# The Voynich Manuscript > Unknown maker (anonymous scribes and illustrators) - Parchment radiocarbon-dated to 1404-1438 (95% probability); the text and illustrations are presumed, but not independently proven, to have been added within a similar timeframe > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/voynich-manuscript-anonymous-scribes/voynich-manuscript-beinecke-ms408/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-10 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown maker (anonymous scribes and illustrators) - **Date:** Parchment radiocarbon-dated to 1404-1438 (95% probability); the text and illustrations are presumed, but not independently proven, to have been added within a similar timeframe - **Medium:** Iron gall ink, tempera-type pigments (azurite, copper resinate, red ochre, egg-white ground) and ink washes on vellum (calfskin parchment) - **Dimensions:** Approx. 225 x 160 mm bound. Contains 5 double-folio, 3 triple-folio, 1 quadruple-folio and 1 sextuple-folio fold-out leaves of larger dimensions - **Object type:** Manuscript - **Period:** Late medieval / early Renaissance, Central Europe - **Current location:** Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary An illustrated vellum codex of roughly 240 surviving pages, written entirely in an unidentified script that no one has been able to read since at least the 1660s, and quite possibly never could. Its parchment has been radiocarbon-dated to 1404-1438; its earliest secure documentary trace is a 1665 or 1666 letter sending it from Prague to Rome, which reports, at second hand and without the letter-writer's own endorsement, that it once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II and was believed to be the work of Roger Bacon, an attribution the radiocarbon date makes impossible on its own terms.From the Jesuit library in Rome it was hidden from state confiscation in 1870, most likely at Villa Torlonia in Castel Gandolfo rather than the long-assumed Villa Mondragone, sold in 1912 to the antiquarian dealer Wilfrid Voynich, held by his widow and her circle until 1961, bought and unsuccessfully offered for resale by the dealer Hans Kraus, and given to Yale's Beinecke Library in 1969, where it has remained since. A century of claimed decipherments, from William Newbold's 1921 microscopic-shorthand theory to Gerard Cheshire's 2019 proto-Romance claim, has been examined and rejected by specialists one after another.What remains genuinely unresolved, and is stated here as unresolved rather than settled in either direction, is whether the text encodes a real language, a working but unbroken cipher, or nothing at all. Named scholars hold each position, on record, and the manuscript itself has not yet given either side a conclusive answer. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1404-1438** Unknown maker(s) `[documented]` (manufacture of the vellum) Radiocarbon dating (University of Arizona, 2009) of four vellum samples places the parchment's creation in this range at 95% probability. This dates the animal skin, not conclusively the writing or illustration added to it. - **c. 1404-1438** Unknown maker(s) `[unknown]` (text and illustration added) No document records when the text and drawings were added relative to the parchment's manufacture. Ink and pigment analysis (McCrone Associates) found materials consistent with other 15th-century manuscripts, which supports but does not prove a composition date close to the parchment date. - **-c. 1590s** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner is documented for roughly a century and a half after the parchment's creation. - **1599** Possibly the bookseller Karl Widemann, via the financier Zacharias Geizkofler, to the imperial chamberlain Hans Popp `[disputed]` (possible sale into Rudolf II's court) A documented March 1599 sale of a consignment of books for 600 Rheinische gulden is argued by some researchers (following Karin Guzy's archival work) to be the transaction later garbled into Marci's '600 ducats' story, but the manuscript is not named in the surviving correspondence, so the identification is an argument, not a document. - **c. 1600-1612** Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (reported) `[disputed]` (reported ownership and reported belief in Roger Bacon authorship) Reported only in Marci's 1665/1666 letter, at second hand, from Dr. Raphael Mnishovsky, who is said to have recalled the purchase from decades earlier. Marci himself explicitly declined to endorse the Bacon attribution. No contemporary Rudolfine inventory or record naming this manuscript has been found. - **after 1608** Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenec `[documented]` (ownership, established by ex libris) Ex libris on folio 1 recto uses the 'de Tepenec' form of his name, adopted only after his 1608 ennoblement by Rudolf II, dating the inscription (and so this ownership) to after that year. How he acquired the manuscript is not documented. - **-1637** Georg Baresch `[documented]` (ownership) Baresch is independently documented writing to Athanasius Kircher in 1639 about an unreadable book in his possession, sending a partial transcription; the identification of that book with the Voynich manuscript is accepted by specialists on the strength of matching detail, though Baresch's letter does not name the book explicitly. - **c. 1662-1665-1665/1666** Johannes Marcus Marci (Jan Marek Marci) `[documented]` (inheritance from Baresch's estate, then transfer to Kircher) Marci's own letter, sent with the manuscript to Rome, states he inherited it from a deceased friend (understood to be Baresch) and forwarded it to Kircher. The letter survives bound into the manuscript. - **1665/1666-1680** Athanasius Kircher `[documented]` (receipt of the manuscript in Rome) Kircher received the manuscript and Marci's letter at the Collegio Romano, where he lived and worked until his death in 1680. No record survives of what analysis, if any, Kircher performed on it. - **1680-1870** Library of the Society of Jesus, Collegio Romano, Rome `[documented]` (custody within the Jesuit college library) The manuscript remained among the Collegio Romano's holdings following Kircher's death; Jesuit records note a rebinding of the volume sometime between 1824 and 1870 owing to woodworm damage. - **1870-1912** Private library of Superior General Pieter Jan Beckx and the Society of Jesus, hidden from confiscation `[documented]` (removal from the Collegio Romano and concealment, most likely at Villa Torlonia, Castel Gandolfo) Removed from Rome in 1870 to avoid confiscation of Church property under new Italian anticlerical law. The manuscript's binding carries a label reading 'Ex Bibliotheca privata P. Petri Beckx.' The long-repeated claim that the collection was hidden at Villa Mondragone in Frascati is now considered an error, traceable to a public statement by Hans Kraus roughly thirty years after Voynich's death; 2022 archival research by Francesca Potenza, using 1912 inventory catalogues and Jesuit-Vatican correspondence, identifies Villa Torlonia at Castel Gandolfo as the actual location, with no evidence placing Voynich himself at either site. - **1912-1930** Wilfrid M. Voynich `[documented]` (purchase from the Society of Jesus and ownership until his death) Voynich acquired the manuscript as part of a larger group purchase from the Jesuit owners, arranged through the intermediary Father Joseph Strickland, under a promise of secrecy. Voynich's own public account of personally discovering the collection unknown to its owners is contradicted by his wife Ethel's later, independently sealed and opened account, and is not treated here as established fact. The specific price paid for this manuscript has not been published in any source consulted. - **1930-1960** Ethel Lilian Voynich, then briefly Anne Nill `[documented]` (inheritance and custody after Wilfrid Voynich's death) Ethel Voynich, Wilfrid's widow, held the manuscript until her death in 1960; it then passed briefly to Anne Nill, Wilfrid Voynich's former secretary and Ethel's close friend. - **1961-1969** Hans P. Kraus `[documented]` (purchase and unsuccessful attempts to sell) Kraus purchased the manuscript from Anne Nill in 1961 for 24,500 dollars and subsequently offered it for sale at an asking price of 160,000 dollars, without finding a buyer. - **1969-present** Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University `[documented]` (donation and continuous institutional custody) Kraus donated the manuscript to the Beinecke Library in 1969, where it is catalogued as MS 408 and has remained since, leaving the building only once, for a 2014-2015 loan exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library. ## Open questions - Who wrote and illustrated the manuscript, and where? No scribe, artist, author or patron is named or identified by any surviving contemporary document. - Does the text encode a real natural or constructed language, an unbroken cipher, or nothing at all? Specialists remain divided, citing the same statistical evidence for opposite conclusions (Rugg's hoax-generation model versus Montemurro and Zanette's information-theoretic argument for genuine structure). - Where was the manuscript for the roughly 150 years between its radiocarbon-dated creation (1404-1438) and the first plausible trace of an owner in the late 1590s? No owner is documented for this period. - Was the 1599 Widemann-to-Geizkofler-to-Hans Popp sale of books to Rudolf II's court, for 600 Rheinische gulden, actually this manuscript, or is the resemblance between that figure and Marci's later '600 ducats' a coincidence or a garbled memory of an unrelated transaction? The manuscript is not named in the surviving sale correspondence. - How many scribal hands actually produced the manuscript, two (Currier) or as many as five (Davis), and does that number reflect a workshop, a single scribe's habits changing over time, or something else? No paleographic study has yet settled on a final count. - What became of the manuscript's missing bifolios and the two entirely missing quires? The gaps predate Voynich's 1912 acquisition, and nothing is known about when, how, or by whom the material was removed, or whether any of it survives unrecognized elsewhere. - What price did Wilfrid Voynich actually pay the Jesuits in 1912, and how much of his own public account of a chance discovery in an old castle was true, given that his own wife's later, independently opened account describes a rather more ordinary private arrangement? ## Sources - [1] Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, catalogue description, Beinecke MS 408 ('Cipher manuscript, known as: Voynich manuscript') - [2] Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 'The Beinecke Cipher (Voynich) Manuscript' - [3] Rene Zandbergen, voynich.nu, 'History of the MS' (specialist reference site maintained since the 1990s, widely cited in Voynich scholarship) - [4] Rene Zandbergen, voynich.nu, 'Where was the Voynich MS kept and how did Voynich find it?' - [5] Rene Zandbergen, voynich.nu, 'Radio-carbon dating of the Voynich MS,' summarizing the University of Arizona AMS Laboratory report (G. Hodgins et al.), first presented publicly 11 May 2012 - [6] EurekAlert!, 'University of Arizona experts determine age of book nobody can read' - [7] Johannes Marcus Marci, letter to Athanasius Kircher, 1665 or 1666, accompanying the manuscript to Rome (surviving letter, bound into the manuscript; translated text as widely reproduced in Voynich scholarship, including on voynich.nu and in secondary discussion) - [8] Wikipedia, 'William Romaine Newbold' (tertiary; flagged for replacement with John Matthews Manly, 'Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS,' Speculum 6:3, 1931, pp. 345-391) - [9] Cipher Mysteries, 'Gordon Rugg, The Man Who Cracked The Mystery Of The Voynich Manuscript, cracks it once again (NOT)', discussing Rugg & Taylor, 'Hoaxing statistical features of the Voynich Manuscript,' Cryptologia 41:3 (2016) - [10] Marcelo A. Montemurro and Damian H. Zanette, 'Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis,' PLOS ONE 8(6): e66344 (2013) - [11] Stephen Bax, 'A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script' (2014) - [12] Language Log (Victor Mair), scholarly-linguistics reception of Gerard Cheshire's 2019 claimed decipherment, published in Romance Studies (Taylor and Francis) and distanced from by the University of Bristol following criticism - [13] Cipher Mysteries, 'Voynich - the McCrone report now online!', summarizing McCrone Associates' chemical analysis of the manuscript's inks and pigments, commissioned by the Beinecke Library - [14] Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 'Mondays at Beinecke: Voynich Manuscript with Lisa Fagin Davis, Raymond Clemens, Claire Bowern,' on Davis's digital paleography and the proposed five scribal hands - [15] Francesca Potenza (2022) archival research on the Jesuit collection's 1870-1912 hiding place, as reported and summarized by Rene Zandbergen, voynich.nu - [16] Voynich Ninja research forum, discussion thread on the 1599 Widemann-Geizkofler book sale and its possible identification with the '600 ducats' tradition, summarizing archival research by Karin Guzy (forum secondary source; flagged for replacement with Guzy's primary publication) - [17] Wikipedia, 'Voynich manuscript' (tertiary; used to cross-check dates, names and figures already established elsewhere, including the Kraus purchase and asking price, the missing-quire count, and additional named decipherment claimants; flagged for replacement with primary and specialist sources throughout) --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. 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