Voynich manuscript pages may be out of order
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Researchers in the United States and Malta believe the famously undeciphered Voynich manuscript was bound incorrectly in the 15th century.
Lisa Fagin Davis of the Medieval Academy of America noticed inconsistencies in the handwriting and illustrations, suggesting pages don’t follow a logical sequence. She and Colin Layfield of the University of Malta examined the manuscript’s physical structure, suspecting it was originally a collection of loose sheets, called singulions, rather than quires intended for binding.
The team used a text analysis technique called latent semantic analysis to compare sections of the manuscript. Their analysis revealed that some pages share similarities, while others do not, supporting the theory that the pages are disordered. This misbinding could explain issues that have frustrated scholars for over a century, such as images appearing to continue across multiple pages. Davis and Layfield’s work means previous attempts to decode the manuscript, which assumes correct ordering, should be re-examined.
They hope their findings will help future researchers make progress toward a translation, and they plan to further analyze a water stain across the pages to help reconstruct the original order.
