The Voynich Manuscript: A Translation

Part Two: Manuscript Pages 4-8

To read Part One, a translation of Pages 1-3, go here.

Introduction

The so-called Voynich Manuscript is —or is believed to be— a work treating of botanical, pharmaceutical, astrological, and balneological matters, written on calf vellum in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century. The manuscript is first known to have been in the possession of the Czech collector and alchemist Jiří Bareš (1585-1662), from whom it passed in 1665, via the physician Jan Marek Marci (1595-1668), to the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) in Rome. It remained in Jesuit collections until 1912, when it was purchased by the London-based Polish antique bookdealer Wilfrid Voynich (1865-1930). This latter’s eponymous treasure is currently held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection of Yale University Library (MS 408), which has, to the great benefit of researchers, digitized the work and made high-resolution scans available online.

The Voynich Manuscript has long been held to have been written either in an unknown natural language, or in an uncrackable cipher. As if this were not mysterious enough, until now none of the dozens of botanical illustrations in the work have been successfully identified with any known species of plant. It is not surprising therefore that many scholars have taken the manuscript for a fraud, perhaps perpetrated by Voynich himself, who for his part long insisted it was an encrypted treatise penned by the medieval Oxford alchemist Roger Bacon. Evidence from carbon-14 dating and chemical analysis have in more recent years shown that the work indeed dates from the Renaissance, and that it was produced from materials primarily found in Northern Italy. But beyond this not much progress has been made.

Until The Hinternet cam along, that is. Three and a half years ago we were delighted to receive, from cherished friend of The Hinternet Maëlysenn Plouzanec, a translation of the first three pages of the Voynich Manuscript. Today, we are delighted to announce that she has now completed an exquisite translation of the following five manuscript pages, which we are thrilled to be able to share with you below. Before reading on, we encourage you first to study the initial installment, together with Maëlysenn’s detailed notes.

Three and a half years might seem like a long time to translate a mere five pages, but if that’s what you think then you really do not understand, yet, what this work involves. The Voynich Manuscript is by far the hardest philological nut in existence, which the very best cryptographers in US military intelligence spent decades struggling, unsuccessfully, to crack.

We fear that it may have cracked Maëlysenn in turn. Her recent e-mail exchanges with us teetered on the brink of incoherence, and when Hélène met her at the Chicken’s King restaurant across from the main station of Quimper to retrieve the USB on which Maëlysenn insisted on delivering the materials, it struck her, Hélène that is, that she, Maëlysenn that is, had acquired what Nietzsche somewhere called the “hunchback of authenticity”, characteristic of only the most dedicated and self-sacrificing philologists.

We urge you to subscribe to The Hinternet to support valuable work such as hers. To be clear, she is our friend, but she’s not letting us publish this material for free. Trust us: once you have subscribed, and pushed past the paywall to study her sumptuous rendering of this mysterious text, you will not be able to hold any other thought in your head than: Yes, yes, that was worth it!