Overview

The Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated codex of roughly 240 vellum pages written in an unknown script that has never been deciphered. Its drawings fall into recognisable thematic sections, botanical, astronomical and astrological, "balneological" (nude figures in systems of pools and tubes), cosmological, and pharmaceutical, yet the plants match no known species and the accompanying text yields no confirmed meaning.

Held at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as MS 408, it is one of the most studied and least understood documents in the world. Crucially, the manuscript itself is not a mystery in the way legends often are: it is a genuine physical book whose parchment has been securely dated to the early fifteenth century. The enigma is confined to its writing system and language, which have resisted professional cryptanalysis for over a century. This distinction, an authentic object bearing an unread text, is why the site records it as attested and extant rather than debated.