Voynich Manuscript May Have Been Misbound and Read in Wrong Order, Scholars Say

In the article “Singulion Structure and the Voynich Manuscript,” Colin Layfield and Lisa Fagin Davis write that the manuscript's folded sheets may originally have been stacked on top of each other as “singulions,” similar to a stack of Christmas cards, before being mis-bound in a more typical “nested” arrangement in the mid-to-late 15th century. Layfield is a senior lecturer in information systems at the University of Malta; Davis is an expert on medieval handwriting.

The authors used a numerical analysis tool to compare blocks of text and found that many attached pages scored highly for coherence even when many intervening pages separated them, suggesting the manuscript had been mis-bound. Visual evidence pointed in the same direction. In the current binding, illustrations of streams or pipes run into the gutter—the blank space along the inner margins—and do not fully match the pictures on the opposite page. “Once you treat them as loose pages stacked together, all these artistic anomalies suddenly join up,” Layfield said, according to The Guardian.

Davis said the hypothesis fixes structural problems elegantly. “There are a lot of people who wanted the Voynich to have been created by one mad genius working in their attic in medieval London or wherever,” she said. “In fact, the evidence suggests we're talking about a more communal object, perhaps a set of booklets through which information was passed down from one generation to the next—the ‘lone genius' idea is kind of out of the door.”

The manuscript's origins remain unknown. It surfaced in book collectors' records in the 17th century. In 1912 it was bought by Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish revolutionary and book dealer with a shop on London's Soho Square. It was once thought to be a scientific diary by the 13th-century polymath Roger Bacon, and others credited it to Leonardo da Vinci. Recent chemical analyses of the manuscript, held at Yale University, carbon-dated its parchment to between 1404 and 1438, ruling out those authorships.

Scholars have disagreed about the text. Some have argued that it is gibberish intended as a hoax or forgery, though recent linguistic analysis has found it more likely to be written in a natural, if still unidentified, language. In 2019, a biology research assistant at the University of Bristol claimed the manuscript was written in “calligraphic proto-Romance,” but the findings were later disputed, and the university removed a reference to the claims from its website.

Davis said the only other known medieval manuscripts she has found preserved in a singulion arrangement were Qurans from North Africa, likely meant to be handed out as small booklets for instruction. She added that the hypothesis was supported by paleographical analysis suggesting the manuscript was written by up to five different scribes. Some drawings resemble the female reproductive system, while others hint at herbal lore and astrology. “When you put all of this together, it starts to feel like a book of women's folk knowledge that's being preserved,” she said. “But you cannot prove that yet.”

On the language, Davis said it was not out of the question that other manuscripts were written in Voynichese. “The problem is that so few manuscripts have survived from the middle ages, because they weren't bound,” she said. “The irony is that whoever mis-bound this manuscript still did us a huge favour by ensuring its survival.”