Middle Ages15th century · New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Voynich manuscript was bound in the wrong order in the 15th century, study says
Two researchers argue the undeciphered book was made as loose folded sheets, then bound out of sequence by someone who could not read it.
In brief 3 key points
ShowHide
- Voynich manuscript pages were bound out of their intended order, a new study argues
- Restoring the order could help efforts to read the script
- Tests give strong evidence against a quire structure, but no translation
The Voynich manuscript was bound in the wrong order in the 15th century, according to a new study. The undeciphered book is written on parchment carbon-dated to the early 1400s. The authors argue that whoever bound it could not read the text. The mixed-up pages may help explain why no one has cracked the script.
Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, did the work with Colin Layfield. He is an information systems researcher at the University of Malta. Their study appeared on 19 October in the journal Digital Medievalist.
The manuscript has 240 pages. They hold about 38,000 words in an unknown script called Voynichese, with drawings of people, plants and astrological symbols. A Holy Roman emperor was its first owner. Wilfrid Voynich bought it in 1912, and Yale University's rare book library has held it since 1969.
Davis noticed odd physical features while she was counting how many scribes copied the text. The handwriting switches from page to page in ways that make no sense. Several drawings also run off one page and continue on another far away, with many pages in between.
Made as loose sheets, not quires
Medieval books usually began as sheets of parchment folded in half. Each folded sheet is called a bifolium. About five were nested together to form a quire, and a stack of quires was bound along the spine. Davis and Layfield say the Voynich manuscript followed another plan.
In their view, the maker intended a set of loose bifolia, called singulions. These were meant to be read in sequence and never nested into quires.
Testing the page order with statistics
Other researchers have suggested before that the pages are out of order. This team tested the idea with numbers. Layfield used latent semantic analysis, a language method invented in the late 1980s to find hidden patterns in text.
The method works well with small data sets. Modern AI tools need huge amounts of training text, and the manuscript offers only about 35,000 words. The same report gives a figure of about 38,000 words elsewhere, so the exact word count is unclear.
The team compared blocks of text across pages, leaves, bifolia and quires. They ran the same tests on known medieval works, including the Aberdeen Bestiary and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. Pages with low similarity likely did not belong together. Pages with high similarity supported reading them side by side.
The results gave strong evidence against a quire structure. The authors also tried to work out the original order of the bifolia, if one existed.
Treating the book as singulions clears up several puzzles at once. Each scribe wrote one sheet, and drawings that cross the gutter between pages now make sense. Past work that assumed the pages were in order needs another look.
Davis says the finding does not deliver a translation. A book with mixed-up pages makes no sense to anyone, though, so putting the pages back in order counts as progress. She is hopeful.
A similar puzzle has been solved before. Cain's Jawbone is a 1930s murder mystery of 100 pages, printed with its pages shuffled. A handful of people have solved it. AI tools failed at the same task.
The team plans more work on a large water stain in the upper margin of some pages. The stain should match from one page to the next, but it does not. This again points to a wrong binding. Comparing the shapes of the stain could help the researchers put the pages back in sequence.
Sources (1)
Peer-reviewed paperfrom Medieval Academy of America, University of Malta and Yale University
- Voynich manuscript was bound in the wrong order, new study finds | Archaeology News Online Magazine (Bluesky buzz)
Paper: Lisa Fagin Davis and Colin Layfield, study of the Voynich manuscript's binding structure, Digital Medievalist (published 19 October)
Edited by Guiseppe Weijermars
Spotted a mistake? Tell the editor about a spelling error or a fact that is wrong. We correct stories openly.
