s estimated that there have been about 100 billion people on earth, ever.

  My guess is that every hundred years produces a few bright stars of the written word, and a few absolute looneys.

  • [Noctilucent Studios]

    Do you still have the letters?

    • [awjt]

      No, mom threw them away.  They were stressful to her, and she was churchy.

• [tristan eldritch]

  Looks like the work of Cornish piskies to me.  Anyone tried reading it by the light of the full moon, with their jacket on back to front?

• [liquidstar]

  It s funny how just about everyone seems to know about Voynich now.  It wasn t so long ago that even mentioning it got you put in the same category as that crazy cat lady down the street who is in contact with Martian Occult Masters (whom I would also respect though).  My pet theory is that this is actually what we in the 21 st century would call a dream journal,  possibly an extended sojourn on a coherent planetscape (more in the sense of J.R.R. Tolkien) so it may be using what modern psychologists would call an idiolect.

• [rattypilgrim]

  There’s a Breugel vibe to these drawings. Also, the writing looks like a mirror image of script. It has a backwards, left-leaning thing going on. Anyway, now I want a Voynich font.

  • [Jim Saul]

    It does look a bit like Da Vinci’s mirror-script notes.  Since the dating seems to be in that range, perhaps it was commissioned as a forged “lost” work of Da Vinci for a 16th century long con.

• [technogeekagain]

  I still find myself thinking that someone found a good way to fake the carbon-dating and is laughing hysterically every time this comes around. Either that or someone is laughing hysterically from beyond the grave. “You mean they _still_ haven’t figured out that it’s meaningless?”

• [technogeekagain]

  Or, to put it in other terms:  Chath d’ornik’sha por prede boos, chode ko singde ba. Scoando pe bath ‘sko, skordi shim baba. Ur’t kad nyeba, ush di dal la. Dempoko “glossolalia” spehn.

  • [rattypilgrim]

     You took the words right out of my mouth.

• [JonS]

  http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4252

• [Bauart]

  What… so someone finds a handwritten book containing a well-structured unknown language full of strange creatures and mysterious plants — and just because it’s old — everyone think it’s from outer space?

  Funny.

  http://www.kli.org/tlh/phrases.html

• [Joseph Francis]

  I like to throw that Voynich font around to be cryptic
   http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2009/03/nothing-is-real.html
  nsfw?

• [awjt]

  Isn’t there a natural language specialist anywhere who wants to feed The Voynich into their special automatic Chomskyizer?

• [SoItBegins]

  What is the Manuscript? XKCD has one theory.

• [planettom]

  I used Voynich pages to fill the interior of my Necronomicon that I made for an Ash/EVIL DEAD/ARMY OF DARKNESS Halloween costume a few years ago:
  http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b344/planettom/lj2009/necronomicon3b.jpg

• [Nanodome Ltd]

  I’ll be there, as will Elonka: I’m chairing the first session & then later giving a presentation on “Between Vellum & Prague”. It should be a fun day – a nice chance for a virtual community to meet in RL - but anyone going along hoping for alien theories (or even hoax theories, truth be told) may be somewhat disappointed. :-)

• [Wooly_Chamoth]

  Not to be rude, but why call is “written in an as-yet uncrackable cipher”?  That implies it was written with something encoded in it.  Is there no chance it’s not just nonsense?  Sounds like Mark is biassed towards the former.

  • [Jonathan Badger]

    Actually, the possibility that it’s nonsense is one of the theories. The problem is that it would have to be fairly sophisticated nonsense — the statistical distribution of characters isn’t what you’d expect if someone was just writing gibberish.

• [Culturedropout]

  Kind of reminds me of my college class notes.  I never could make any sense of those when I looked at them later either…

• [Tarot Dude]

  http://deepsky.com/~merovech/voynich/voynich_key.html

• [mp123]

  If ever translated, it will be discovered to say, “Drink your Ovalfine.”

• [Whiskey Mike]

  The plant on page 31 of the pdf is familiar and may explain the rest of the drawings an jibberish.  Hint: Mary Jane

• [Michael Edwards]

  Old Czech?
  http://zlatodej.blog.cz/

• [Suck]

  While staying grounded in the provable, repeatable and peer-reviewed,  I like to take trips of imagination in which the Voynich is the product of a configuration space exploit by another configuration’s version of John Titor.     It’s a fun fantasy to think about, anyway.   :)