Gibbs’s article broadly consists of two parts. She told me that, by coincidence, she had dinner recently with Beinecke’s curator, who had not heard from TLS about the article.
“If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat,” she says.
When she was a doctoral student at Yale-whose Beinecke Library holds the Voynich manuscript-Davis read dozens of theories as part of her job. “Frankly I’m a little surprised the TLS published it,” says Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America. As for what is in the TLS article, the criticism can be summed up as such: Not much in it is truly novel, but what is appears to be incorrect. Zandbergen runs the popular website Voynich.nu, and he is a long-time researcher of the manuscript. “The summary in the TLS is really too short to provide any serious analysis,” René Zandbergen wrote in an email. “Frankly I’m a little surprised the TLS published it.”įor one, the rather long-winded article features only two decoded lines of the Voynich manuscript. Blogs and forums started picking at its problems. Medievalists, used to seeing purported solutions every few months, panned it on Twitter. The solution should be seismic news in the Voynich world-for medieval scholars and amateur sleuths alike-but the reaction to Gibbs’s theory has been decidedly underwhelming. And the cipher is no cipher at all, but simply abbreviations that, once decoded, turn out to be medicinal recipes.
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The article by Nicholas Gibbs suggests the manuscript is a medieval women’s-health manual copied from several older sources. This week, the venerable Times Literary Supplement published as its cover story a “solution” for the Voynich manuscript.
What could be so scandalous, so dangerous, or so important to be written in such an uncrackable cipher?
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But its pages are full of astrological charts, strange plants, naked ladies bathing in green liquid, and, most famously, an indecipherable script that has eluded cryptographers to this day. It is slightly larger than a modern paperback, bound in “limp vellum” as is the technical term. The Voynich manuscript is not an especially glamorous physical object.