tomitaku.net

Beinecke MS 408

Voynich manuscript / MS 408
add · 925 words

The shelfmark of a manuscript held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University※1, generally known by the name "Voynich manuscript". On parchment, characters corresponding to no known writing system are written densely throughout, accompanied by illustrations of plants, celestial bodies and the human body. Since it came to light in 1912, when the antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Voynich acquired it, a great many people from professional cryptanalysts to amateurs have worked on it, but it is settled neither what language the characters represent nor even whether it is a meaningful language at all. That the holding institution does not go into the contents and refers to it only by the number "MS 408" is a treatment reflecting this unsettled state as it stands.

Form and contents

The whole is on parchment, with roughly 240 pages extant and more than 170,000 characters written in, it is said※2. The hand flows, and there are almost no traces of the writer hesitating and no large rewritings. The illustrations divide into several sections by content: a part where plant figures continue, a part resembling astronomical diagrams combining circles and stars, a part in which many naked figures are drawn in water, and a part resembling a pharmacological book with small vessels lined up.

Many of the plant figures cannot be identified with known species. They are drawn in a way that reads either as copies of real plants or as imaginary figures combining several plants, and here too interpretation is divided. The correspondence between illustrations and text is not clear either, and there is no clue for confirming whether a word written beside a figure is the name of that figure.

Date and provenance

Radiocarbon dating of the parchment has given a result between 1404 and 1438※3. This indicates the period when the animal that supplied the parchment was slaughtered, and is not necessarily the same as the period when the characters were written in. The possibility of a forgery written later on parchment obtained from an earlier time cannot be excluded by this measurement alone. There are, however, observations that no chemical aging of the ink or traces of artificial degradation are seen, and no positive evidence supporting later creation has emerged. The Beinecke Library's description gives it as made in Central Europe in the late fifteenth to sixteenth century.

The provenance from the modern period onward begins where Voynich acquired it in Italy in 1912※4. As for earlier owners, a line going back to figures of the seventeenth century is discussed on the basis of letters and notes accompanying the manuscript, but the route of acquisition cannot be traced continuously as a whole.

Attempts at decipherment and their failure

Attempts have been repeated in changing directions: decipherment as a cipher, as a transformation of a known language, as an artificial language. All remain partial explanations, and break down when applied to other passages. In 2019 Gerard Cheshire published a paper arguing that the text is written in a lost proto-Romance language and is a therapeutic handbook compiled by nuns for Maria of Castile, queen of Aragon. The University of Bristol publicized it, then withdrew the article on the grounds that concerns had been raised about the validity of the research, and harsh criticism came from scholars of medieval manuscripts.

The focus of the criticism is the method. Looking at a word near a figure, inferring a meaning from that figure, and then fixing the reading so as to fit the inferred meaning, is a circular procedure, and it can produce an urban-legend "translation" out of any sequence of signs. This type of failure is seen in common with past claims of decipherment as well.

Calling it "MS 408"

The popular name "Voynich manuscript" derives from the name of the bookseller who put it on the market at the beginning of the twentieth century. That is, with the author, the circumstances of its making and its contents all unknown, the name of a modern owner has become the name of the book. The library's practice of calling it by its shelfmark also carries the sense of avoiding the implications that the popular name brings with it.

In research, too, the distinction tells in practice. A claim to have "deciphered the Voynich manuscript" is a claim about the contents, whereas "examining Beinecke MS 408" is work on the manuscript as an object. Material descriptions such as the date of the parchment, the binding, the composition of the ink and the pigments of the illustrations accumulate on the latter side, and the elucidation of meaning has not yet connected to it.

To verify

  • Quantitative confirmation of whether "バイネッケ" is the most common Japanese rendering. Instances of "バイネッケ" are found in Japanese literature and reporting, but a comparison of frequency with "バイネッキ" and "バイネキ", and the authority form of the National Diet Library, could not be confirmed
  • The original paper on the radiocarbon dating. Accounts of a measurement by a team at the University of Arizona agree across several sources, but the academic paper reporting the result itself could not be consulted
  • The source for the figures "about 240 pages" and "more than 170,000 characters". Secondary sources give them consistently, but the values in the holding institution's catalogue description could not be confirmed
  • The current assessment of the debate over owners before the seventeenth century. There is a theory tracing back from letters related to the manuscript, but how far it is treated as established could not be confirmed

References

Mentioned in
none
Similar