The Voynich manuscript, whose parchment dates to the early 15th century, may owe part of its enduring mystery to an incorrect page arrangement. Its 240 pages contain roughly 38,000 words in an undeciphered script, accompanied by illustrations of people, plants, and astrological symbols. Despite more than a century of attempts to interpret it, the text remains unreadable. A study published October 19 in Digital Medievalist proposes that sheets intended to remain separate were mistakenly bound into a book.
Co-authors Lisa Fagin Davis and Colin Layfield identified evidence in both the manuscript's physical structure and its textual patterns. Davis observed irregular shifts in handwriting and illustrations that extend across sheets whose corresponding sections are now separated by intervening pages. Rather than nested groups of folded parchment, the researchers suggest, the manuscript originally consisted of independent folded sheets. Layfield, an information systems researcher at the University of Malta, applied latent semantic analysis to compare textual sections. The technique detected similarities between some pages and substantial differences between others, lending support to the proposed structural explanation.
The findings do not constitute a decipherment, but Davis argues that previous analyses assuming a correct page sequence require reconsideration. Further clues may lie in water stains along the upper margins: their shapes do not align as expected between pages. Comparing those patterns could help reconstruct the arrangement. Purchased by Wilhelm Voynich in 1912, the manuscript has been held in Yale University's rare book library since 1969.
