Unraveling the Voynich Codex by Jules Janick and Arthur O Tucker

Unraveling the Voynich Codex by Jules Janick and Arthur O Tucker

Matthew Nicholson reviews a book in which botany was used to uncover the origins of an ancient manuscript.

I have always had an interest in ancient manuscripts (a codex is an ancient manuscript, the ancestor of today’s book) so I suppose this, and an interest in botanical studies, drew me to this title. Why is a book on a medieval manuscript published under the Springer ‘Fascinating Life Sciences’ banner? Surely the subject matter is purely in the realm of the dedicated medievalist. As I read the book, I discovered that it is as much a mystery of interdisciplinary studies as anything else.

The original manuscript was first discovered in 1912 in a Catholic college in Italy by a book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, hence the ‘Voynich’ moniker, and has been the subject of debate and scholarship ever since it was uncovered. It contains symbolic language that has never been deciphered and includes botanical drawings. ‘The Voynich Manuscript’ isn’t the proper title of the manuscript – it is more of a descriptor to aid library cataloguists. For this analysis Janick and Tucker have divided their book into four sections: a general introduction, evidence for Mesoamerican origins, decipherment and finally, a description of the author and artist. The general introduction features chapters elucidating upon the manuscript’s origin and provenance, where the evidence purporting Mesoamerican/Mexican derivation is examined.

As others have said, the plant illustrations are ‘fairly rough’ (Lewis, 2023), and there have been people over the years who have thought that if they could identify the drawings of the plants from the text, this could be a method of ‘reverse engineering’ the text (Lewis, 2023). I followed a news story in 2017 that heralded the ‘solving’ of the Voynich Manuscript and that textual analysis purported the text to be written in a ‘proto-Romance’ language (Ouellette, 2019), an argument ‘completely unsubstantiated’ (Ouellette, 2019) in paleolinguistics.

The plant section, entitled ‘Phytomorph and Geomorph Identification’ (pp. 85–139) is comprised of 139 phytomorphs (plant images). Janick and Tucker give an accurate count of ‘131 in the herbal section’ and ‘228 in the pharmaceutical section’ and most of the illustrations contain ‘morphological structures’ that facilitate identification. The phytomorphs contained in the manuscript were long assumed to be of ‘pre-Columbian European origin’, but this wisdom was called into question by the Rev. Dr Hugh O’Neil, a distinguished botanist who identified ‘two New World plants’ (Tucker and Janick, 2019) within the manuscript, and was roundly ignored or ridiculed for his work, despite his credentials in botanical taxonomy and as an expert in Mesoamerican plants. O’Neil was vindicated, however, in 1991 by Jacques B M Guy, who confirmed O’Neil’s identification of Sunflower Helianthus annus, and ‘noted not a single European species’ (Tucker and Janick, 2019). Guy also mentioned that one of his colleagues identified passionfruit.

Janick and Tucker provide an analysis of the plants contained within the manuscript down to species level and arrange the angiosperms in alphabetical sequence ‘incorporating the folio number in the codex’. This analysis leads the authors to conclude that the artist was ‘concerned with certain features significant to identification’. Their nomenclature follows ‘a concordance of the cited revisions … the Germplasm Resources Information Network, and/or the collaboration of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Missouri Botanical Garden’.

Even though there appears to be ‘a whole quire’ (a quire is 24 sheets of paper) (Lewis, 2023) missing from the manuscript – this is probably in some museum in Europe, awaiting discovery – I found this book to be of immense interest, as one attracted to the study of manuscripts. To uncover a book describing this mystery in such vivid detail was simply fascinating and made me want to follow subsequent research on the matter.

Unraveling the Voynich Codex by Jules Janick and Arthur O Tucker is published by Springer Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77294-3

References

Lewis, M. (2023, Jan 21). The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Gone Medieval. Apple Podcasts.

Ouellette, J. (2019, May 16). No, someone hasn’t cracked the code of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Ars Technica.

Tucker, AO, Janick, J. (2019). Flora of the Voynich Codex – An exploration of Aztec plants. Springer Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19377-5