American historian Lisa Feigin Davis published multispectral images of the Voynich manuscript on her blog Manuscript Road Trip, which made it possible to distinguish texts invisible to the naked eye.
According to the researcher, multispectral imaging is a method of obtaining digital images using invisible wavelengths such as ultraviolet and infrared radiation. This method is extremely useful when studying medieval manuscripts, as it makes it possible to make visible faded or erased text that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
The Voynich manuscript was written using medieval iron-impregnated ink. This allows the ink to “eat” into the surface of the parchment, and when the ink is scraped off or faded away, the text becomes invisible.
However, the ink molecules are preserved and ultraviolet photography reveals them. Scanning the Voynich manuscript helped reveal some of its secrets. A total of 10 pages of the manuscript were studied using this method, and this was done in 2014. Only 10 years later, researchers published the first results.
The most exciting part was the visualization of the first page, which revealed letters and symbols written in three parallel columns on its right margin. By the way, researchers had previously suspected that there were invisible letters on this page, but they only spoke of one column.
Decoding showed that the letters represented the Latin alphabet and that there were at least two variants of this alphabet on the page. Next to them, in the third column, are the so-called Voynich symbols; the fact is that the manuscript is written in an unknown language, it is replete with symbols unknown to science, so it has not yet been possible to decipher it. Although various decryption options have been regularly offered for more than a century.
“Are these alphabets an early attempt to decipher the manuscript?” asks Lisa Feigin Davis. “Perhaps the two Latin alphabets are written in what paleographers call ‘humanist script,’ a writing style developed by humanists such as Petrarch and Boccaccio in Italy in the 14th century and used throughout Europe for several hundred years.”
The researcher carefully compared these letters with the handwriting of all those people who were associated with the manuscript in the 16th and 17th centuries, including Carl Wiedemann, Leonard Rauwolf, Emperor Rudolf II, Jacob Sinapius, Georg Baresch, Marcus Marzi and Athanasius Kircher. However, it was not possible to identify the author of the alphabets on them. However, the Voynich manuscript revealed one of its secrets.
Please note that this mysterious artifact is indirectly related to Russia. The name of its creator is unknown; the manuscript is named after Wilfred Mikhail Voynich, originally from the town of Telshi in the Kovno province of the Russian Empire.
He graduated from high school in Suwalki, worked in a pharmacy in Grodno, studied at Moscow University and was a member of the People’s Will organization, for which he was arrested and exiled to Irkutsk.
Voynich managed to escape into exile, arriving in London by a long and difficult road, where he married Ethel Lilian Boole, who took his surname and wrote the novel “The Gadfly”, which was a great success among Soviet readers.
In London, Voynich became an antiquarian and in 1912 acquired the manuscript from an unknown person. Incidentally, Voynich himself was the first to discover the hidden inscription.
“When I brought the manuscript to America, the margins of the first page appeared blank, but the accident of the photostatic reproduction of this page revealed the fact that the underexposure of the plate revealed a faded autograph in the lower margins…” he wrote in 1921.
A century later, modern digital analysis methods confirmed Voynich’s assumption. But they have not yet been able to fully reveal the secret of the manuscript.
