Illustrations depict naked women bathing in green liquid, naked women being propelled by jets of water, naked women supporting rainbows with their hands. The astrological wheels are dotted with little drawings of nude women, and in the subsequent balneological section, the nude drawings go wild. Then comes the astrological section, which includes foldout drawings of celestial charts that do not seem to match up with any known calendar. It is divided into four sections, each of them very weirdĪs Michael LaPointe explains in the Paris Review, the book begins with an herbal section featuring vibrant drawings of plants-but nobody is quite sure what sort of plants they are supposed to be. Why has the Voynich proved so baffling, so polarizing over the years? Here are six things to know about the elusive manuscript: Some say the book is a nature encyclopedia.

The manuscript has been attributed to everyone from ancient Mexican cultures to Leonardo da Vinci to aliens. The most recent interpretation of the Voynich Manuscript may not have been sound, but it’s certainly not the wackiest theory about the text’s contents and origin. Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, told the Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang that Gibbs’ decoded text “doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense.”

But alas, experts and enthusiasts were soon poking holes in Gibbs’ theory. Gibbs claimed to have decoded two lines of the text, and his work was initially met with enthusiasm. The manuscript, Gibbs theorized, is a woman’s health manual, and each character of its elusive language represents medieval Latin abbreviations. And last week, a hullaballoo erupted over a Times Literary Supplementpiece by historical researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs, who claimed to have solved the enduring Voynich mystery. The text, written in a language that has yet to be decoded, has confounded scholars, cryptologists and amateur sleuths for centuries. Crumbling medieval texts do not usually make for the subjects of frenzied online debate, with the notable exception of the thoroughly bizarre, persistently impenetrable Voynich Manuscript.

Complete voynich manuscript pdf