Together, Davis’s findings are very promising and could offer a solution to the ‘hard problem’ of the manuscript. By applying the principles of Latin Palaeography to the Voynichese writing system, Davis has identified five separate hands at work in the manuscript, revealing the work to be a much more collaborative production than previously assumed.įurther examination of the manuscript by Davis has established that by ‘overlaying the scribal corpora onto the sections and quires’, it is evident that the book is assembled in a highly unusual way, probably indicating that the pages are not currently in their original order. She is also a very engaging person, and is very transparent about her work she is active on ‘manuscript twitter’ and ‘rare book twitter’, and through that platform and others she patiently responds to questions and theories about the manuscript.ĭavis’s recent work includes a breakthrough finding: conformation that the Voynich manuscript is the work of multiple scribes. She has also catalogued medieval manuscript collections at major institutions (Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Wellesley College, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Boston Public Library) and several private collections, and she has supervised or was the principal investigator for several digital reconstructions of dismembered manuscripts.ĭr Davis has examined the manuscript in person more than half a dozen times, and she is recognised as a leading expert in Voynich studies. Since receiving her PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale University in 1993, she has written and published extensively in that field.
Having taught Latin Palaeography at Yale, Dr Davis now teaches Manuscript Studies at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science and, as of 2023, she is the regular Latin Palaeography instructor at The Rare Book School, University of Virginia. And in 2023, a solution may well be imminent.ĭr Lisa Fagin Davis is a palaeographer, codicologist, fragmentologist and bibliographer with a particular interest in pre-seventeenth-century manuscript fragments and collections in North America. The Voynich text can only be unlocked once that problem is solved. These problematic passages are a large part of why many people think the manuscript is a hoax, or nonsense.Ī convincing theory of Voynich needs to explain this divide, which is the ‘hard problem’ of the manuscript. In those passages, there are also sequences of words that are almost repetition, but with single letter changes. But at the same time there are highly problematic sections, such as those that contain a high degree of strange repetition of longish words such as (in the European Voynich alphabet) ‘qokedy’. Those sections are a large part of why people take the manuscript seriously. Some sections in the manuscript seem to have been written in a practised hand, and they have the feel of real language.
In the case of Voynich, too, there is a hard problem. According to Chalmers, any new theory of consciousness will fail unless it offers a solution to the ‘hard problem’. In 1995, Australian philosopher David Chalmers put forward what he called the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, which relates to how people perceive reality. (At the age of six, Charlotte came up with a plausible identification of one of the botanical illustrations as the castor oil plant.) I’ve spent many hours looking at the high-resolution digital copy on the Yale website – even making a game of it with my youngest daughter, Charlotte.
Like many people, I have long been fascinated by the manuscript. While often characterised as a magical, astrological, medical or scientific text, the work’s meaning has so far eluded researchers. The manuscript takes its name from antiquarian bookdealer Wilfrid M. Probably from Central or Eastern Europe, this fifteenth-century illustrated codex is written in an undeciphered language. One of the treasures of the library is the mysterious ‘Voynich Manuscript’ ( Beinecke 408).
#High resolution voynich manuscript skin#
The tower is surrounded by a void, and the outer skin of the library is another box, this one made from translucent Vermont marble panels in a Vierendeel steel truss clad in granite. The core of the library is a six-storey, glass-enclosed tower that houses the book stacks. A temple of rare books, it was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The Beinecke Library at Yale is a marvel of library architecture and indeed of all forms of architecture.
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