Has the Voynich manuscript been decoded?

What is known: a genuine medieval object

Has the Voynich manuscript been decoded? No. The manuscript itself is well documented: it is Beinecke MS 408, a genuine medieval object now held at Yale, and radiocarbon dating performed at the University of Arizona in 2009 places its vellum pages between 1404 and 1438. Greg Hodgins, then an assistant research scientist in the university's physics department, led a team that tested four samples, one from each of four separate pages, using an accelerator mass spectrometer to measure carbon-14 decay.

The pages are grouped, by convention among scholars, into sections nicknamed herbal, astrological, balneological and pharmacological, after their illustrations, which include plants of unknown origin, celestial charts and numerous depictions of nude women in unusual scenes. None of those plants has been matched to a known species, and the images have not settled what the neighboring text says.

The manuscript surfaced in the historical record by the late sixteenth century, when Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II bought it for 600 gold ducats, believing it the work of the medieval friar Roger Bacon; it later passed through the pharmacist Jacobus Horčicky de Tepenec and, in 1666, reached the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. Book dealer Wilfrid Voynich acquired it in 1912 from the Jesuit College at Frascati; after his death his widow Ethel passed it to their friend Anne Nill, who sold it in 1961 to bookseller H. P. Kraus, who donated it to Yale's Beinecke Library in 1969, where it remains.

Where to see the Voynich manuscript

Anyone can page through it: the manuscript is Beinecke MS 408 at Yale, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has put scans of it online for free (its Voynich page is in the sources below). What no one can offer is a full translation. The script has never been read, so every “translation” online is somebody's proposed decipherment, not an accepted one.

What is known: an unread script, not one voice

Claire Bowern, a linguistics professor at Yale, said in 2025 that "paleography lets us identify that five people collaborated on writing the book," evidence that the text was produced deliberately by multiple hands rather than dashed off by one person. Decades earlier, the American cryptologist William Friedman, who spent years trying to break it, concluded only that the manuscript looked like "an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language."

The mainstream explanation: no accepted reading exists

Here the mainstream and minority views are not rival methods, as with some archaeological mysteries, but a single point of near-total agreement: nobody has read the Voynich manuscript. Yale's own Beinecke Library states on its collection page that "cryptographic approaches have failed to decipher the text, if it is indeed encoded." That plain statement, from the institution that has held the manuscript since 1969, is the closest thing to an official mainstream position that exists.

Popular alternative claims: three solutions, three rejections

In 2017, the television researcher Nicholas Gibbs wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that the manuscript was a women's health manual compiled from other Latin sources, its script an abbreviated Latin shorthand. Gibbs published only two decoded lines as evidence. Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, said his translation "doesn't result in Latin that makes sense," and Smithsonian reported that Gibbs had floated the idea partly to sell a documentary about the manuscript to a cable network.

In January 2018, the computing scientist Greg Kondrak and graduate student Bradley Hauer at the University of Alberta applied language-identification software trained on 380 languages to the text and reported that it most resembled Hebrew, offering a translation of the manuscript's first line. Medievalist Damian Fleming of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne objected publicly that the pair had checked their results with Google Translate rather than consulting a Hebrew scholar, and reviewers noted the field had already been burned the previous year by Gibbs's rejected Latin theory.

In May 2019, Gerard Cheshire, a research associate at the University of Bristol, announced he had identified the text in two weeks as "proto-Romance," an extinct language he said was written by Dominican nuns for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon. Davis called the result "gibberish" and said "proto-Romance language is not a thing," dismissing the method as "aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense." Within days, the University of Bristol removed its own article promoting the paper, saying concerns had been raised "from academics in the fields of linguistics and medieval studies."

What is still unsolved

What remains unsolved is not a single word or page but whether the Voynich manuscript encodes language at all, and if so, which one. Dozens of proposed languages and cipher systems have been floated over the past century, but this record covers only the claims that reached peer review or wide media attention and were then specifically rebutted by named scholars. Bowern's own verdict is blunt: the manuscript stays "mysterious" and "perplexing" because, she says, any theory "relies on so many assumptions that it's all too easy to get lost in speculation."

Verdict

Real or Legend stamps the Voynich manuscript as unsolved, not disputed, because none of its claimed solutions has a serious rival camp of specialists still defending it, the way two schools of archaeologists might argue over a construction method. Gibbs, the University of Alberta team and Cheshire each drew wide press coverage and then a fast, specific, named rebuttal, and Yale's own library still calls the text undeciphered. What the evidence supports is this: a real fifteenth-century book, written by real scribes, in a script nobody now living can read.