An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery

Lisa Fagin Davis was starting her medieval-studies Ph.D. at Yale in 1989 when she got a part-time job at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her boss was the curator of early books and manuscripts, and he stuck her with an unenviable duty: answering letters from the cranks, conspiracists, and truthers who hounded the library with questions about its most popular holding.

In the library catalog, the book—a parchment codex the size of a hardcover novel—had a simple, colorless title: “Cipher Manuscript.” But newspapers tended to call it the “Voynich Manuscript,” after the rare-books dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it from a Jesuit collection in Italy around 1912. An heir sold the manuscript to another dealer, who donated it to Yale in 1969.

Davis grew up in Oklahoma City, transfixed by the fantasy worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. When the Beinecke curator first showed her the Voynich Manuscript, she thought, This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Its 234 pages contained some 38,000 words, but not one of them was readable. The book’s unnamed author had written it, likely with a quill pen, in symbols never before seen. Did they represent a natural language, such as Latin? A constructed language, like Esperanto? A secret code? Gibberish? Scholars had no real idea. To Davis, however, the manuscript felt alive with meaning.

Flowering through the indecipherable script were otherworldly illustrations: strange, prehistoric-looking plants with leaves in dreamy geometries; oversize pages that folded out to reveal rosettes, zodiacs, stars, the cosmos; lists of apparent medicinal formulas alongside drawings of herbs and spindly bottles. Most striking of all were the groups of naked women. They held stars on strings, like balloons, or stood in green pools fed by trickling ducts and by pipes that looked like fallopian tubes. Many of the women, arms outstretched, seemed less to be bathing than working, as plumbers in some primordial waterworks.

Although the book’s parchment and pigments looked medieval, the drawings of the women had no close cultural parallel, in any era. Even the plants—which appeared to have the stems of one species and the roots of another—resisted identification.

Davis, then 23 years old, with a rosy sense of the world’s knowability, wanted to figure out what the Voynich Manuscript was, what it meant, where it came from. But people in her field saw the Voynich as a waste of time, a house-of-curiosities gewgaw unworthy of the serious scholar, especially when so many legible manuscripts begged for study.

[From the June 2020 issue: Ariel Sabar on a biblical mystery at Oxford]

In any case, scholars had already tried. The manuscript had reeled them in with what one cryptanalyst called a “surface appearance of simplicity”: letters that looked glancingly Latin, words that repeated with language-like regularity, handwriting that had the easy flow of a long-established script. But Renaissance-era intellectuals, Ivy League professors, and spy-agency code breakers—including William Friedman, who cracked Japan’s World War II “Purple” cipher before becoming the National Security Agency’s chief cryptographer—all toiled in vain to unlock the Voynich’s secrets. So many headline-making “solutions” had been debunked over the years that the text had earned a reputation, in the words of a Beinecke librarian, as “the place where academic careers go to die.”

[Read: “Pure poison” for a scholarly career]

For all anyone knew, the manuscript was nothing more than the ravings of a lunatic, or a hoax to dupe some fool into paying a fortune for it. In his magisterial history of code breaking, the writer David Kahn called the Voynich “the longest, the best known, the most tantalizing, the most heavily attacked, the most resistant” of cryptographic puzzles. H. P. Kraus, the dealer who donated the manuscript to Yale, once likened it to the mythical Sphinx, “its lair strewn with the bones of those who failed to solve the riddle, and still awaiting the Oedipus who will give the right answer.”

To the aspirants who wrote to the Beinecke, Davis sent minimalist replies: prints, from microfilm, of whatever pages they requested, without comment. The Beinecke got more than enough attention from unstable-seeming “Voynich people.” Davis was careful not to encourage them, or to betray her own fascination. When she began checking out books on the manuscript—to feed her own curiosity—she didn’t tell her boss, a medievalist who would soon become her dissertation adviser. “What I wanted more than anything,” she told me, “was for him to respect me.” But the further along she got in graduate school, the less she thought about the Voynich, until she scarcely thought of it at all. If her field saw the manuscript as beneath its dignity, then perhaps she should too.

I met Davis in Boston this past March, some 35 years after her youthful infatuation with the manuscript. She had risen to one of her discipline’s most visible posts: executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, the premier professional organization for North American medievalists, which she has led for more than a decade. Its offices are a 20-minute walk from her penthouse condo, where she lives with her husband, Dan Davis, a finance executive. Their balcony overlooks Boston Harbor and the meeting of the Charles and Mystic Rivers, with Old North Church in the distance.

Davis, 58, has the air of the college roommate you could spend hours staring at the stars with, casually unraveling the meaning of the universe. She has a cascade of dark corkscrew curls, and wears purple-lensed glasses—indoors and out—that “pretty much everyone,” she said, mistakes for an affectation. In fact, she has a rare disorder that causes double vision, and the tinted lenses stabilize her sight. Eventually, “I’ll just start wearing an eye patch,” she said, and “go the pirate route.”

My visit came after an unexpected turn of events. The Voynich Manuscript had reentered Davis’s life, forcing her to reconsider almost everything she thought she knew about it. The manuscript’s notoriety—as history’s hardest puzzle; as grist for unhinged conspiracies—had for many years scared scholars away. But what if you looked past its extravagant strangeness? What if you focused instead on the things—little noticed—that it shared with countless other manuscripts?

Could the ordinary illuminate the extraordinary? Davis resolved to find out.

The youngest of three siblings, and the only girl, Davis grew up in a home suffused with serendipitous discovery. Floor tiles in the family room doubled as a chessboard. Posters designed by her mother, a poet, took common exclamations, such as “Good God,” and split them (“Good / God”) to inspire alternative readings.

When Davis wasn’t singing in school musicals—her star turn was as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun—she buried herself in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and recited poems in Tolkien’s Elvish. She loved the backstories that Tolkien created for his made-up languages. “The invention of languages is the foundation,” Tolkien once wrote. “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”

Girls in Davis’s middle school didn’t tend to share these interests. When her geeky older brothers played Dungeons & Dragons, she waitressed their games, as “the beer wench.” At 13, “I was like, ‘Screw this,’ ” she recalled. She got her own dungeon, and led adventures for a group of fellow eighth graders, all boys.

During college, at Brown, she spent a summer singing show tunes on dinner cruises in Boston Harbor. She’d hoped to become a professional actress. But after struggling to land roles in college plays, she took classes on the history of theater, where she found herself drawn to medieval drama—which fused her childhood interests. She majored in medieval studies, and in a senior-year class, she ran her fingers across medieval parchment for the first time. I’m touching something that somebody touched 800 years ago, she thought. The connection felt immediate, she told me, and “magical and really powerful.”

At Yale, Davis answered letters to the library about the Voynich, but she abandoned her own research on it. She had failed to hook even her own brother. Barry Fagin, then a young computer-engineering professor at Dartmouth, had a background in cryptology but gave up on the Voynich after a few tries. “You can beat your head against these kinds of problems for years,” he told me, “and then you wake up one morning and you find you’ve wasted your life.”

Davis’s boss at the Beinecke introduced her to a 12th-century liturgical manuscript known as the Gottschalk Antiphonary, and Davis wrote her dissertation on it. The Gottschalk was the sort of text—Latin, Christian, European—on which medievalists built respectable careers. Davis earned her Ph.D. in 1993 and became a sought-after consultant, cataloging medieval manuscripts for some of the country’s top collections and compiling, with her colleague Melissa Conway, the definitive directory of such manuscripts in North America, a project Davis chronicled on her blog, Manuscript Road Trip.

Then, in 2014, the Medieval Academy of America hired her as its executive director. She became the public face of a field that wanted little to do with the Voynich. But the Voynich wasn’t done with her.

When Davis opened her email in February 2016, the message from Yale University Press surprised her. It asked if she would peer-review the essays in a forthcoming “facsimile edition” of the Voynich Manuscript, a coffee-table book that featured high-resolution, life-size images of every one of its pages.

The Beinecke’s then-director, Edwin C. Schroeder, had grown frustrated by the constant questions his staff got about the Voynich: Its popularity, he told me, was “orders of magnitude” greater than anything else at the library. The Beinecke—a marble-paned building somewhere between modernist cathedral and spaceship—held more than 1 million genuinely meaningful texts, among them a Shakespeare First Folio, a Gutenberg Bible, the papers of Edith Wharton, and a third-century fragment of a Pauline Epistle.

But sometimes it felt as if the only text that visitors cared about was the one nobody could read. And too often, the way they cared about it was to proclaim that they’d solved it. “Part of the challenge,” Schroeder told me, “was that people were regularly contacting us saying, ‘Here’s my theory, what’s my reward?’ ” The Beinecke didn’t offer rewards, the librarians would have to explain, and it didn’t judge theories. But with little rigorous scholarship to point people to, wild ideas bloomed.

A New Jersey doctor argued that the Voynich was a manual, in Flemish creole, of death rites for an ancient cult of Isis. A Texas chemist spied what she took to be the signature of Leonardo da Vinci. The author of a guide to the end of the world theorized that a “Semite” had written the Voynich in scrambled Hebrew, to record a message from extraterrestrials about “our future doom.” A man writing from jail believed that the manuscript was a childhood project of his from the 1980s, written in his own blood. “He kept telling us he was coming to get it,” a Yale official told me. (The library contacted the campus police.)

The manuscript’s unintelligibility had made it a blank screen, onto which people freely projected their own fantasies. When Beinecke officials permitted one self-proclaimed scholar to examine the Voynich—only to see a social-media post afterward about her conducting some sort of séance—“it was like, ‘All right,’ ” Schroeder recalled, “ ‘we need to change some of the conversation.’ ”

Schroeder hoped that a high-quality reproduction, surrounded by accessible essays, would shift interest away from “Break the code!” and toward questions of history. Who might have produced such a work, and why? What do the drawings reveal about the illustrator’s understanding of botany, astronomy, and biology? What kinds of knowledge did earlier cultures encrypt, and how did they do it?

In its email asking Davis to vet the book before publication, the Yale press wrote, “We know that you are an expert in the subject.” That was news to Davis. True, while blogging about the Beinecke a year earlier, she had written a jokey post on the Voynich, warning readers about the “dark scary corner of the internet” where the manuscript’s obsessives lurked. But since leaving graduate school and her Beinecke job more than two decades earlier, she had rarely given it a thought, much less studied it.

But when she read the essays, she felt her broader training as a medievalist kick in. The book treated the Voynich not as some alien vessel of dangerous secrets, but as any other historical manuscript with a physical reality and a past. The volume’s editor was the Beinecke’s new early-books-and-manuscripts curator, a historian named Raymond Clemens. Times had changed.

One essay told of how Wilfrid Voynich remade himself from a Polish revolutionary into a charming New York antiquarian. Another documented the Voynich’s suspected provenance, with evidence suggesting that the manuscript had been owned by the 16th-century Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II before passing through the hands of a court pharmacist, a Prague alchemist, a Bohemian doctor, and a German polymath on its way to the Jesuits in Italy. There were reports on recent radiocarbon tests dating the calfskin parchment to between 1404 and 1438, and on the University of Pennsylvania philosopher William Romaine Newbold, who in 1921 became the first of many Voynich theorists to succumb to grandiose delusions of having solved it. Newbold’s code-breaking key involved so many freewheeling steps that one could make the text say practically anything. Newbold was convinced that the wily 13th-century friar Roger Bacon had not only written the manuscript but illustrated it with things—the Andromeda galaxy, spermatozoa—that he’d glimpsed through a telescope or microscope hundreds of years before those instruments were thought to have been invented.

Davis’s response to Yale University Press was a rave. The existing Voynich literature contained so much “unscientific and unsupported rubbish” that people couldn’t tell fact from fiction, she wrote. A book of sound, citable research was “long-overdue.”

Titled The Voynich Manuscript and priced at $50, the book would sell some 55,000 copies. (“For a rare-book library, that’s best-seller land,” Schroeder told me.) But if the Beinecke’s leaders thought it would change the conversation or slow the influx of questions, they had miscalculated. The ranks of enthusiasts—or “Voynicheros,” as they’re sometimes called—appeared only to grow. Over the next few years, new theories spread from the internet into the pages of venerable publications.

In 2017, the Times Literary Supplement ran a cover story titled simply “Voynich Manuscript: The Solution,” by the author of a book on how to write and sell TV screenplays. The man, who said he had a “commission from a television production company to analyse the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript,” announced that each character represented an abbreviated Latin word. The text, he argued, was a health manual, complete with recipes, for “the more well to do women in society.”

[Read: Has the Voynich manuscript really been solved?]

The next year, a headline in The Times of Israel declared, “Scientists Claim to Crack an Elusive Centuries-Old Code—And It’s Hebrew.” The article cited a study by a pair of non-Hebrew-speaking computer scientists who claimed that the Voynich’s author used anagrams and an alphabetic-substitution cipher, even though the resulting “Hebrew” made almost no sense.

Around the same time, a Canadian civil engineer concluded that the Voynich was a Tibetan Bible, while a Russian electrical engineer glimpsed an algorithm, according to one news report, “for conducting a ritual that protected women from sexual violence by vampires.”

Committed to its no-comment policy, the Beinecke started referring Voynich theorists—and the reporters who covered them—to Davis. Again the library was sending her its Voynich headaches, much as it had some 25 years earlier, when she was a student-worker there.

This time, however, Davis had the stature, and the freedom, to tell people what she really thought.

In May 2019, the University of Bristol issued an eye-catching news release: A biological scientist named Gerard Cheshire had used “lateral thinking and ingenuity” to identify the Voynich’s language (“proto-Romance,” he termed it). It had taken him, he said, just two weeks. “I experienced a series of ‘eureka’ moments whilst deciphering the code, followed by a sense of disbelief and excitement when I realised the magnitude of the achievement.” He concluded that Dominican nuns had compiled the manuscript as a medical and astrological reference for Maria of Castile, a great-aunt of King Henry VIII’s first wife.

The manuscript, Cheshire wrote, was “dominated by female issues, activities and adventures” because the men in Maria’s castle were off to battle, “leaving the women and girls sexually and emotionally frustrated, so they amused and distracted themselves whilst they waited and yearned for male attention to return.”

Cheshire had written to Davis more than a year before the news release, asking if she could help him publish his paper. “You may indeed be on to something,” Davis had replied politely. But in careful, line-by-line notes, she identified what she saw as significant errors in his logic, methods, and history.

Like so many others, she thought, he had pronounced a solution and then produced evidence for it, rather than working open-mindedly from facts to theory. At best, his ideas were a “hypothesis,” she told him; they weren’t a solution.

But Davis had found that most Voynicheros didn’t want nuanced critique; they wanted blanket affirmation—or, as Davis put it one morning as we walked to her office in downtown Boston, “Oh my God! You did it! Here’s a cookie!” When she quibbled with a man who’d argued that some of the Voynich’s letterforms represented dance choreography, he retorted, “Now I understand what Galileo must have gone through.” Cheshire grew similarly hostile after failing to convert Davis. “Try to shake off the Voynich spell,” he wrote to her. “I don’t want you to lose face when the penny eventually drops.”

When the University of Bristol announced Cheshire’s solution, it generated credulous headlines, in part because a peer-reviewed journal had published his article. Davis, stunned, slammed it in the media and on Twitter: “Sorry, folks, ‘proto-Romance language’ is not a thing. This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense.”

An attack by the head of the Medieval Academy was no small matter. The University of Bristol deleted its news release, distanced itself from Cheshire’s paper, and issued a statement saying that “following media coverage, concerns have been raised about the validity of this research.” Cheshire defended his work as ahead of its time, but the university’s about-face made international news.

Davis was imposing a reputational cost on what she saw as bad Voynich research. She tweeted about the manuscript more than 100 times in 2019. Her posts—some whimsical, others cutting—swelled her Twitter following from a few hundred to more than 10,000.

Her frustrations boiled over in an August 2019 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post. “We watch ‘Game of Thrones,’ we read ‘Lord of the Rings,’ we play medieval-themed video games, and therefore we think we know something about the Middle Ages,” she wrote. The fantasies that pass for medieval history in popular culture had come for the Voynich, fueling media coverage of shoddy research and “turning an authentic and fascinating medieval manuscript into a caricature of itself.”

But after a couple of years, Davis developed second thoughts about her social-media smackdowns. It was less the hate mail she got from “Voynich bros,” as she called the men who dominated online forums—though that didn’t help. She’d just begun to feel unkind, as though she were punching down at people genuinely inspired by the manuscript’s mysteries. Hadn’t she once been one of them? Her regrets grew after a YouTube channel produced a video of failed Voynich solutions that identified her as “executive director of the Medieval Academy of America and Reigning Queen of Academic Burns.”

If she wanted to dignify the manuscript as worthy of serious scholarship, she realized, she would need to be more than just a critic.

Late in the summer of 2018, an announcement went out about the following year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies: Organizers were soliciting papers for a panel on ciphers, scripts, and shorthands. When Davis replied with a proposal on the Voynich, “it just wasn’t what I was expecting,” Carson Koepke, one of the panel’s organizers, told me. “If it was somebody of a lower caliber than Lisa, I think we would have been much more skeptical.” But Davis was known for painstaking scholarship, and her proposal was accepted.

Davis knew well the Voynich’s reputation as a career killer. But she’d reached a point in her own career where she felt that she could take the risk. Still, she chose to be cautious. Neither a linguist nor a cryptanalyst, she would make no attempt to decode it, she decided. She would instead confine her study to her deepest specializations.

Davis is an elected member of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine, a prestigious guild of the world’s top paleographers and codicologists—experts in, by turns, ancient handwriting and the physical properties of old books. Of the Paris-based society’s 67 members, Davis is one of only four to be admitted from the United States.

She had never conducted a paleographic study of an illegible manuscript, and she wasn’t sure at first that she could. She couldn’t use the Voynich’s handwriting style to place or date it, because there was nothing in history to compare it to. Nor could she avail herself of the most basic paleographic skill: making sense of a scribe’s letterforms, abbreviations, and punctuation—the skill, that is, of reading. How could you read something whose alphabet lacked any known precedent?

That left a single, slim line of attack: counting the manuscript’s hands. Even if a language was unreadable, a good paleographer could spot small, stylistic tells distinguishing one scribe from the next.

Did one person create the Voynich? At first glance, it seemed so: “The handwriting is incredibly consistent throughout,” a onetime Army code breaker had observed in 1946. If the language existed in a kind of vacuum, beyond history’s reach, logic suggested that its creator did too: a hoaxer working furtively in a private office or some lone genius in an attic, disgorging bizarro visions onto parchment by candlelight.

But as Davis magnified the handwriting, she noticed subtle variations. In certain places, the script was more cramped or more likely to slant as it crossed the page. She tested this observation by picking a letter that didn’t appear often and tracking it across the manuscript’s pages. Its style, she saw, varied among groups of pages but not within those groups. This suggested that the differences—larger or smaller loops, straighter or curvier crossbars, longer or shorter feet—were the product of different scribes rather than of one scribe writing the same letter in different ways.

To reduce the possibility of selection bias, Davis examined other letters and found that their styles shifted in lockstep with the first letter. After months of analysis, she concluded that even if the Voynich had a single guiding vision, it was the handiwork of five different scribes.

The book’s physical condition filled in more of the picture. Even before anyone wrote on it, the calfskin parchment had holes where scabs, wounds, or insects had stricken the animal it had come from—one of several signs that the manuscript’s makers couldn’t afford, or didn’t need, the finest materials. The pigments were ordinary, and luxuries, such as gold leaf, were wholly absent. Stains darkened the tops of the manuscript’s first 100-odd pages, from an apparent water spill. Beneath Davis’s fingers, the parchment felt soft, almost cloth-like, a familiar texture in books that were once heavily thumbed. “This is not a manuscript that was meant to be a precious object on a book stand for people to go, ‘Ooooh,’ ” Davis told me. Like a manual of anatomy or an almanac of the stars, it was meant to be flipped through and used.

Davis presented her findings at the medieval-studies conference and published them in 2020 in the journal Manuscript Studies. She had hardly solved the Voynich, but she’d opened it to new kinds of investigation. If five scribes had come together to write it, the manuscript was probably the work of a community, rather than of a single deranged mind or con artist. Why the community used its own language, or code, remains a mystery. Whether it was a cloister of alchemists, or mad monks, or a group like the medieval Béguines—a secluded order of Christian women—required more study. But the marks of frequent use signaled that the manuscript served some routine, perhaps daily function.

Davis’s work brought like-minded scholars out of hiding. In just the past few years, a Yale linguist named Claire Bowern had begun performing sophisticated analyses of the text, building on the efforts of earlier scholars and on methods Bowern had used with undocumented Indigenous languages in Australia. At the University of Malta, computer scientists were figuring out how to analyze the Voynich with tools for natural-language processing. Researchers found that the manuscript’s roughly 38,000 words—and 9,000-word vocabulary—had many of the statistical hallmarks of actual language. The Voynich’s most common word, whatever it meant, appeared roughly twice as often as the second-most-common word and three times as often as the third-commonest, and so on—a touchstone of natural language known as Zipf’s law. The mix of word lengths and the ratio of unique words to total words were similarly language-like. Certain words, moreover, seemed to follow one another in predictable order, a possible sign of grammar.

Finally, each of the text’s sections—as defined by the drawings of plants, stars, bathing women, and so on—had different sets of overrepresented words, just as one would expect in a real book whose chapters focused on different subjects.

Spelling was the chief aberration. The Voynich alphabet—if that’s what it was—appeared to have a conventional 20-odd letters. But compared with known languages, too many of those letters repeated in the same order, both within words and across neighboring words, like a children’s rhyme. In some places, the spellings of adjacent words so converged that a single word repeated two or three times in a row. A rough English equivalent might be something akin to “She sells sea shells by the sea shore.” Another possibility, Bowern told me, was something like pig Latin, or the Yiddishism—known as “shm-reduplication”—that begets phrases such as fancy shmancy and rules shmules.

No known cipher—certainly none from the early 1400s—could produce the Voynich’s overly repetitive letter sequences and its language-like word and letter frequencies. To pull off something similar in English, Bowern and a graduate student found, you’d have to do strange things, like replace all the vowels in a word with a single, catchall character; or anagram the letters of each word into alphabetical order; or lard the text, in some yet-to-be-determined fashion, with nonsense characters, or “nulls.”

But if Voynichese was some reclusive group’s invention, why would its scribes take the extra step of scrambling its letters? Why riddle a puzzle? And yet that’s what the Voynich did, over and over again. The moment you felt you were getting somewhere, it coiled in on itself, retreating from your grasp, into another disguise.

This shape-shifting—this inability to see it from any one angle—persuaded the Malta computer scientists, led by Colin Layfield, to assemble a multidisciplinary team. So little was known about the underlying language—if it was a language—that even artificial intelligence, in its current state, lacked the models to decode it. Good AI requires “massive amounts of data to learn from,” Layfield told me. “We simply don’t have that luxury with the text in the Voynich.” In 2021, Layfield recruited Davis, Bowern, and other specialists, and they began meeting online to develop ideas for collaboration. In late 2022, the Voynich Research Group, as it became known, held its first conference, with 16 peer-reviewed papers, touching on history, literature, paleography, linguistics, cryptology, and—because of some of the drawings—medieval gynecology. Davis was invited to give the closing keynote.

Scholars inside and outside the group are now pressing in a variety of directions. Some are using mathematical tools to hunt for “cribs”: words whose meanings can be inferred because they consistently appear, like labels, beside certain illustrated objects.

Others are reevaluating the alphabets that earlier scholars created to convert the Voynichese letterforms into machine-readable ASCII text—the raw data for computational studies of the language. AI might be unable to decrypt the Voynich, but it could contribute in other ways, once enough of the world’s hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts are digitally imaged and accessible. Models trained on those images may eventually develop the power to spot visual similarities to the Voynich—the curvature of a particular pen stroke, the shades of certain pigments—that have eluded the human eye. Those similarities could help scholars identify writing communities with possible ties to the Voynich.

Still conspicuously missing from the research are professional art historians. Scholars of medieval art could bring a whole new field to bear on the Voynich’s illustrated world, but like other medievalists, they have been reluctant to engage.

In a 2020 article in the journal Cryptologia, a pair of European scientists argued that someone could have used a simple formula to give strings of meaningless symbols the structure of language. The Voynich, in their view, is little more than artfully constructed nonsense. But Davis has come to believe that the manuscript has meaning, and that scholars will one day find it. She thinks that an individual is less likely to hit on the solution than a cross-disciplinary team, whose members will turn small, hard-won discoveries into a coherent picture. “A lot of people try to make the argument that surely it would have been read by now if it could be read,” she told me. “But that’s just not enough of a reason to give up hope.” Egypt’s hieroglyphs and the Mycenaean script known as Linear B were also notoriously indecipherable—until the Rosetta Stone and a British genius produced working keys.

But what if the Voynich remains unsolvable? What if the manuscript is in some sense smarter than us all, its anonymous author, or authors, laughing from the grave at the hubris of reason? When I posed these questions to one of Bowern’s graduate students, she recited a Robert Frost poem about all human quests for understanding: “We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”

On a sunny day this past April, I walked into the Beinecke with Davis and Bowern and descended the steps to a basement classroom, where a librarian had set the Voynich on a pillow that keeps stresses off the book’s old body. It was open to a page where a block of inscrutable text is pierced by a plant with leaves that resemble origami frogs.

Bowern teaches an undergraduate Yale linguistics class on the Voynich, and today was her students’ one chance to see it in the flesh. Hands clasped behind their back, many of them leaned gingerly toward its open pages, as if in the presence of something sublime.

[From the December 2021 issue: Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit]

At times Davis, too, still feels the tug of the manuscript’s ineffable magic. But today she had come from Boston to ground Bowern’s students in its hard, physical facts: the parchment thumbed to the softness of felt. The blotches where some ancient reader may have spilled her water jug. The ellipsis of pinpricks where someone with needle and thread had tried, long ago, and without success, to mend one of the parchment’s many holes.

A year earlier, while lecturing at a different college, Davis had fielded a question about what made the Voynich “so sensational.” Was it that some band of medieval women might have come together to preserve their secrets? Was it the text’s spirituality, or the possibility that it said something about the Holy Grail or the Living Water?

Davis gently steered her questioner away from speculation. The Voynich is “not imaginary,” Davis said. “It’s an actual object, it exists in space and time, it has a history, it has physical characteristics, and because of that, it has a true story. We just don’t know what that true story is yet.”

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery.”