The Voynich manuscript has puzzled experts for more than a century. Its parchment pages, made from animal skin, date to the early 1400s. The 240-page book contains unusual writing and illustrations of people, plants, and astrological symbols. A new study suggests that its pages may have been joined together in the wrong order, making the text harder to understand.
Researchers Lisa Fagin Davis and Colin Layfield propose that the manuscript was originally a collection of separate, folded sheets rather than a bound book. Davis noticed unexpected changes in handwriting between pages. She also found illustrations that continue across pages now separated by several others. Layfield used latent semantic analysis, a computer method that identifies patterns in text, to compare sections of the writing. Some pages showed strong similarities, while others had little in common. These findings support the idea that the current arrangement may be incorrect.
The study does not provide a translation. However, Davis says earlier research that assumed the pages were correctly ordered needs to be reconsidered. The researchers are also considering comparing water stains on different pages. Matching the shapes could help them work out how the sheets were originally arranged.
