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# The Voynich Manuscript and the Discipline of Not Knowing
- URL: https://www.thegalacticmind.com/the-voynich-manuscript/
- Published: 2025-12-10T15:32:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T00:09:02.000Z
- Description: MS 408 is authentically medieval and deeply structured, yet still unread. The Voynich Manuscript tests whether we can follow evidence without mistaking pattern for meaning.
- Author: James Cloman II
- Tags: Dossier, Ancient Mysteries, Philosophy, Reality

## Overview: What This Is

The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval illustrated codex written in a script no one has been able to read with accepted, reproducible results. Preserved at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as MS 408, it contains botanical drawings, circular astronomical or astrological diagrams, pharmaceutical vessels, foldout cosmological imagery, and groups of human figures many of them nude women—immersed in pools or connected by tube-like forms. Around and between those images runs a fluent, carefully organized text in an otherwise unattested writing system.

The manuscript is often introduced as “the world’s most mysterious book,” a phrase that attracts attention but blurs the real problem. The mystery is not that the object floats outside history. Its parchment has been radiocarbon dated, its inks and pigments have been examined, parts of its ownership history can be reconstructed, and every surviving page is available in high-resolution scans. What remains inaccessible is the relationship between the marks and their meaning.

That distinction is why the Voynich Manuscript belongs in The Galactic Mind archive. It is not evidence of alien authorship, impossible science, or a lost civilization. It is something more intellectually useful: a genuine historical object that repeatedly tempts people to make claims stronger than the evidence allows. The manuscript does not merely test cryptography. It tests whether curiosity can remain active when certainty does not arrive.

## Origins and Background

The firmest starting point is the material object. In 2009, the University of Arizona radiocarbon-dated four samples taken from different pieces of the manuscript’s parchment. The combined result placed the parchment between 1404 and 1438 with 95 percent probability. This dates the animal skin, not the moment ink touched it, but the agreement among the samples makes an early-fifteenth-century supply of parchment the established baseline. The laboratory result was documented in an internal report later made public rather than in a conventional peer-reviewed article, a source limitation worth stating even though the date is widely accepted.

Material testing narrows the frame further. Analysis identified iron-gall inks and pigments such as azurite, copper-based green, and red ochre. Later non-destructive work at Yale found the materials and bookmaking techniques consistent with fifteenth-century manuscript production and detected no modern inks or pigments. None of this proves that the text carries a message. It does make the idea that Wilfrid Voynich manufactured the codex in the twentieth century highly implausible. A medieval object can still contain a cipher, a constructed notation, mnemonic writing, pseudo-text, or a deliberate deception; material age does not choose among those possibilities.

The early ownership history is less complete than the material evidence. A letter sent with the manuscript by the Prague physician Johannes Marcus Marci to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in 1666 reported that Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had once bought the book for 600 ducats and believed it to be the work of Roger Bacon. The letter preserves what Marci had been told, not a surviving sales record. Modern dating excludes Bacon, who died more than a century before the parchment was made, and proposed ownership by John Dee remains disputed.

Other links are firmer. A faded inscription on the first folio connects the book to Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec, a pharmacist associated with Rudolf’s court. By the seventeenth century, Georg Baresch possessed the manuscript and asked Kircher for help with it. Baresch left it to Marci, who then sent it to Kircher. The manuscript appears to have remained in Jesuit collections until 1912, when the Polish-American bookseller Wilfrid Voynich acquired it from the Jesuit college at Frascati near Rome and brought it to modern public attention.

After Voynich’s death, the codex passed through Ethel Voynich and Anne Nill to rare-book dealer H. P. Kraus. Unable to sell it, Kraus gave it to Yale in 1969\. The result is an unusual combination: the manuscript’s author, place of composition, original title, language, and purpose remain unknown, while the physical book and much of its later journey are unusually accessible.

!["Beinecke MS 408" aka "Рукопись Войнича": sassik — LiveJournal](https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/THEt8tKL1oWoJqg98KcFjSxD8_Kf7LjDsrfYILVAaEBNXQt91-uEejPEoxX9ztI8tKEdk-eBB2JY3sVRtvOlsmKwODPM45tIFBiY9S_8RuiR88l6sWgphr78od8SJg0O0EMaVsDuT_w_FGEsGK42lTRpkvfvpbNnvfvfiUdTnQTGD8ERyV95bxBd4ly2RP_l?purpose=fullsize)

The manuscript’s opening folio combines its unfamiliar script with one of its characteristic botanical illustrations. A faded ownership inscription associated with Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec helps connect the codex to early modern Prague without revealing where it was originally created.

## What It Is Known For

The surviving codex contains 102 folios, including unusually large foldouts. Its pages are commonly divided by modern scholars into six visual groupings: herbal, astronomical or astrological, balneological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and a largely unillustrated final section in which star-like marks introduce short entries often described as recipes. These labels are useful navigation tools, not recovered chapter titles. Because the writing cannot be read, the images can suggest subject matter without confirming it.

The botanical pages show plants whose roots, leaves, and flowers are rendered with enough confidence to look identifiable, yet most resist secure identification. Circular diagrams contain stars, zodiacal imagery, radiating segments, and human figures. The so-called balneological pages show nude women in green pools and interconnected channels. The famous multi-panel “Rosettes” foldout combines circular forms, pathways, structures, and dense writing into an image that has been read as everything from a cosmological map to a medical diagram. The page itself is documented; those readings remain interpretations.

The script—often called “Voynichese”—is equally distinctive. It is written predominantly from left to right in word-like groups separated by spaces, usually without obvious punctuation. The pen work appears practiced rather than hesitatingly copied. Certain glyphs and combinations favor particular positions within words, lines, and paragraphs. Vocabulary frequencies vary by illustrated section, and related-looking tokens cluster in patterned ways. These are real regularities, but regularity is not the same as readable language.

Prescott Currier’s statistical work in the twentieth century identified two broad textual varieties, conventionally called Currier A and Currier B. The label “languages” was always provisional: the difference could reflect dialects, cipher settings, scribal habits, stages of production, subject matter, or some other generative shift. In 2020, paleographer Lisa Fagin Davis identified five scribal hands. That finding makes the manuscript look more like coordinated production than a single uninterrupted performance, but it does not tell us what the collaborators were writing—or whether the output encoded ordinary language at all.

The history of attempted decipherment is almost as famous as the book. William Romaine Newbold announced a solution in the early twentieth century that was later rejected. William and Elizebeth Friedman, among the most accomplished cryptanalysts of their generation, studied the manuscript without producing a decipherment. Mary D’Imperio’s 1978 National Security Agency monograph organized the cryptologic problem with unusual care but did not solve it. Since then, proposed readings have invoked Latin, Hebrew, Romance languages, Nahuatl, constructed languages, abbreviations, anagrams, shorthand, and multiple cipher systems. None has won acceptance through consistent application across the whole codex and independent replication.

![Facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript Now Available to Citizen Cryptographers](https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/uNV7Ssxcy_rAGZpm-Pif8X9ZpxHmJIif_n3QvyeXobzX-kTDxw-ZyK24Wy7U6Bnl03wa4lmyiQoqrcDMEmDagXPWqJa0vl5THgUPAkrratfflq-RG3X-uv91hoOAx85P0PrQKInQ7pmUM_whq5TrJqqJjRBK-ryg19aEbuQAJnMOrv23NlnV5eN61hfKuix6?purpose=fullsize)

Recognizable zodiacal imagery provides one of the manuscript’s few familiar anchors, yet the surrounding labels remain unread. The page demonstrates how identifiable symbols can establish context without supplying a translation.

## The Core Idea or Signal

The Voynich Manuscript contains three problems that are often mistaken for one. The first is material: when and how was the object made? The second is generative: what process produced the script’s recurring forms and distributions? The third is semantic: what, if anything, do those forms communicate? Research has made substantial progress on the first problem and measurable progress on the second. The third remains open.

That separation changes the meaning of the mystery. A statistical pattern can show that a token is concentrated in the herbal pages, but it cannot tell us that the token means “root.” Five recognizable hands can reveal collaboration, but not the collaborators’ purpose. A historically plausible cipher can demonstrate a way to produce Voynich-like text, but it does not establish that the original scribes used that method. Each finding constrains the field without closing it.

**The manuscript is not proof of hidden knowledge. It is proof that evidence can survive after interpretation fails.**

This is the discipline at the center of the Voynich problem. The book asks researchers to work with unequal levels of certainty at the same time: high confidence that the object is medieval, moderate confidence about some of its production features, competing models for the text, and no accepted access to its meaning. The honest response is not passivity. It is precision about which question a piece of evidence actually answers.

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## Perspectives and Interpretations

One serious position treats Voynichese as an encoded or transformed natural language. Linguists Claire Bowern and Luke Lindemann reviewed the manuscript’s morphology, entropy, and structural behavior and argued that a natural-language basis deserves serious consideration over a simple hoax. Earlier information-theoretic work by Marcelo Montemurro and Damián Zanette found that token distribution across the manuscript resembles the topical organization of ordinary texts and that relationships between textual clusters correspond in part to illustrated sections. This is evidence for non-trivial organization. It is not a translation, and the statistical behavior is not identical to that of any known language.

The cipher model is related but distinct. A normal medieval language could have been transformed through an unfamiliar system that changed its frequencies, word boundaries, or information density. Michael Greshko’s 2025 Naibbe cipher is a useful recent test of this possibility. Using procedures feasible with fifteenth-century materials, including playing cards or dice, it turns Latin or Italian into ciphertext with several Voynich-like properties. Greshko does not present Naibbe as the manuscript’s key. Its value is methodological: it shows that historically plausible hand encryption can create some features once treated as obstacles to a cipher explanation. It does not reproduce every Voynich property, and it does not recover a single line of plaintext.

A second position argues that the text may be structured but meaningless. Gordon Rugg and Gavin Taylor showed that a low-technology table-and-grille process can generate pseudo-text with several important Voynich-like features, including Zipf-like word frequencies, patterned word lengths, and non-uniform distributions. Their work weakens the claim that language-like statistics alone prove a concealed message. It does not prove that a medieval hoaxer used their exact mechanism, and later research continues to debate whether such generators reproduce the manuscript’s full set of long-range, positional, and scribal constraints.

“Hoax” may also be too narrow a word. Meaningless or partially meaningful text could have served as performance, private practice, mnemonic structure, devotional exercise, display, or a simulation of learned authority without being created only to defraud a buyer. Conversely, deliberate structure need not imply ordinary prose. The manuscript could involve a constructed language, specialized notation, heavily abbreviated text, a cipher with substantial null material, or more than one process across different sections.

A third approach begins with historical context rather than a claimed decoding. Keagan Brewer and Michelle L. Lewis have situated the manuscript’s imagery within late-medieval traditions of medicine, sexuality, reproduction, and the guarded transmission of “women’s secrets.” Their 2024 study connects the codex to a culture in which sensitive medical knowledge could be self-censored or enciphered. This does not identify the author or translate the script. It shows how the images and the practice of secrecy may fit a plausible fifteenth-century intellectual environment.

These perspectives are not simply belief versus skepticism. They are competing models of text generation, each explaining some features better than others. Natural-language models account for topic-like distribution and morphology. Cipher models account for deliberate concealment and altered statistics. Pseudo-text models explain how structure can emerge without recoverable semantics. Contextual history explains why this particular combination of plants, bodies, stars, vessels, and secrecy could have mattered. The manuscript remains unresolved because no model yet explains the complete object with enough specificity to exclude its rivals.

![Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Decoded by British Academic - Arts & Collections](https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/X1Ji1vSIyxcFNHAiR2pOnhsK7E-eZFxEdGfHJSGJ0cMrUbcBXqYDak_LqfBngsp0gMLJrVbeMHd0KH7DUc3NLw9VzKiWveF9UHdk950tKDT86xQIEbBMmtSn5v-KQyzkEft4CMEwvm_xyRXUECQMHybDUqVRRHB67IVc_3guKHFuG0zqvtO1kiWqsIhGy_QM?purpose=fullsize)

Nude figures immersed in pools and connected by channels have inspired medical, reproductive, and alchemical interpretations. The imagery supports serious historical questions, but it does not confirm what the accompanying text says

## Strengths and Limitations

The Voynich case is unusually strong at the level of the artifact. The codex exists in a major public collection. Its pages, binding, inks, pigments, folds, missing leaves, and ownership traces can be examined. Radiocarbon dating and material analysis place hard constraints around modern-forgery stories. Digitization allows scholars worldwide to test claims against the same folios, while paleography and computational work have revealed multiple hands, textual varieties, positional rules, and correlations that are invisible to casual inspection.

Its central limitation is the absence of an external anchor. There is no bilingual inscription, known alphabet, parallel copy, securely identified proper name, author’s key, or long passage whose content can be inferred independently. Even transcription involves judgment: researchers must decide which marks are distinct glyphs, which are ligatures, where characters begin and end, and whether spaces function like ordinary word boundaries. A computational model can therefore fit patterns in a transcription without necessarily capturing how the medieval makers understood the page.

The illustrations are both evidence and trap. They organize the manuscript into recognizable visual domains, yet they rarely identify their subjects with certainty. A proposed solution can assign plant names or astronomical terms to nearby labels and appear persuasive locally. Unless the same rules produce coherent results elsewhere, the image may be acting as a prompt for interpretation rather than a check on it. This is why so many announced solutions begin with a handful of suggestive readings and fail when extended.

A credible decipherment would need to do more than make one page sound plausible. At minimum, it should:

- define a stable transcription and explicit reading rules;
- work across sections, scribes, and both major textual varieties;
- produce coherent language without changing the method whenever the output fails;
- explain the manuscript’s unusual statistical and positional behavior;
- align with images and historical context without relying on them to guess every word; and
- make testable predictions that independent researchers can reproduce on previously unread passages.

No published proposal currently meets that full standard. That does not mean the manuscript is forever insoluble. It means “solution” has to name a reproducible explanatory achievement, not a persuasive interpretation assembled after the fact.

## Broader Implications

The Voynich Manuscript matters beyond medieval studies because it exposes a common error in the way people interpret anomalies: the movement from “this is real” to “therefore my explanation is real.” The physical manuscript is authentic to its historical period. Its script is demonstrably organized. Neither fact validates a specific language, cipher, author, medical theory, esoteric lineage, or extraordinary origin. Reality at one layer does not certify interpretation at the next.

The codex also shows why mystery attracts projection. Its plants almost resemble known species. Its diagrams almost resemble maps, organs, cosmologies, or machines. Its words almost look readable. This repeated nearness creates a powerful sense that the answer is just one association away. The reader begins to supply the missing bridge, and once a favored bridge is chosen, every ambiguous form can be recruited as confirmation.

That problem is especially relevant in the age of artificial intelligence. Machine learning can cluster glyphs, compare distributions, distinguish scribal habits, search large language spaces, and generate candidate plaintexts at a scale earlier researchers could not approach. Those are genuine advances. The same systems can also produce fluent, confident explanations for patterns that have no semantic anchor. A model that returns a grammatical paragraph has demonstrated its ability to generate grammar; it has not necessarily demonstrated that the paragraph was hidden in MS 408.

The manuscript therefore offers a compact ethics of interpretation. Use better tools. Form bolder hypotheses. Demand that methods travel beyond the examples that inspired them. Keep the object, the model, and the meaning in separate columns until evidence connects them. This is not a refusal of wonder. It is how wonder remains credible.

## The Reality Signal

### What This Subject Represents

The Voynich Manuscript represents the boundary between authenticity and intelligibility. It is a real object with a recoverable material history whose central communicative status remains unknown. That combination is rarer and more instructive than a simple fake or a solved cipher, because it preserves evidence without granting access.

It also represents the survival of form after context has been lost. Someone selected the parchment, organized the quires, drew the figures, wrote the lines, and followed shared procedures. The book records intentional human activity even if the intention itself no longer reaches us.

### What Reality Frame It Challenges

The manuscript challenges two comforting binaries: real or hoax, meaningful or random. A materially authentic medieval codex could still contain pseudo-text. A meaningful system might not encode ordinary prose. A statistically organized sequence might arise from linguistic, cryptographic, mnemonic, or generative rules. The available categories overlap, and the artifact refuses to select one for us.

More deeply, it challenges the idea that pattern is equivalent to meaning. Pattern is evidence of constraint. Meaning requires an additional bridge between form, use, and interpretation. The Voynich Manuscript keeps that bridge out of reach.

### Why It Matters Now

We live in a period that can detect and manufacture patterns at extraordinary speed. AI systems can search the manuscript more deeply than any individual scholar, while the same technology can generate endless convincing “translations,” images, and narratives. The result makes methodological discipline more important, not less.

The Voynich problem offers a standard for a wider information culture: an explanation should be judged by reproducibility, coverage, predictive power, and contact with independent evidence—not by fluency, novelty, or the emotional satisfaction of closure. A six-century-old codex has become a timely lesson in how to resist machine-assisted overconfidence.

### What Remains Unresolved

The parchment’s early-fifteenth-century date range is established, and the materials are consistent with medieval production. The surviving provenance is strong from the seventeenth century onward, with earlier ownership claims less secure. The manuscript contains multiple scribal hands and at least two broad textual varieties. Its tokens follow persistent local and long-range constraints.

Still unknown are the identity of its makers, the precise date and place of writing, the relationship among scribes and illustrators, the function of the book, the process that generated its script, and whether that script carries recoverable semantic content. No accepted decipherment exists. Extraordinary claims about alien authors, impossible technology, or a vanished super-civilization have no evidentiary support.

![„Manuskrypt Voynicha” | Pod namiotem życia](https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/zoOg9dAPDmyq2eu8Etf0suIrT2sfCQXx56FxjLtvAlqsq3Ujl7Az4PSMzqOVq1mCAprRPWSEb6U7Sp7fAxD_ODSQCPJMDFlQM2qQ9E7He2ap-AG5K6Ac12z9snUJpbnu3WA9T8XpdKsVn-z7PRxV_baTwXSGSIp1jrtiKYaUy9hVAis3TVYEyeZZQxWrjE9A?purpose=fullsize)

In the manuscript’s text-heavy final section, much of the visual guidance disappears while the script’s recurring forms remain. It is a fitting image for the Voynich problem: measurable structure without an accepted bridge to meaning.

## The Galactic Mind Perspective

The Voynich Manuscript belongs in The Galactic Mind archive because it protects one of the most difficult intellectual positions: sustained attention without premature belief. It rewards investigation, but it does not reward every investigator with an answer. The object remains open while placing real limits on what can responsibly be said about it.

The most defensible present view is that MS 408 is a deliberately organized medieval production, probably made through shared procedures by several people. Its design is too sustained to dismiss as casual scribbling. Whether that organization carries encrypted natural language, a constructed system, specialized notation, structured pseudo-text, or a mixture of processes remains unproved. The material record tells us that people made it. The statistical record tells us that they followed constraints. Neither tells us what they intended to communicate.

That is not a disappointing conclusion. It is a clearer map of the unknown. The manuscript has moved from legend toward history, from a supposedly Roger Bacon text toward an early-fifteenth-century material horizon, and from an undifferentiated cipher toward a document with multiple hands and textual regimes. The mystery has narrowed. It has not vanished.

The deeper value of the Voynich Manuscript is therefore not the promise that one final key must exist. It is the demand that we recognize the difference between a key, a model, and a story we want the object to tell. Some mysteries endure because evidence has been neglected. This one endures partly because the evidence has been studied so closely and still supports more than one explanation.

## Open Thread

If we eventually learn exactly how the Voynich text was generated but still cannot recover what its makers meant, would the manuscript be solved or would we only have located the boundary between mechanism and meaning more precisely?

What do you think? Drop your thoughts in the comments...

# More in Dossier

1. [**The Book of Soyga: John Dee’s Lost Grimoire and Its Unsolved Code**](https://www.thegalacticmind.com/the-book-of-soyga-aldaraia-sive-soyga-vocor/) — A Renaissance text whose letter-table mechanism can be reconstructed even though its intended meaning remains unresolved.
2. [**Piri Reis (1513): Mapping Discovery, Myth, and the Edge of the Known**](https://www.thegalacticmind.com/the-piri-reis-map-1513/) — A real historical artifact that shows how evidence, inherited knowledge, and later myth can become layered together.
3. [**The Nebra Sky Disc and the Bronze Age Map of Heaven**](https://www.thegalacticmind.com/nebra-sky/) — An ancient object whose material reality is secure while the exact relationship among observation, ritual, and symbolic meaning remains debated.

# Sources / Receipts

- **Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University — “The Beinecke Cipher (Voynich) Manuscript.”** Official overview of MS 408, its illustrated sections, provenance, access, catalog, and complete digital facsimile. [https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/collections/beinecke-cipher-voynich-manuscript](https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/collections/beinecke-cipher-voynich-manuscript?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Yale University Library — “Beinecke MS 408” catalog record.** Physical description, foliation, section boundaries, foldouts, provenance documents, and associated archival material. [https://pre1600ms.beinecke.library.yale.edu/docs/pre1600.ms408.htm](https://pre1600ms.beinecke.library.yale.edu/docs/pre1600.ms408.htm?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **René Zandbergen — “The Radio-Carbon Dating of the Voynich MS.”** Detailed account of the University of Arizona’s four parchment samples, the combined 1404–1438 range at 95 percent probability, and the status of the internal laboratory report. [https://www.voynich.nu/extra/carbon.html](https://www.voynich.nu/extra/carbon.html?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Yale News — “Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Reborn in Facsimile Edition” (October 31, 2016).** Reports Yale’s non-destructive material analysis and the finding that inks, pigments, and construction techniques are consistent with fifteenth-century manuscript production. [https://news.yale.edu/2016/10/31/mysterious-voynich-manuscript-reborn-facsimile-edition](https://news.yale.edu/2016/10/31/mysterious-voynich-manuscript-reborn-facsimile-edition?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **M. E. D’Imperio — *The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma* (National Security Agency/Central Security Service, 1978).** Foundational survey of the manuscript’s cryptologic history, textual features, and competing hypotheses. [https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Digital-Media-Center/Document-Gallery/igphoto/2002761512/](https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Digital-Media-Center/Document-Gallery/igphoto/2002761512/?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Sravana Reddy and Kevin Knight — “What We Know About the Voynich Manuscript” (ACL-HLT Workshop, 2011).** Computational-linguistic review of transcription, token statistics, word structure, and the constraints facing decipherment. [https://aclanthology.org/W11-1511/](https://aclanthology.org/W11-1511/?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Marcelo A. Montemurro and Damián H. Zanette — “Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis,” *PLOS ONE* 8(6), 2013.** Evidence for long-range token organization and section-dependent distribution; useful evidence for structure, not a decipherment. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0066344](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0066344?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Gordon Rugg and Gavin Taylor — “Hoaxing Statistical Features of the Voynich Manuscript,” *Cryptologia* 41(3), 2017.** Demonstrates that a low-technology table-and-grille method can reproduce several qualitative and quantitative features of Voynich-like pseudo-text. [https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2016.1206753](https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2016.1206753?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Lisa Fagin Davis — “How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript,” *Manuscript Studies* 5(1), 2020.** Paleographic study identifying five scribal hands and refining the manuscript’s production history. [https://doi.org/10.1353/mns.2020.0011](https://doi.org/10.1353/mns.2020.0011?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Claire L. Bowern and Luke Lindemann — “The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript,” *Annual Review of Linguistics* 7, 2021.** Scholarly review of linguistic, cipher, entropy, morphology, and hoax models; argues for serious consideration of a natural-language basis while preserving uncertainty about content. [https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030613](https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030613?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Keagan Brewer and Michelle L. Lewis — “The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets,” *Social History of Medicine* 37(3), 2024.** Historical-contextual analysis of secrecy, reproductive medicine, and the manuscript’s imagery; it does not claim a decipherment. [https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkad099](https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkad099?ref=thegalacticmind.com)
- **Michael A. Greshko — “The Naibbe Cipher: A Substitution Cipher That Encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-Like Ciphertext,” *Cryptologia*, published online November 26, 2025.** A historically plausible cipher model that reproduces several Voynich-like properties without claiming to decode MS 408\. [https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408](https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408?ref=thegalacticmind.com)

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