What has roughly 38,000 words over 234 pages and yet is not just unreadable but indecipherable? The ancient Voynich manuscript, of course, which just might be "history's hardest puzzle," writes Ariel Sabar in the Atlantic. Cryptographers, mathematicians, and linguists have been trying to decode the 15th-century text, which is accompanied by funky illustrations, ever since rare-books dealer Wilfrid Voynich acquired it in 1912 and brought it to the world's attention. It's now in the hands of Yale. Plenty of theories have emerged over the years—a health manuscript, perhaps?—but none that have satisfied leading scholars. Sabar's story recounts all of this but also details how one of those medieval scholars, Lisa Fagin Davis, has been examining the manuscript through a different lens.
"What if you looked past its extravagant strangeness?" writes Sabar. "What if you focused instead on the things—little noticed—that it shared with countless other manuscripts?" Davis began looking at the text itself, as in the letters and the penmanship. "After months of analysis, she concluded that even if the Voynich had a single guiding vision, it was the handiwork of five different scribes," Sabar writes. Who, and why the seemingly invented language? All unclear, "but the marks of frequent use signaled that the manuscript served some routine, perhaps daily function," per Sabar. Davis' insight, published in 2020, has led to new avenues of study detailed in the story, which nonetheless leaves open the possibilities that the manuscript is pure nonsense and/or unsolvable. Read it in full here. (Or check out other Longform recaps.)
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