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101-551: The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex , hand-written in an unknown script referred to as Voynichese . The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438). Stylistic analysis has indicated the manuscript may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance . While the origins, authorship, and purpose of the manuscript are still debated, hypotheses range from

202-516: A Coptic ( Egyptian ) dictionary and claimed to have deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs ; Baresch twice sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome, asking for clues. The 1639 letter from Baresch to Kircher is the earliest known mention of the manuscript to have been confirmed. Whether Kircher answered the request or not is not known, but he was apparently interested enough to try to acquire

303-451: A compound word that describes the process: "The original writing was scraped and washed off, the surface resmoothed, and the new literary material written on the salvaged material." The Ancient Greeks used wax-coated tablets to write on with a stylus , and to erase the writing by smoothing the wax surface and writing again. This practice was adopted by Ancient Romans , who wrote on wax-coated tablets, which were reusable; Cicero 's use of

404-538: A concertina , in particular the Maya codices and Aztec codices, which are actually long sheets of paper or animal skin folded into pages. In Japan, concertina-style codices called orihon developed during the Heian period (794–1185) were made of paper. The ancient Romans developed the form from wax tablets . The gradual replacement of the scroll by the codex has been called the most important advance in book making before

505-624: A quarto volume of the original folio, with the overwritten text running perpendicular to the effaced text. Faint legible remains were read by eye before 20th-century techniques helped make lost texts readable. To read palimpsests, scholars of the 19th century used chemical means that were sometimes very destructive, using tincture of gall or, later, ammonium bisulfate . Modern methods of reading palimpsests using ultraviolet light and photography are less damaging. Innovative digitized images aid scholars in deciphering unreadable palimpsests. Superexposed photographs exposed in various light spectra,

606-401: A quill pen and iron gall ink were used for the text and figure outlines. The ink of the drawings, text, and page and quire numbers have similar microscopic characteristics. In 2009, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) revealed that the inks contained major amounts of carbon, iron, sulphur , potassium and calcium with trace amounts of copper and occasionally zinc. EDS did not show

707-458: A script for a natural language or constructed language , an unread code , cypher , or other form of cryptography , or perhaps a hoax , reference work (i.e. folkloric index or compendium ), glossolalia or work of fiction (e.g. science fantasy or mythopoeia , metafiction , speculative fiction ) currently lacking the translation(s) and context needed to both properly entertain or eliminate any of these possibilities. The manuscript

808-457: A buyer and donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969, where it was catalogued as "MS 408", sometimes also referred to as "Beinecke MS 408". Codex By convention, the term is also used for any Aztec codex (although the earlier examples do not actually use the codex format), Maya codices and other pre-Columbian manuscripts. Library practices have led to many European manuscripts having "codex" as part of their usual name, as with

909-437: A close examination of the physical attributes of a codex, it is sometimes possible to match up long-separated elements originally from the same book. In 13th-century book publishing , due to secularization, stationers or libraires emerged. They would receive commissions for texts, which they would contract out to scribes, illustrators, and binders, to whom they supplied materials. Due to the systematic format used for assembly by

1010-535: A constructed language. Bowern also concludes that the statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript are not consistent with the use of a substitution cipher or polyalphabetic cipher . As noted in Bowern's review, multiple scribes or "hands" may have written the manuscript, possibly using two methods of encoding at least one natural language. The "language" Voynich A appears in the herbal and pharmaceutical parts of

1111-515: A few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. Few repetitions occur among the thousand or so labels attached to the illustrations. There are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row (see Zipf's law ). Words that differ by only one letter also repeat with unusual frequency, causing single-substitution alphabet decipherings to yield babble-like text. In 1962, cryptanalyst Elizebeth Friedman described such statistical analyses as "doomed to utter frustration". In 2014,

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1212-1023: A literary work (not just a single copy) being published in codex form, though it was likely an isolated case and was not a common practice until a much later time. In his discussion of one of the earliest parchment codices to survive from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Eric Turner seems to challenge Skeat's notion when stating, "its mere existence is evidence that this book form had a prehistory", and that "early experiments with this book form may well have taken place outside of Egypt." Early codices of parchment or papyrus appear to have been widely used as personal notebooks, for instance in recording copies of letters sent (Cicero Fam. 9.26.1). Early codices were not always cohesive. They often contained multiple languages, various topics and even multiple authors. "Such codices formed libraries in their own right." The parchment notebook pages were "more durable, and could withstand being folded and stitched to other sheets". Parchments whose writing

1313-442: A metric called h2, or second-order conditional entropy. Natural languages tend to have an h2 between 3 and 4, but Voynichese has much more predictable character sequences, and an h2 around 2. However, at higher levels of organisation, the Voynich manuscript displays properties similar to those of natural languages. Based on this, Bowern dismisses theories that the manuscript is gibberish. It is likely to be an encoded natural language or

1414-475: A number of times, often twice- a bifolio , sewing, bookbinding , and rebinding. A quire consisted of a number of folded sheets inserting into one another- at least three, but most commonly four bifolia, that is eight sheets and sixteen pages: Latin quaternio or Greek tetradion, which became a synonym for quires. Unless an exemplar (text to be copied) was copied exactly, format differed. In preparation for writing codices, ruling patterns were used that determined

1515-400: A scroll, which uses sequential access ). The Romans used precursors made of reusable wax-covered tablets of wood for taking notes and other informal writings. Two ancient polyptychs , a pentaptych and octoptych excavated at Herculaneum , used a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on of thongs or cords. A first evidence of the use of papyrus in codex form comes from

1616-463: A team led by Diego Amancio of the University of São Paulo published a study using statistical methods to analyse the relationships of the words in the text. Instead of trying to find the meaning, Amancio's team looked for connections and clusters of words. By measuring the frequency and intermittence of words, Amancio claimed to identify the text's keywords and produced three-dimensional models of

1717-633: A technique called "multispectral filming", can increase the contrast of faded ink on parchment that is too indistinct to be read by eye in normal light. For example, multispectral imaging undertaken by researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University recovered much of the undertext (estimated to be more than 80%) from the Archimedes Palimpsest . At the Walters Art Museum where

1818-661: A tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, then King of Bohemia, told me the said book belonged to the Emperor Rudolf and that he presented to the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats . He believed the author was Roger Bacon , the Englishman. On this point I suspend judgement; it is your place to define for us what view we should take thereon, to whose favor and kindness I unreservedly commit myself and remain At

1919-419: Is also rather peculiar: Some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end (like Greek ς ), and some always in the middle section. Many researchers have commented upon the highly regular structure of the words. Professor Gonzalo Rubio, an expert in ancient languages at Pennsylvania State University , stated: The things we know as grammatical markers – things that occur commonly at

2020-427: Is around 240, but the exact number depends on how the manuscript's unusual foldouts are counted. The quires have been numbered from 1 to 20 in various locations, using a style of numerals consistent with those used in the 15th century, and the top righthand corner of each recto (righthand) page has been numbered from 1 to 116, using a style of numerals that originated at a later date. From the various numbering gaps in

2121-608: Is currently using spectral imaging techniques developed for imaging the Archimedes Palimpsest to study more than one hundred palimpsests in the library of Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt . A number of ancient works have survived only as palimpsests. Vellum manuscripts were over-written on purpose mostly due to the dearth or cost of the material. In the case of Greek manuscripts,

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2222-676: Is more similar to the Mandarin Chinese pinyin text of the Records of the Grand Historian than to the text of works from European languages, although the numerical differences between Voynichese and Mandarin Chinese pinyin look larger than those between Mandarin Chinese pinyin and European languages. Practically no words have fewer than two letters or more than ten. Some words occur in only certain sections, or in only

2323-642: Is named after Wilfrid Voynich , a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. The manuscript consists of around 240 pages, but there is evidence that pages are missing. The text is written from left to right, and some pages are foldable sheets of varying sizes. Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations and diagrams, some crudely coloured, with sections of the manuscript showing people, fictitious plants, astrological symbols , etc. Since 1969, it has been held in Yale University 's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library . In 2020, Yale University published

2424-459: Is not aimed at deciphering Voynich, it was capable of providing keywords that could be helpful for decipherers in the future. Linguists Claire Bowern and Luke Lindemann  [ Reasonator search ] have applied statistical methods to the Voynich manuscript, comparing it to other languages and encodings of languages, and have found both similarities and differences in statistical properties. Character sequences in languages are measured using

2525-723: Is technically feasible and common in the historical record. Technically, even modern notebooks and paperbacks are codices, but publishers and scholars reserve the term for manuscript (hand-written) books produced from late antiquity until the Middle Ages . The scholarly study of these manuscripts is sometimes called codicology . The study of ancient documents in general is called paleography . The codex provided considerable advantages over other book formats, primarily its compactness, sturdiness, economic use of materials by using both sides ( recto and verso ), and ease of reference (a codex accommodates random access , as opposed to

2626-543: The amatl paper . There are significant codices produced in the colonial era, with pictorial and alphabetic texts in Spanish or an indigenous language such as Nahuatl . In East Asia , the scroll remained standard for far longer than in the Mediterranean world. There were intermediate stages, such as scrolls folded concertina -style and pasted together at the back and books that were printed only on one side of

2727-562: The Codex Gigas , while most do not. Modern books are divided into paperback (or softback) and those bound with stiff boards, called hardbacks . Elaborate historical bindings are called treasure bindings . At least in the Western world, the main alternative to the paged codex format for a long document was the continuous scroll , which was the dominant form of document in the ancient world . Some codices are continuously folded like

2828-458: The Nag Hammadi library , hidden about AD 390, all texts (Gnostic) are codices. Despite this comparison, a fragment of a non-Christian parchment codex of Demosthenes ' De Falsa Legatione from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt demonstrates that the surviving evidence is insufficient to conclude whether Christians played a major or central role in the development of early codices—or if they simply adopted

2929-811: The Pontifical Gregorian University ). It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States . The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. Many books of the university's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty just before this happened, according to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, and those books were exempt from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence

3030-619: The Ptolemaic period in Egypt, as a find at the University of Graz shows. Julius Caesar may have been the first Roman to reduce scrolls to bound pages in the form of a note-book, possibly even as a papyrus codex. At the turn of the 1st century AD, a kind of folded parchment notebook called pugillares membranei in Latin became commonly used for writing in the Roman Empire . Theodore Cressy Skeat theorized that this form of notebook

3131-402: The incipit , before the concept of a proper title developed in medieval times. Though most early codices were made of papyrus, the material was fragile and supplied from Egypt, the only place where papyrus grew. The more durable parchment and vellum gained favor, despite the cost. The codices of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) had a similar appearance when closed to

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3232-617: The late Middle Ages ] were written in gold and silver ink on parchment...dyed or painted with costly purple pigments as an expression of imperial power and wealth." As early as the early 2nd century, there is evidence that a codex—usually of papyrus—was the preferred format among Christians . In the library of the Villa of the Papyri , Herculaneum (buried in AD 79), all the texts (of Greek literature) are scrolls (see Herculaneum papyri ). However, in

3333-403: The libraire , the structure can be used to reconstruct the original order of a manuscript. However, complications can arise in the study of a codex. Manuscripts were frequently rebound, and this resulted in a particular codex incorporating works of different dates and origins, thus different internal structures. Additionally, a binder could alter or unify these structures to ensure a better fit for

3434-408: The 21st century. How manufacturing influenced the final products, technique, and style, is little understood. However, changes in style are underpinned more by variation in technique. Before the 14th and 15th centuries, paper was expensive, and its use may mark off the deluxe copy. The structure of a codex includes its size, format/ ordinatio (its quires or gatherings), consisting of sheets folded

3535-469: The 7th to the 9th centuries. It has been noticed that no entire work is generally found in any instance in the original text of a palimpsest, but that portions of many works have been taken to make up a single volume. An exception is the Archimedes Palimpsest (see below). On the whole, early medieval scribes were thus not indiscriminate in supplying themselves with material from any old volumes that happened to be at hand. About sixty palimpsest manuscripts of

3636-474: The European codex, but were instead made with long folded strips of either fig bark ( amatl ) or plant fibers, often with a layer of whitewash applied before writing. New World codices were written as late as the 16th century (see Maya codices and Aztec codices ). Those written before the Spanish conquests seem all to have been single long sheets folded concertina -style, sometimes written on both sides of

3737-590: The Society of Jesus (Collegio Romano) was short of money and decided to sell some of its holdings discreetly to the Vatican Library . The sale took place in 1912, but not all of the manuscripts listed for sale ended up going to the Vatican. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 of these manuscripts, among them the one which now bears his name. He spent the next seven years attempting to interest scholars in deciphering

3838-624: The Zipfian distribution. Measures of the proportional frequency of the ten most common words is similar to those of the Semitic, Iranian, and Germanic languages. Another measure of morphological complexity, the Moving-Average Type–Token Ratio (MATTR) index, is similar to Iranian, Germanic, and Romance languages. Because the text cannot be read, the manuscript is conventionally divided into sections based on its illustrations. Most of

3939-487: The beginning or end of words, such as 's' or 'd' in our language, and that are used to express grammar, never appear in the middle of 'words' in the Voynich manuscript. That's unheard of for any Indo-European, Hungarian, or Finnish language. Stephan Vonfelt studied statistical properties of the distribution of letters and their correlations (properties which can be vaguely characterised as rhythmic resonance, alliteration, or assonance) and found that under that respect Voynichese

4040-510: The book when Voynich acquired it: Reverend and Distinguished Sir, Father in Christ: This book, bequeathed to me by an intimate friend, I destined for you, my very dear Athanasius, as soon as it came into my possession, for I was convinced that it could be read by no one except yourself. The former owner of this book asked your opinion by letter, copying and sending you a portion of the book from which he believed you would be able to read

4141-532: The book's early provenance is unknown, though the text and illustrations are all characteristically European. In 2009, University of Arizona researchers radiocarbon dated the manuscript's vellum to between 1404 and 1438. In addition, McCrone Associates in Westmont, Illinois, found that the paints in the manuscript were of materials to be expected from that period of European history. There have been erroneous reports that McCrone Associates indicated that much of

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4242-533: The book, but date to its possession by the Collegio Romano . Insect holes are present on the first and last folios of the manuscript in the current order and suggest that a wooden cover was present before the later covers. Discolouring on the edges points to a tanned leather inside cover. Many pages contain substantial drawings or charts which are coloured with paint. Based on modern analysis using polarized light microscopy (PLM), it has been determined that

4343-457: The book, which Baresch refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (also known as Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague. A few years later, Marci sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent. Marci also sent Kircher a cover letter (in Latin, dated 19 August 1665 or 1666) that was still attached to

4444-437: The codex is very different to that of producing and attaching the case. The first stage in creating a codex is to prepare the animal skin. The skin is washed with water and lime but not together. The skin is soaked in the lime for a couple of days. The hair is removed, and the skin is dried by attaching it to a frame, called a herse. The parchment maker attaches the skin at points around the circumference. The skin attaches to

4545-482: The command of your Reverence, Joannes Marcus Marci of Cronland Prague, 19th August, 1665 [or 1666] The "Dr. Raphael" is believed to be Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky , and the sum of 600 ducats is 67.5  ozt (2.10  kg ) of actual gold weight . The only matching transaction in Rudolf's records is the 1599 purchase of "a couple of remarkable/rare books" from Karl Widemann for the sum of 600 florins . Widemann

4646-471: The consumption of old codices for the sake of the material was so great that a synodal decree of the year 691 forbade the destruction of manuscripts of the Scriptures or the church fathers , except for imperfect or injured volumes. Such a decree put added pressure on retrieving the vellum on which secular manuscripts were written. The decline of the vellum trade with the introduction of paper exacerbated

4747-482: The copying occurred. The layout (size of the margin and the number of lines) is determined. There may be textual articulations, running heads , openings, chapters , and paragraphs . Space was reserved for illustrations and decorated guide letters. The apparatus of books for scholars became more elaborate during the 13th and 14th centuries when chapter, verse, page numbering , marginalia finding guides, indexes , glossaries , and tables of contents were developed. By

4848-434: The experiments of earlier centuries, scrolls were sometimes unrolled horizontally, as a succession of columns. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a famous example of this format, and it is the standard format for Jewish Torah scrolls made to this day for ritual use. This made it possible to fold the scroll as an accordion. The next evolutionary step was to cut the folios and sew and glue them at their centers, making it easier to use

4949-429: The fifth century, the codex outnumbered the scroll by ten to one based on surviving examples. By the sixth century, the scroll had almost vanished as a medium for literature. The change from rolls to codices roughly coincides with the transition from papyrus to parchment as the preferred writing material, but the two developments are unconnected. In fact, any combination of codices and scrolls with papyrus and parchment

5050-466: The flesh side. This was not the same style used in the British Isles, where the membrane was folded so that it turned out an eight-leaf quire, with single leaves in the third and sixth positions. The next stage was tacking the quire. Tacking is when the scribe would hold together the leaves in quire with thread. Once threaded together, the scribe would then sew a line of parchment up the "spine" of

5151-426: The form (as opposed to the scroll), as well as the convenience with which such a book can be read on a journey. In another poem by Martial, the poet advertises a new edition of his works, specifically noting that it is produced as a codex, taking less space than a scroll and being more comfortable to hold in one hand. According to Theodore Cressy Skeat , this might be the first recorded known case of an entire edition of

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5252-499: The format to distinguish themselves from Jews . The earliest surviving fragments from codices come from Egypt, and are variously dated (always tentatively) towards the end of the 1st century or in the first half of the 2nd. This group includes the Rylands Library Papyrus P52 , containing part of St John's Gospel, and perhaps dating from between 125 and 160. In Western culture , the codex gradually replaced

5353-403: The head of Rudolf's botanical gardens in Prague. Rudolf died still owing money to de Tepenecz, and it is possible that de Tepenecz may have been given the book (or simply taken it) in partial payment of that debt. No records of the book for the next 200 years have been found, but in all likelihood, it was stored with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now

5454-419: The herse by cords. To prevent it from being torn, the maker wraps the area of the skin attached to the cord around a pebble called a pippin. After completing that, the maker uses a crescent shaped knife called a lunarium or lunellum to remove any remaining hairs. Once the skin completely dries, the maker gives it a deep clean and processes it into sheets. The number of sheets from a piece of skin depends on

5555-531: The impression that the symbols were not enciphered ; there is no delay between characters, as would normally be expected in written encoded text. Only a few of the words in the manuscript are thought to have not been written in the unknown script: Various transcription alphabets have been created to equate Voynich characters with Latin characters to help with cryptanalysis, such as the Extensible (originally: European) Voynich Alphabet (EVA). The first major one

5656-429: The ink was added not long after the creation of the parchment, but their official report contains no such statement. The first confirmed owner was Georg Baresch , a 17th-century alchemist from Prague . Baresch was apparently puzzled about this " Sphynx " that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years. He learned that Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher from the Collegio Romano had published

5757-609: The interest of economy, a page was often re-used by scraping off the previous writing. In colloquial usage, the term palimpsest is also used in architecture , archaeology and geomorphology to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another; for example, a monumental brass the reverse blank side of which has been re-engraved. The word palimpsest derives from Latin palimpsestus , which derives from παλίμψηστος , palímpsēstos (from Ancient Greek πάλιν (pálin)  'again' and ψάω (psáō)  'scrape'),

5858-583: The invention of the printing press . The codex transformed the shape of the book itself, and offered a form that has lasted ever since. The spread of the codex is often associated with the rise of Christianity , which early on adopted the format for the Bible . First described in the 1st century of the Common Era, when the Roman poet Martial praised its convenient use, the codex achieved numerical parity with

5959-401: The layout of each page. Holes were prickled with a spiked lead wheel and a circle. Ruling was then applied separately on each page or once through the top folio. Ownership markings, decorations, and illumination are also a part of it. They are specific to the scriptoria , or any production center, and libraries of codices. Watermarks may provide, although often approximate, dates for when

6060-487: The low entropy (h2) of Voynichese. In the absence of obvious punctuation, some variants of the same word appear to be specific to typographical positions, such as the beginning of a paragraph, line, or sentence. The Voynich word frequencies of both variants appear to conform to a Zipfian distribution , supporting the idea that the text has linguistic meaning. This has implications for the encoding methods most likely to have been used, since some forms of encoding interfere with

6161-443: The manuscript are assumed to indicate word breaks, there are consistent patterns that suggest a three-part word structure of prefix, root or midfix, and suffix. Certain characters and character combinations are more likely to appear in particular fields. There are minor variations between Voynich A and Voynich B. The predictability of certain letters in a relatively small number of combinations in certain parts of words appears to explain

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6262-483: The manuscript contains text, mostly in an unidentified language, but some have extraneous writing in Latin script . The bulk of the text in the 240-page manuscript is written in an unknown script, running left to right. Most of the characters are composed of one or two simple pen strokes. There exists some dispute as to whether certain characters are distinct, but a script of 20–25 characters would account for virtually all of

6363-401: The manuscript forms six different sections, each typified by illustrations with different styles and supposed subject matter except for the last section, in which the only drawings are small stars in the margin. The conventional sections are: Five folios contain only text, and at least 14 folios (28 pages) are missing from the manuscript. The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of

6464-478: The manuscript have been analysed using PLM, XRD, EDS, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The pigments used were deemed inexpensive. Computer scientist Jorge Stolfi of the University of Campinas highlighted that parts of the text and drawings have been modified, using darker ink over a fainter, earlier script. Evidence for this is visible in various folios, for example f1r , f3v , f26v , f57v , f67r2 , f71r , f72v1 , f72v3 and f73r . Every page in

6565-446: The manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine . However, the puzzling details of the illustrations have fuelled many theories about the book's origin, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal , but attempts have failed to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with

6666-430: The manuscript online in its entirety in their digital library . The Voynich manuscript has been studied by both professional and amateur cryptographers , including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II . Codebreakers Prescott Currier , William Friedman , Elizebeth Friedman , and John Tiltman were unsuccessful. The manuscript has never been demonstrably deciphered, and none of

6767-680: The manuscript to protect the tacking. The materials codices are made with are their support, and include papyrus, parchment (sometimes referred to as membrane or vellum), and paper. They are written and drawn on with metals, pigments , and ink . The quality, size, and choice of support determine the status of a codex. Papyrus is found only in late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages . Codices intended for display were bound with more durable materials than vellum. Parchment varied widely due to animal species and finish, and identification of animals used to make it has only begun to be studied in

6868-417: The manuscript were radiocarbon dated at the University of Arizona in 2009. The results were consistent for all samples tested and indicated a date for the parchment between 1404 and 1438. Protein testing in 2014 revealed that the parchment was made from calfskin, and multispectral analysis showed that it had not been written on before the manuscript was created (i.e., it is not a palimpsest ). The quality of

6969-438: The manuscript. The "language" known as Voynich B appears in the balneological section, some parts of the medicinal and herbal sections, and the astrological section. The most common vocabulary items of Voynich A and Voynich B are substantially different. Topic modeling of the manuscript suggests that pages identified as written by a particular scribe may relate to a different topic. In terms of morphology , if visual spaces in

7070-561: The media was less wasteful than simply to burn the books. Vast destruction of the broad quartos of the early centuries took place in the period which followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire , but palimpsests were also created as new texts were required during the Carolingian Renaissance . The most valuable Latin palimpsests are found in the codices which were remade from the early large folios in

7171-521: The membrane, whether they are from the original animal, human error during the preparation period, or from when the animal was killed. Defects can also appear during the writing process. Unless the manuscript is kept in perfect condition, defects can also appear later in its life. Firstly, the membrane must be prepared. The first step is to set up the quires. The quire is a group of several sheets put together. Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham point out, in "Introduction to Manuscript Studies", that "the quire

7272-405: The most valuable palimpsests are those that were overwritten in the early Middle Ages. Medieval codices are constructed in "gathers" which are folded (compare folio , 'leaf, page' ablative case of Latin folium ), then stacked together like a newspaper and sewn together at the fold. Prepared parchment sheets retained their original central fold, so each was ordinarily cut in half, making

7373-400: The new binding. Completed quires or books of quires might constitute independent book units- booklets, which could be returned to the stationer, or combined with other texts to make anthologies or miscellanies. Exemplars were sometimes divided into quires for simultaneous copying and loaned out to students for study. To facilitate this, catchwords were used- a word at the end of a page providing

7474-405: The next page's first word. Palimpsest In textual studies , a palimpsest ( / ˈ p æ l ɪ m p s ɛ s t / ) is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book , from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid skin and was expensive and not readily available, so, in

7575-463: The palimpsest is now conserved, the project has focused on experimental techniques to retrieve the remaining text, some of which was obscured by overpainted icons. One of the most successful techniques for reading through the paint proved to be X-ray fluorescence imaging, through which the iron in the ink is revealed. A team of imaging scientists and scholars from the United States and Europe

7676-551: The paper. This replaced traditional Chinese writing mediums such as bamboo and wooden slips , as well as silk and paper scrolls. The evolution of the codex in China began with folded-leaf pamphlets in the 9th century, during the late Tang dynasty (618–907), improved by the 'butterfly' bindings of the Song dynasty (960–1279), the wrapped back binding of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368),

7777-422: The papyrus or vellum recto-verso as with a modern book. Traditional bookbinders would call one of these assembled, trimmed and bound folios (that is, the "pages" of the book as a whole, comprising the front matter and contents) a codex in contradistinction to the cover or case, producing the format of book now colloquially known as a hardcover . In the hardcover bookbinding process, the procedure of binding

7878-418: The parchment is average and has deficiencies, such as holes and tears, common in parchment codices, but was also prepared with so much care that the skin side is largely indistinguishable from the flesh side. The parchment is prepared from "at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins". Some folios (such as 42 and 47) are thicker than the usual parchment. The goat skin binding and covers are not original to

7979-404: The presence of lead, while X-ray diffraction (XRD) identified potassium lead oxide , potassium hydrogen sulphate, and syngenite in one of the samples tested. The similarity between the drawing inks and text inks suggested a contemporaneous origin. Coloured paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the ink-outlined figures, possibly at a later date. The blue, white, red-brown, and green paints of

8080-404: The proposed hypotheses have been independently verified. The mystery of its meaning and origin has excited speculation and provoked study. The codicology , or physical characteristics of the manuscript, has been studied by researchers. The manuscript measures 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 cm (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in), with hundreds of vellum pages collected into 18 quires . The total number of pages

8181-434: The quires and pages, it seems likely that in the past, the manuscript had at least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912. There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in the book's history, and that its pages were originally in a different order than the order they are in today. Samples from various parts of

8282-494: The remainder, but he at that time refused to send the book itself. To its deciphering he devoted unflagging toil, as is apparent from attempts of his which I send you herewith, and he relinquished hope only with his life. But his toil was in vain, for such Sphinxes as these obey no one but their master, Kircher. Accept now this token, such as it is and long overdue though it be, of my affection for you, and burst through its bars, if there are any, with your wonted success. Dr. Raphael,

8383-431: The roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third. Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting , and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript. However, interpretation remains speculative, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets . Much of

8484-589: The scarcity, increasing pressure to reuse material. Texts most susceptible to being overwritten included obsolete legal and liturgical ones, sometimes of intense interest to the historian. Early Latin translations of Scripture were rendered obsolete by Jerome's Vulgate . Texts might be in foreign languages or written in unfamiliar scripts that had become illegible over time. The codices themselves might be already damaged or incomplete. Heretical texts were dangerous to harbor—there were compelling political and religious reasons to destroy texts viewed as heresy, and to reuse

8585-409: The script, while he worked to determine the origins of the manuscript. In 1930, the manuscript was inherited after Wilfrid's death by his widow Ethel Voynich , author of the novel The Gadfly and daughter of mathematician George Boole . She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill sold the book to antique book dealer Hans P. Kraus . Kraus was unable to find

8686-408: The scroll around 300 CE, and had completely replaced it throughout what was by then a Christianized Greco-Roman world by the 6th century. The word codex comes from the Latin word caudex , meaning "trunk of a tree", "block of wood" or "book". The codex began to replace the scroll almost as soon as it was invented, although new finds add three centuries to its history (see below). In Egypt , by

8787-565: The scroll. Between the 4th century, when the codex gained wide acceptance, and the Carolingian Renaissance in the 8th century, many works that were not converted from scroll to codex were lost. The codex improved on the scroll in several ways. It could be opened flat at any page for easier reading, pages could be written on both front and back ( recto and verso ), and the protection of durable covers made it more compact and easier to transport. The ancients stored codices with spines facing inward, and not always vertically. The spine could be used for

8888-424: The size of the skin and the final product dimensions. For example, the average calfskin can provide three-and-a-half medium sheets of writing material, which can be doubled when they are folded into two conjoint leaves, also known as a bifolium . Historians have found evidence of manuscripts in which the scribe wrote down the medieval instructions now followed by modern membrane makers. Defects can often be found in

8989-526: The stitched binding of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912), and finally the adoption of Western-style bookbinding in the 20th century. The initial phase of this evolution, the accordion-folded palm-leaf-style book, most likely came from India and was introduced to China via Buddhist missionaries and scriptures . Judaism still retains the Torah scroll , at least for ceremonial use. Among

9090-414: The stylised drawings of contemporaneous herbals. Only a few of the plant drawings can be identified with reasonable certainty, such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern . The herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of them, except that missing parts were completed with improbable details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite:

9191-581: The term palimpsest confirms such a practice. Because parchment prepared from animal hides is far more durable than paper or papyrus , most palimpsests known to modern scholars are parchment, which rose in popularity in Western Europe after the 6th century. Where papyrus was in common use, reuse of writing media was less common because papyrus was cheaper and more expendable than costly parchment. Some papyrus palimpsests do survive, and Romans referred to this custom of washing papyrus. The writing

9292-526: The text was entered and with vertical bounding lines that marked the boundaries of the columns. From the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages, different styles of folding the quire came about. For example, in continental Europe throughout the Middle Ages, the quire was put into a system in which each side folded on to the same style. The hair side met the hair side and the flesh side to

9393-451: The text's structure and word frequencies. The team concluded that, in 90% of cases, the Voynich systems are similar to those of other known books, indicating that the text is in an actual language, not random gibberish . The use of the framework was exemplified with the analysis of the Voynich manuscript, with the final conclusion that it differs from a random sequence of words, being compatible with natural languages. Even though our approach

9494-413: The text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. There is no obvious punctuation . Much of the text is written in a single column in the body of a page, with a slightly ragged right margin and paragraph divisions and sometimes with stars in the left margin. Other text occurs in charts or as labels associated with illustrations. The ductus flows smoothly, giving

9595-470: Was a prolific collector of esoteric and alchemical manuscripts, so his ownership of the manuscript is plausible, but unproven. While Wilfrid Voynich took Raphael's claims at face value, the Bacon authorship theory has been largely discredited. However, a piece of evidence supporting Rudolf's ownership is the now almost invisible name or signature, on the first page of the book, of Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz ,

9696-658: Was among those books, and so, apparently, was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the ex libris of Petrus Beckx , head of the Jesuit order and the university's rector at the time. Beckx's private library was moved to the Villa Mondragone , Frascati , a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Ghislieri College . In 1903,

9797-751: Was created by the "First Study Group", led by cryptographer William F. Friedman in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card to make it machine readable . The text consists of over 170,000 characters, with spaces dividing the text into about 35,000 groups of varying length, usually referred to as "words" or "word tokens" (37,919); 8,114 of those words are considered unique "word types". The structure of these words seems to follow phonological or orthographic laws of some sort; for example, certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels ), some characters never follow others, or some may be doubled or tripled, but others may not. The distribution of letters within words

9898-534: Was invented in Rome and then spread rapidly to the Near East. Codices are described in certain works by the Classical Latin poet, Martial . He wrote a series of five couplets meant to accompany gifts of literature that Romans exchanged during the festival of Saturnalia . Three of these books are specifically described by Martial as being in the form of a codex; the poet praises the compendiousness of

9999-504: Was no longer needed were commonly washed or scraped for re-use, creating a palimpsest ; the erased text, which can often be recovered, is older and usually more interesting than the newer text which replaced it. Consequently, writings in a codex were often considered informal and impermanent. Parchment (animal skin) was expensive, and therefore it was used primarily by the wealthy and powerful, who were also able to pay for textual design and color. "Official documents and deluxe manuscripts [in

10100-413: Was the scribe's basic writing unit throughout the Middle Ages": Pricking is the process of making holes in a sheet of parchment (or membrane) in preparation of it ruling. The lines were then made by ruling between the prick marks.... The process of entering ruled lines on the page to serve as a guide for entering text. Most manuscripts were ruled with horizontal lines that served as the baselines on which

10201-405: Was washed from parchment or vellum using milk and oat bran . With the passing of time, the faint remains of the former writing would reappear enough so that scholars can discern the text (called the scriptio inferior , the 'underwriting') and decipher it. In the later Middle Ages the surface of the vellum was usually scraped away with powdered pumice , irretrievably losing the writing; hence

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