“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. 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? 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.
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