The Voynich 'Roger Bacon' Cipher Manuscript: Deciphered Maps of Stars

A small, elaborately illustrated manuscript, written in cipher, and now in Yale's Beinecke Library, has often been referred to as 'the world's most mysterious manuscript'.1 It is also known as the Voynich manuscript, after the book dealer who rediscovered it in a Jesuit school in Frascati and acquired it in 1912, and as the Roger Bacon cipher because it has been attributed to Roger Bacon.2 Its history is worth recounting.3 It was given to Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit polymath, in 1666; the letter of gift, still preserved, reports that the manuscript had formerly belonged to Emperor Rudolph II, patron of Tycho Brahe and Kepler, among others. Further, the letter goes, on, Rudolph had paid a fabulous price-6oo gold ducats-because he believed it to be 'the work of Roger Bacon, the Englishman'. On the first leaf, chemical treatment has brought out the signature of J. De Tepenecz, who had been a botanist in charge of the collection of Rudolph II. Details within the manuscript make it clear that this manuscript is not contemporary with Roger Bacon. From an alphabet including J, V, and W, to a fifteenth-century style of two-handed clock, one detail after another points to a later date.4 What is most conclusive, however, is Hugh O'Neill's identification in two illustrations of plants first brought to Europe by Columbus in I492.5 (I have subsequently identified two more as plants brought by Columbus in 1493.6) The date is therefore about 1500 at the earliest. But this says nothing about the date of the material incorporated in this treatise, nor the attribution to Roger Bacon. Two things make that attribution plausible. First, the illustrations indicate a sequence of topics exactly right for a treatise on the elixir of life, in which Bacon was reputed to be, and in fact was, keenly interested. Second, the key on the final leaf opens with a phrase, in mixed anagram and cipher, 'To me, Roger Bacon .. .'. The cipher is different from that used in the text itself, and this looks as though it could be the copy of a much earlier enciphered attribution. 7 The manuscript itself now has 204 pages; twenty-eight have been lost. It seems to divide into five main parts. It opens with a set of illustrations of plants, one to a page, as though it were a treatise on botany. There follows a * References in the footnotes are given in abbreviated form. Full information may be found in the bibliography on pp. 149-150. 1 See Manly, 'Mysterious MS', i921; Friedman, 1962. 2 Beginning with a letter accompanying its gift to A. Kircher in 1666; see below. 3 What follows is based on Newbold's account, in Newbold and Kent, 1928. 4 The Beinecke Catalogue suggests a 15thcentury date. The costume of the medallion of the Sa gittarius map; the two-handed clock on fol. 85; the style of Arabic numerals, for example in the margin of fol. 49r; a cipher box using distinct J, V, and W; all indicate that the date is at least that late.