Voynich manuscript: the solution

NICHOLAS GIBBS

For medievalists or anyone with more than a passing interest, the most
unusual element of the Voynich manuscript Beinecke Ms. 408, known to
many as the most mysterious manuscript in the world is its handwritten
text. Although several of its symbols (especially the ligatures) are
recognizable, adopted for the sake of economy by the medieval scribes, the
words formed by its neatly grouped characters do not appear to correspond to
any known language. It was long believed that the text was a form of code
one which repeated attempts by cryptographers and linguists failed to
penetrate. As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin
inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English
parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an
abbreviated Latin format. But interpretation of such abbreviations depends
largely on the context in which they are used. I needed to understand the
copious illustrations that accompany the text.
I first came across the Voynich manuscript some fifteen years ago when, as a
professional history researcher, I was looking into some of the more bizarre
claims by commentators about some of my ancestors John Florio (1553
1625) and Jane Fromond (15551604/5), the wife of Dr John Dee and grand-
daughter of Thomas Fromond, the great English herbalist. I am also a
muralist and war artist with an understanding of the workings of picture
narration, an advantage I was able to capitalize on for my research. A chance
remark just over three years ago brought me a commission from a television
production company to analyse the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript
and examine the commentators theories. By this time the manuscript had
been carbon-dated to the early fifteenth century. One of the more notable
aspects of the manuscript were the illustrations on a bathing theme, so it
seemed logical to have a look at the bathing practices of the medieval period.
It became fairly obvious very early on that I had entered the realms of
medieval medicine.

To those who have studied medieval medicine, and possess a good

knowledge of its origins, the classical physicians Galen (AD 129210),
Hippocrates (460370 BC) and Soranus (AD 98138) among them, the
Voynich manuscripts incorporation of an illustrated herbarium (collection of
plant remedies), Zodiac charts, instructions on thermae (baths) and a diagram
showing the influence of the Pleiades side by side will not be surprising.
They are all in tune with contemporary medical treatises, part and parcel of
the medieval world of health and healing. Bathing as a remedy is a time-
honoured tradition: practised by the Greeks and the Romans, advocated by
the classical physicians, and sustained during the Middle Ages. The central
theme of the Voynich manuscript is just such an activity, and one of its chief
characteristics is the presence of naked female figures immersed in some
concoction or other. Classical and medieval medicine had separate divisions
devoted to the complaints and diseases of women, mostly but not exclusively
in the area of gynaecology, and covered other topics such as hygiene, food,
purgatives, bloodletting, fumigations, tonics, tinctures and even cosmetics
and perfumes: all involved taking the waters, by bathing or ingesting.

On the evidence of previous commentaries, one could be forgiven for

thinking that the sole piece of useful information to have emerged from all
the research done on the manuscript since 1969 has been its carbon dating (to
140338). But from the point of view of the importance given to bathing,
precision carbon dating is not necessary. Medical research into the period one
hundred years either side of the carbon date will attain the same basic result.
One of the more celebrated collections of medical doctrine emerged in the
twelfth century from the Italian port city of Salerno, a major centre of
medical learning. This compilation of medical dos and donts is known by
its generic name of the Trotula. I first came across the Trotula in an
eighteenth-century printed edition in Latin some years before I began my
research on the Voynich manuscript, as I browsed through a private library (I
had worked in the book department at Christies in the 1970s).
The Trotula specializes in the diseases and complaints of women, and
encouraged a regime of bathing (among other cures) for a range of maladies;
not inconvenient for a city famed for its monastery baths. The Trotula had
many incarnations all over Europe, and was widely adapted right up to the
1700s. Its selected procedures, remedies and cures were filched, on the
whole, from the earlier writings of Galen, Hippocrates, Pliny and others, who
had been guilty of exactly the same plagiarism in their own time. The most
interesting aspect of certain passages of the Trotula is their remarkable
similarity, in the details of subject matter gynaecology, bloodletting and
bathing to the narrative details in the drawings of the Voynich manuscript;
and it dawned on me that the Trotula was quite possibly the model for many
of its illustrations.
The Trotula is closely linked to another widely copied manuscript of the
medieval period. De Balneis Puteolanis, which first appeared around 1220,
was unlike the Trotula, which contained blocks of handwritten and partially
abbreviated instructions wonderfully illustrated. Its theme, unsurprisingly,
is the health benefits of bathing, specifically in the volcanic springs and
mineral baths of Puzzuoli, an ancient health resort on the Phlegraean fields, a
volcanic area not far from Naples. On close inspection of each illustration
(there are digitized copies in several world-renowned libraries), I found that
the story-board narrative appeared marginally out of step with the poetic text.
I also noted that several of the details in each illustration of De Balneis
Puteolanis recalled scenes from personal anecdotes in the writings of either
Galen or Hippocrates: scenes relating to sleeping draughts, exercise,
purgatives and bleeding. Several of these are replicated in the Voynich
manuscript and without much trouble their descriptions can be tracked down
in the Trotula.

The external parts of the body are not the only parts the waters are able to
reach in medieval medicine. The illustrations of De Balneis Puteolanis also
extol the virtues of consuming the mineral waters, either straight or as part of
a cocktail of processed herbs and plants. De Materia Medica, a reference
book compiled by the Greek physician and early botanist Dioscorides (40
90), was another widely copied and illustrated manuscript. The work that
appears to have attained real popularity, however, and was also copiously
copied, was Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus, by the publicity-shy author of
the fifth/sixth century. Its artists represented each plant, with varying degrees
of success, and the scribes supplied the text; this gave each plants attributes,
and those of the target illness. Indexes or tableaux were much in evidence.
The text of the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus was well tailored and
succinct, and used a standard format generally repeated in each entry: flower,
root, leaf, water, decoct and mix being among the predominant words.
To match this confident work, the physician Paulus Aegineta, a near
contemporary of the mysterious Apuleius, brought out his own version of a
herbarium. It contained plant entries termed simples on the basis that the
medicine and its target illness depended on the attributes of a single plant.
Aeginetas work also included a separate reference list with descriptions of
diseases, complaints and illnesses shamelessly plagiarized, word for word,
from the writings of Galen. This was accompanied by an impressive array of
Galens compound medicine ingredients, along with the required quantities
or measures for the doses, all in conjunction with an overactive desire to
bleed the unfortunate patient, in some cases almost to death. Clothed with
indexes, this volume, too, would find a place on the shelves of medieval
medical practitioners. The very same practices are reiterated in passages of
the Trotula, and thence in the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript. It goes
without saying that taking the waters was well represented.

Medicine in the Middle Ages had a superstitious element. Its practitioners

truly believed in the influence of the planets, as did those classical physicians
who had gone before them. The position of the Pleiades, the Dog star, and the
Arc of Arcturus, along with the most favourable days of the month known
as the critical days were all-important. Such astrological observations
were inextricably bound up with the quest for a successful medicinal
outcome. And that quest included bathing.

Less than a century after the carbon date given for Beinecke Ms. 408, a
collection of medical treatises in a printed edition hit the streets. As was
customary at that time (1528), it had an impossibly long title: Claudii Galeni
Pergameni: Liber De Plenitude Polybus De Victus Ratione Privatorum . . .
. Incorporated into this edition was a text-only version of Herbarium
Apuleius Platonicus; in the same book, and in support, there was also a
treatise from the second century AD, on the twelve special herbs,
entitled Herbarum Singulorum Signorum Zodiaci Demonstratio, along with
an index. The traditional trademark for Zodiac influence on medical
diagnosis came in the form of the Zodiac man, a full-frontal naked figure
marked in appropriate regions of the body with Zodiac iconography: Scorpio
for reproduction, Pisces for legs and feet, and so on. On the other hand each
of the twelve special herbs sat under its own Zodiac sign; each listed the
stable of illnesses within its sphere of influence; and, where necessary, extra
ingredients were also listed. Today only fragments of this treatise survive in
manuscript form from the medieval period.

It is reflected, however, in the illustrated Zodiac wheels of the Voynich

manuscript; the additional ingredients can be identified by the trademark
patterns on the bathing tubs, a practice of ingredient identification used by
many a medieval apothecary on his albarelli (storage jars). Each Zodiac
wheel in the Voynich manuscript is populated by depictions of naked female
figures in the classical tradition of either bathing in hip baths or in physical
exertions. (These water tubs receive more than a passing mention both in the
various versions of the Trotulaand in The Seven Books of Paulus Aegineta.
Hip baths are an essential element for many of the cures listed in medieval
medicine, ostensibly, and as in the case of the Voynich manuscript, to be
combined with solutions of the preordained herbs.) Each Zodiac wheel is
edged with the repetitious and abbreviated letter/ligature groupings that can
be found elsewhere in the manuscript. Curiously, each bemused-looking
female figure clasps a floating star by a cord. Wondering what it might
represent, I looked at the star iconography used in such profusion in other
folios of the manuscript.

The foldout diagram of nine illustrated spheres found in the Voynich

manuscript proved the key to understanding it. The Voynich manuscript has
been digitized by the Beinecke library, and this allowed me, at maximum
magnification, to take a patchwork pencil tracing of the entire sequence of
nine spheres. When I laid out my copy and turned it through 360 degrees, I
noticed some interesting perspective properties. The design, in spite of its
Persian influence, is definitely Mediterranean in style and content. The entire
diagram can be viewed either as a lozenge shape or like a board of noughts
and crosses. Every detail shown inside each circle or in their immediate
connecting pathways whether tent canopy, water fountain, fortification,
cardinal point or wind direction is depicted in the illustrations of De Balneis
Puteolanis and copies of what was eventually to become the highly decorated
manuscript Tacuinum Sanitatis (thirteenth century) gleaned from an eleventh-
century Arab script, which in turn can be traced to Pliny. The sources
common to all three titles come as no surprise Galen, Hippocrates and
Pliny.

The imagery in one of the Voynich manuscripts nine spheres reveals a

hitherto unrecognized medieval sea port. There is no mistaking the fort that
guards the harbour approaches, the crescent quay and the lighthouse on the
mole at the end of the causeway, all overseen by its citadel. From an earlier
project exclusively focused on the Crusades, I had come across a 1487
manuscript of Conrad Grnenbergs travelogue of his pilgrimage to
Jerusalem. The manuscript was stuffed full of illustrations of medieval sea
ports. On revisiting this volume I noticed an image of Rhodes harbour which
clearly reflected many of the features of the harbour of the Voynich nine
spheres. Traditionally, water is depicted by a series of swirled or undulating
parallel lines. In the Voynich manuscript, the harbour water is represented by
star motifs. This provides a credible explanation for the star motif as a water
symbol elsewhere in the manuscript.
The artists engaged in illustrating the Voynich manuscript ranged from the
proficient to the downright naive. There appears to have been a different hand
for each genre incorporated in it. The draughtsman responsible for the botany
possessed a good sense of depth, while the colourist of the same images was
slapdash, not with a brush but with a nib; the artist of various cylindrical and
bulbous vessels had an eye for detail, but absolutely no sense of depth, and in
stark contrast to the attached depictions of the root and leaf ingredients; while
the artist of the nine spheres appears to have used an optical device.

All the detail and objects depicted in such manuscripts are salient points
picked out from a story. Abstract and perhaps unrecognized at first, they can
suddenly surprise as a narrative comes into focus. Artists who illustrate
instruction manuals for that is what the Voynich manuscript is are
naturally economical and only provide detail where necessary. In the
Voynich manuscript, the same object an oversized doughnut with a hole
and a carbuncle attached to its side is proffered by several of the unclothed
women. Its significance only became apparent when, as I was casually
leafing through a medical-related book, Ortis Sanitatis (1482), its pages
overflowing with woodcuts, I came across the doughnut object depicted as a
lodestone (natural magnet). Passages in the versions of the Trotula, Galen,
Hippocrates and Paulus Aegineta advocate a lodestone as part remedy for
gynaeocological complaints in the same region of the body as the figures
demonstrate in the Voynich manuscript.

Further details emerge from other sources. The cylinder-churns mentioned

above are plainly medieval cooking stoves with inverted boiling vessels.
Once again I was trawling through the woodcuts of two related books of the
period when I came across an example of the stove on the title page of Das
Buch Zu Distillern (1485), by the surgeon and botanist Hieronyus
Brunschwygk (14501512). The square ventilation apertures are clearly
visible in both drawings and woodcuts. The bulbous vessels, meanwhile,
whose classical antecedents can be found in the ruins of Pompeii, are clearly
early forms of samovar, with firebox used for infusions. They, too, are
accompanied by the same repetitive, neatly grouped letter sequences.
By now, it was more or less clear what the Voynich manuscript is: a
reference book of selected remedies lifted from the standard treatises of the
medieval period, an instruction manual for the health and wellbeing of the
more well to do women in society, which was quite possibly tailored to a
single individual. The script had hitherto proved resistant to interpretation
and presented several hurdles. Medieval lettering is notoriously fickle:
individual letter variations, styles and combinations are confusing at the best
of times. I recognized at least two of the characters in the Voynich
manuscript text as Latin ligatures, Eius and Etiam. Ligatures were developed
as scriptorial short-cuts. They are composed of selected letters of a word,
which together represent the whole word, not unlike like a monogram. An
ampersand is just such an example. The design combines the letters e t;
and et is the Latin word for and. On the strength of this I consulted
the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum of medieval Latin (1899) by Adriano Cappelli,
sometimes referred to as the medievalists Bible. Systematic study of every
single character in the Lexicon identified further ligatures and abbreviations
in the Voynich manuscript and set a precedent. It became obvious that each
character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and
not a letter.

From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript a standard

pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry. The
abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in
the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque /
decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij
= seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc. So the herbarium of the Voynich
manuscript must therefore be a series of (simple) recipe ingredients with
the necessary measures. One other noticeable difference from the Herbarium
Apuleius Platonicus is that not a single plant name or malady is to be found
in the Voynich manuscript. This was problematic until I realized that not only
had the folios of the manuscript been cropped (the images of flowers and
roots have been severed and the tops of folios hacked) but, more importantly,
the indexes that should have been there were now absent. Indexes are present
in many other similar books: a system of cross-reference for illness,
complaints, names of plants and page numbers. For the sake of brevity, the
name of both plant and malaise were superfluous in the text so long as they
could be found in the indexes matched with a page number. Recipes require
an index to function in a reference book. The same recipe format is replicated
throughout the manuscript: recipes for bathing solutions, tonics, tinctures,
ointments, unguents, purgatives and fragrant fumigations and not a name in
sight. Not only is the manuscript incomplete, but its folios are in the wrong
order and all for the want of an index.
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