Thread by @lisafdavis

OK, people, you worked hard to get me to 10K followers, so here is your reward! An epic 62-Tweet thread about the #Voynich manuscript coming your way, starting NOW!

1. First things first. The #Voynich manuscript (VMS from now on) is a real object. Please always keep that in mind! It is a medieval manuscript (more on that in a minute) that belongs to the @BeineckeLibrary at Yale University, where it has been MS 408 since it was given in 1969.

2. I have seen it on multiple occasions and can confirm this. It is not imaginary. It is not fake. It is not a gift from aliens. But what IS it?

3. The Voynich Manuscript is written in an unknown alphabet apparently encoding an unidentified language, embellished with astonishing botanical, astronomical, and biological illustrations.

4. Cryptologists and mathematicians and linguists worldwide have been studying this manuscript for hundreds of years, and no one has ever offered a satisfactory solution to the enigma that is the Voynich.

5. The VMS is an unassuming little mess. Dealer Wilfrid Voynich, for whom it is named, called it an “ugly duckling,” & you can see why! Measuring 225 x 160 mm, the manuscript currently comprises 102 leaves (at least 14 leaves are missing), including several multi-page fold-outs.

6. First, the contents. The codex begins with with 66 folios of botanical illustrations and accompanying texts. The fantastic and impossibly elaborate plants have resisted any attempts to fully and reliably identify them.

7. Next comes a series of astrological and astronomical diagrams, including ten circular diagrams surrounding signs of the zodiac (two are missing). The miniature naked women standing in baskets who populate the rest of the manuscript make their first appearance in this section.

8. The next section seems to depict women bathing, and has been interpreted as relating to balneology, the medieval practice of medicinal bathing. It also includes what may be biological illustrations having to do with gynecology or women's health.

9. This large foldout attracts a lot of attention but also has resisted interpretation. The video shows its codicological structure.

10. Next is a series of leaves and foldouts that may depict recipes and ingredients, with a few more botanical illustrations as well.

11. The final section is purely textual, with 12 (of at least 14) leaves of starred paragraphs.

12. The few lines on the final page (f. 116v) are roughly contemporary with the manuscript but are written in what appears to be a Germanic language, with some Voynichese thrown in for good measure.

13. Now let’s talk about Voynichese. There are around 25 symbols that are used throughout the manuscript with different frequencies, and a few that are extremely rare. All of the common symbols can be seen "in the wild" on the slide at right:

14. The linguists and cryptologists who have studied the VMS use strategies such as analyzing word and letter frequencies to conduct their analyses. But the uniqueness of Voynichese makes this process difficult. So Voynichologists have an interim step.

15. Voynichologists have developed an ASCII substitution alphabet for Voynichese that allows you to transcribe the manuscript in a machine-readable way. The Extensible Voynich Alphabet (EVA) is used by Voynichologists worldwide.

16. Here’s the EVA transcript of f. 2r. Important note: this is NOT a decryption! It is an ASCII-character substitution for machine-readability only!

17. The more-than-2% letter-frequency chart looks like this:

18. Linguists also look at word frequencies, looking for patterns that may help determine what KIND of language Voynichese represents. Here are the top 100ish VMS “words,” showing how Voynichese obeys a linguistic axion known as Zipf’s Law (look it up):

19. Some of the most unusual and (for my work) interesting glyphs are these four, known as “gallows” characters. In EVA, these are (clockwise from UR) [f], [p], [t], and [k].

20. These can also be interfixed into a “bench” to create combos like this:

21. And gallows can be combined with OTHER gallows to create even more interesting characters:

22. Fifty years ago, a scholar named Prescott Currier noticed patterns in groups of leaves that he called “Language A” and “Language B”. I tend to refer to these differences as “dialects” rather than languages, since they aren’t HUGE differences.

23. For example, this "benched gallows" character is quite common in Dialect A but is rare in Dialect B.

24. And this combo is extremely common at the end of words in Dialect B but is extremely rare in Dialect A.

25. This is the kind of evidence that linguists and computational analysts like @anggarrgoon and @DrCLayfield use to draw conclusions about the linguistic properties of Voynichese. Is it a real language? Is it gibberish? Is it an invented language like Elvish or Dothraki?

26. In this article, @anggarrgoon and Luke Lindemann argue that Voynichese represents an actual human language; we just don’t know which one. ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005415

@anggarrgoon 27. I am NOT a linguist or a cryptologist. I am a paleographer and codicologist, with a lengthy track record of studying, cataloguing, and analyzing medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. That is how I approach my work on the manuscript.

[intermission! Gotta go walk the dog...back soon]

And we're back!

Now, where were we? Oh, yes. No. 28. Paleography is the study of the history of handwriting. It involves 3 skillsets: attribution (establishing date/place of origin by comparison); literacy (learning to read unfamiliar scripts); and description (distinguishing between scribes).

29. To apply the principles of paleographical analysis to the VMS, we are limited by two facts: 1) this is the only example of this writing, so there’s nothing to compare it to; and 2) no one can read it. So we can’t employ attribution or literacy. How about description?

30. I applied paleographical theory to the VMS using a tool called ArchetypeInk, which allowed me to annote images of the VMS with discoverable tags, pulling the annotations into a “lightbox” for comparison. Here are a few screenshots:

31. The upshot is that I was able to identify distinguishing features of five different scribes and track each scribe’s work throughout the manuscript:

32. (see this article in the journal Manuscript Studies for details) muse.jhu.edu/article/754633…

33. Why is this important? The scribes collaborate in codicologically interesting ways. As Currier noted, for example, Scribes 1 and 2 alternate by bifolia in the botanical section. Here's quire 4, where scribe 2 writes the 2nd bifolium only (thanks to @leoba for the #VisColl!)

@leoba 34. The fact that in the botanical section the scribal work is by bifolium, not by quire or even by leaf, suggests that the bifolia are actually now bound out of order.

35. And why does THAT matter? 1) understanding the collaborative nature of the VMS; 2) digging more deeply into linguistic variety among the scribes. Every bit of evidence helps the linguists and cryptologists, all of which gets us closer to reading the damn thing.

36. How about the history of the manuscript? Does that help? Well, we don’t know anything FOR SURE until the mid-seventeenth century, when this letter was sent with the manuscript from Johannes Marcus Marci in Prague to Athanasius Kircher in Rome.

37. According to the letter, the VMS was acquired by HRE Rudolph II in the late-16th/early-17th century. We don’t have any other evidence supporting this claim, so we can’t say FOR SURE that the Emperor owned it. But it was certainly the kind of thing he might have wanted.

38. Here’s the erased signature of Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (d. 1622), an alchemist in Prague, on the first page (visible under UV light). The MS passed from him to George Baresch to Marcus Marci to Kircher. Then it stayed in Rome for several hundred years.

39. We don’t know FOR SURE, but it is likely that the MS stayed in the hands of the Jesuits all that time, until Voynich acquired it (circumstances uncertain, but likely from the Jesuits) in 1912.

40. In the meantime, early owners left their marks on the VMS. Names of the months were added to the zodiac pages. The manuscript was rebound (out of order) and foliation was added, likely in the 17th century.

41. Voynich spent the remainder of his life trying to sell the manuscript, with no success. He brought in medievalists, cryptologists, and linguists to study it. No one could read it, and no one would buy it.

42. After his death, it was inherited by his wife Ethel, who couldn’t sell it. After her death, it passed to their longtime assistant and business manager, Anne Nill. She sold it to NYC dealer H. P. Kraus for $24,500. HE couldn’t sell it either and gave it to Yale in 1969.

43. "OK, Lisa, that’s all really interesting, but when and where was it produced? And what does it SAY?!" you ask. Well, friends, I am sorry to report that after centuries of study, we still don’t know for sure.

44. The script has humanistic features that are similar to Italian manuscripts like this one @TheHuntington, so it seems likely that the MS was written in the NE Mediterranean region or Eastern Europe in the early 15th c., but we can't say for sure.

45. Can science help? Yes! @BeineckeLibrary commissioned carbon-14 testing and chemical analyses. The results: the parchment is almost certainly from the early 15th century, and the inks and pigments are consistent with medieval recipes. beinecke.library.yale.edu/sites/default/…

@BeineckeLibrary 46. That does not PROVE the VMS date and place of origin. It gives us a LIKELY date/place. Some argue that the parchment may be medieval but the manuscript is a modern forgery. I don’t agree – I think that the object is too complex, with too many layers, to be a modern fake.

47. Want to see for yourself? The entire manuscript is digitized in a high-resolution open-access viewer here: beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/hi…

48. Got a theory of your own? Here’s some thoughts about what to do with that information (tl/dr: don’t send it to anyone at the Beinecke Library):

49. Want to get started on your own research? Do the reading first! Start here: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030021…

50. Check out Barbara Shailor’s formal description of the VMS here: brbl-net.library.yale.edu/pre1600ms/docs…

51. Here’s a video introduction with myself, Beinecke Curator Ray Clemens, and Yale Professor of Linguistics @anggarrgoon:

@anggarrgoon 52. Here’s a great community of Voynichologists and a great space to investigate ongoing work and past theories: voynich.ninja/forum-25.html

53. Another great resource is Rene Zandbergen's website, a regularly-updated clearinghouse for everything Voynich: voynich.nu

54. My blogpost introduction to the manuscript: manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/man…

55. A recent blogpost about my last visit with the manuscript: manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2022/04/24/man…

56. My @washingtonpost article about the importance of evidence-based Voynich research: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…

57. Want to own a really fantastic facsimile? It doesn’t come cheap! siloe.es/en/facsimiles-…

58. Finally, I hope you will join me & my colleagues for @voynich2022, an online international symposium showcasing the best and latest vetted Voynich research from around the world, taking place on Nov. 30 - Dec. 1. Keynotes by me and RZ. More info here: um.edu.mt/event/voynich2…

59. Just for fun! The Avengers save the VMS:

60. Voynich Sudoko:

61. Voynich Wordle:

62. And a Voynich XKCD! xkcd.com/593/

THE END!

Phew! Thanks for joining me on this epic tour! I'm about to get on the subway for an hour or so, so it's a good time to #AskMeAnything about the VMS! Hit me up with your questions...but just FYI, I'm not here to tell you if your pet theory is right or wrong! Let's get to it...