In an interview with the TLS podcast, Gibbs mentioned that he worked with the British Museum curator Irving Finkel, who is an expert in cuneiform but not of medieval manuscripts. He does not seem to be known to professional scholars or the amateur Voynich community. Some of the skepticism of Gibbs’s theory likely has to do with him being an outsider. If Gibbs can present his theory in greater detail, like in a future book, Davis says she’d be open to it. Yes, there is evidence that the Voynich manuscript is missing pages and has been trimmed as it’s been rebound, but there is no evidence of an index. “This is the piece that really killed it for me,” she says. To Davis, this represents a kind of magical thinking. His explanation is that the index laying out which illnesses and which plants these recipes correspond to have been lost. Nah, but I'll keep eating healthy quantities of popcorn as it is decided. Now higher up the food chain it is "magical thinking" and must prove a negative or something to make sense? Perhaps a future book. Thanks I really enjoyed reading the link at boingboing, thought it was interesting. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in lutris "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 this wasn't a code at all it was just shorthand. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. One paragraph from that article highlights the beginnings of the discoveryĪfter looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. it most certainly was a code - it just wasn't a secret code intended to obscure and conceal the information. The ars technica article confuses the concept of a code, with the concept of an encryption cipher.
The relatively recent digitization, with the resultant increased exposure of the full text to a much wider audience was likely an important factor in its solution.įb image from national archive on flickr is public lutris One cannot help but wonder if the fact that this was such an uncrackable mystery for so long may have been in part due to the fact that it concerned women's affairs, but that would be idle speculation. The full tls article linked therein looks like it will be a somewhat substantial read, and I have not yet dived in. The whole Boing Boing article is a somewehat short and quick read that provides enough information on the contents of the tls article to both titillate and perhaps satisfy one's curiosity regarding this fabled 15th century mystery. This is followed by what appears to be a blockquote from this article: Nicholas Gibbs, a history researcher, says that he has decoded the Voynich Manuscript, a legendarily mysterious 15th century text whose curious illustrations and script have baffled cryptographers, historians, and amateur sleuths for decades.Īccording to Gibbs, the Voynich Manuscript is a cobbled together compendium of largely plagiarized women's medical advice and treatments, and the odd script is just an idiosyncratic version of a widely used system of Latin abbreviations.
The Boing Boing article leads in to some material from another source as follows:
The Voynich Manuscript appears to be a fairly routine anthology of ancient women's health advice at this link: No, not clickbait, but not guaranteed either, I suspect.