If you think you can translate the Voynichese text, here are some suggestions that I would find most interesting to read. If you want a botanical page, try costmary.
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Hello everyone and thank you to everyone involved in the talks and organisation today. I would like to take this opportunity to start a topic on Leonhard Rauwolf, as I have some thoughts on his role. This is of course in reference to the research conducted by René Zandbergen (including the presentation today) and Stefan Guzy, who, in my opinion, have made a very convincing case for Widemann as the person who sold the manuscript to Rudolf. However, as a short tl, dr: I am quite skeptical of the theories about Rauwolf's role, and would not consider him a much more likely candidate for a previous owner than any other of Widemann's contacts.
Unfortunately, this opinion is not based on any archival material or other new findings. I hope to have managed to get my hands on most relevant publications including S. Guzy's elusive German-language article, although I could only read it at a library in a break while working on my actual project, so my apologies if there is something I misrepresent. Beyond that, my thoughts here are informed by my own studies on early modern provenance, book acquisitions, history of knowledge etc. which was a core element of my PhD thesis, in which somehow Rauwolf is mentioned exactly once.
The core question I started asking myself regarding the manuscript's history from Widemann to Kircher (which I will treat as a given here, since there is little point in discussing several aspects at once): When and why did knowledge about the previous owner(s) end? Obviously, Widemann himself must have known how he acquired the book. Mnišovský, Barschius and Marci must have had additional knowledge beyond the little that is mentioned in the letters to Kircher. The latter two may have only sent information that they thought would encourage Kircher to take an interest in the matter, but unless they knew the manuscript was a hoax, they probably did not misrepresent their information on purpose. So, why did they convey this exact information to Kircher? Let me structure my assumptions on the matter a bit:
1. It makes sense to not mention all the less relevant people such as Widemann, Geizkofler, Tepenec and whoever might have owned it after them. Kircher would not have known them and they provide little additional value for the understanding of the manuscript. Therefore, there is no insight to be gained from this omission.
2. 'Name-dropping' the emperors, including the price of sale, and Bacon is reasonable to draw Kircher's interest. Mentioning Mnišovský, who, by the way he is described, Marci did Kircher not expect to be familiar with, seems like an attempt of Marci to describe the Bacon-theory without fully owning it. This all is logical as well in my opinion.
3. Regarding Rauwolf the question is: If the Barschius-Marci generation of Voynich scholars was aware of his involvement, would they have mentioned him? I think the answer is almost certainly yes. After Kircher's "success" with hieroglyphs, which Barschius even mentions, it would be strange to omit such a direct connection to an "oriental" origin and rather mention it indirectly like Barschius did. Instead, Marci offers a geographically opposing explanation in the follow-up letter, which I would consider unlikely if they had any solid information on Rauwolf or even just a vague record of the manuscript's "oriental" origin. From my research, Rauwolf was also relatively well known in the 17th and 18th century and respected as a overseas traveller with a scholarly background, which would have been another reason to convey this information to Kircher.
4. It also seems unlikely to me that such potentially relevant information as a previous ownership by Rauwolf was lost in the less than 40 years since the sale to Rudolf, while the exact price was still discussed. Perhaps Rudolf could have only mentioned the value to highlight the generosity of his gift to Tepenec, if that was how the book was transferred between them - there are possible explanations for why Rauwolf was forgotten in that time frame. However, because there seems to have been a significant level of discussion about the cipher manuscript in Prague in the 1600s and several people involved in the transactions, it is hard to imagine a particular point at which the information was lost, be it through death or the deliberate decision to not provide it to others.
5. The most likely candidate to have obscured the manuscript's provenance before Widemann is actually Widemann himself. First, he had the opportunity, in contrast to the later scenarios where a larger number of people had knowledge of relevant events. Second, he had a financial motive: The value of a manuscript depended significantly on its previous owners or author(s), meaning Widemann had an incentive to tell the most enticing story to his potential customer. I think Rauwolf might have been a reasonably convincing (=valuabe) background story, so there would probably be no need to make up another explanation, such as possibly one involving Kelly and England that might have led Mnišovský to his theory. The only somewhat realistic scenario I can come up with where Widemann omits the connection to Rauwolf is one where he obtained the manuscript in a not exactly clean way, i. e. he simply kept it after the Rauwolfs' death and sold it as soon as no heirs claimed it, this would fit the timeline reasonably well. But this is pure conjecture and certainly less plausible than a number of theories of pre-Widemann ownership that do not involve Rauwolf at all.
In summary, while what I write here is just a mix of assumptions, probabilities and context clues, in my opinion, nothing really more convincing is available in favor of Rauwolf's ownership. Therefore, it seems more likely that Wiedemann had acquired the manuscript from someone else than that Rauwolf's involvement and the implications in terms of its origin were forgotten by the time Barschius and Marci wrote their letters.
That's it, I hope posts like this one are at least as welcome here as another brilliant theory on which language the cipher is derived from... I would of course gladly discuss this further and plan to be around here a bit in the future, focusing primarily on provenance and history.
Hi everyone, thank you to everyone for your questions on the Naibbe cipher. A huge thank-you to the community and to Koen for letting me present at this year's Voynich Manuscript Day.
You'll find a full preprint version of my paper, as well as 20 reference Naibbe ciphertexts, in the following Dropbox folder: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In addition, you'll find more resources—including Microsoft Excel implementations of Voynichesque and the Naibbe cipher—at the following Zenodo data repository: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
For reference, the preprint contains everything except my replication of Bowern and Gaskell (2022) and Gaskell and Bowern (2022), which I just got working a few days ago.
I built an alphabet and started translating the plants section. I will upload here the plants mentioned that read with images to compare them with the images on the folio. Hope it helps.
Hello, I'm new here so maybe this has been talked about before but I didn't find a post about it.
I was wondering if Easter could be the reason why Aries and Taurus are divided in two each and figures seem to be getting dressed with a transition from more than half the figures lightly clothed in Aries 1 to all (but one?) fully clothed in Aries 2 to most figures covered in Taurus 1 to nudity again from Taurus 2 on (apart from 4 figures in Gemini because why not).
I didn't consider the month names added later, but while checking a few books of hours trying to find similitudes I've found some where Aries is Mars and Taurus Auril:
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Also I checked Easter dates for all of the 15th century (Julian Calendar) and the earliest was on the 22nd of March in 1478, and the latest on the 25th of April in 1451 (which it seems is the normal range) so this would only make sense ignoring the month names.
So far I failed with finding similitudes with a book of hours, the only familiar thing I could see was this one maybe making wine in Virgo.
I'd appreciate opinions or links to earlier posts or related information.
This seems to make sense to me, however, I know nothing about this stuff at all so offer it to those who do.
It seemed to me once you think of the VM diagram from a "what's up?" perspective, it makes sense (given the below).
That is to say we are looking up at the sky at what we can see and can't see. It's about as simple as I've found a VM image to be, so undoubtedly it is incorrect.
My understanding is that by 14XX this was still applicable knowledge to most who were not an astrologer.
"Isidore of Seville".
From - "The cosmos and its parts"
((c. 560–636) and translated).
"Portals"
The sky has two portals: the East and the West, for the sun
enters through one portal and withdraws through the
other.
"Unknown paths beyond east/west portals"
lii. The path of the sun (De itinere solis) The sun, when
it rises, holds a path through the south. Afterward, it
goes to the west and plunges itself into the Ocean, and it
travels unknown paths under the earth, and once again
runs back to the east
"Air and then Sky (above)"
Sometimes the word ‘sky’ is used for the air, where
winds and clouds and storms and whirlwinds arise.
Lucretius (cf. On the Nature of Things 4.133):
The sky (caelum), which is called air (aer).
And the Psalm (78:2; 103:12, Vulgate) refers to “fowls of
the sky (caelum),” when it is clear that birds fly in the air;
out of habit we also call this air, ‘sky.’ Thus when we ask
whether it is fair or overcast we sometimes say, “How is
the air?” and sometimes “How is the sky?”
"Sky is where the sun and moon are"
God embellished the heaven and
filled it with bright light – that is, he adorned it with the
sun and the gleaming orb of the moon, and the glorious
constellations of glittering stars. [In a different way, it
is named from engraving (caelare) the superior bodies.]
2. It is called
L in Greek, after the term QY ,
that is, ‘seeing,’ because the air is transparent and clearer
for seeing. In Sacred Scripture the sky is called the firmament (firmamentum), because it is secured (firmare) by
the course of the stars and by fixed and immutable laws.
"the stars are in the ether"
The ether
(aether) is the place where the stars are, and signifies
that fire which is separated high above from the entire
world. Of course, ether is itself an element, but aethra
(i.e. another word for ether) is the radiance of ether;
it is a Greek word. 2. The sphere (sphaera) of the sky
is so named because it has a round shape in appearance. But anything of such a shape is called a sphaera
by the Greeks from its roundness, such as the balls that
children play with.
*It's not entirely certain what the firmament means in this comment (to me), so I opted for "The ether" which seemed very clear, but I suspect they mean much in the same.
New blog post on my site (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) - today I'm highlighting the pattern of the second circle in the wheel on 57v - a pattern of 9 symbols. At first glance it seems to repeat four times, but actually the first two patterns use the “one leg, one loop” glyph as the ninth character, and the second two patterns use the “one leg, [b]two loops[/b]” glyph as the ninth character.
I'm sure this is not new information, but I'm having trouble finding relevant research. I've seen this referenced in a chart by M.E. D'Imperio before, as shown in my blog post, though her chart doesn't mention the change.
Would love any help finding threads or other work about this pattern, and the others in vertical on 49v and 66r (and in the star of 69r).
Previous studies have examined the topics of the Voynich manuscript by looking at the distribution of words or patterns across its pages. However, to the best of my knowledge, there has not yet been a fully automated topic modelling analysis that compares multiple algorithms.
In this work, I present an automated page-by-page topic analysis of the Voynich manuscript using three different models:
LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) – which finds 5 topics
BERTopic – which finds 5 topics
NMF (Non-negative Matrix Factorization) – which finds 3 topics
The goal is to see how each model clusters the pages, whether patterns align with the manuscript’s illustrated sections (Botanical, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmacological, Recipes), and to observe if there are topics that dominate certain sections.
METHODOLOGY: HOW THE MODELS DETECT TOPICS
LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation)
LDA treats each page as a bag of words and assumes:
Each page is a mixture of topics (in different proportions)
Each topic is a distribution of words
Through repeated statistical assignments, LDA discovers which words tend to appear together, grouping them into topics. Pages are then assigned the topic (or mix of topics) that best matches their word patterns.
BERTopic
BERTopic uses transformer-based embeddings (BERT) to represent each page as a high-dimensional vector capturing semantic similarity. It then applies dimensionality reduction (UMAP) and clustering (HDBSCAN) to group similar pages. Finally, it extracts the most representative words for each cluster to define topics. This allows for more nuanced grouping, even with subtle vocabulary differences.
NMF (Non-negative Matrix Factorization)
NMF uses a term-frequency matrix (TF-IDF weighted) and factorizes it into two smaller matrices:
One representing topics as weighted combinations of words
One representing pages as weighted combinations of topics
Because all values are non-negative, each page’s topic weights are easy to interpret. The dominant topic for a page is the one with the highest weight.
RESULTS
Each model produces two complementary visualizations:
Timeline Plot (Top)
Horizontal axis (X) = Ordered folios of the Voynich manuscript.
Vertical axis (Y) = Dominant topic assigned to each folio (numbered according to the model).
Color = Illustrated section of the folio (Botanical, Astronomical, etc.).
Marker shape = Topic number.
How to interpret: Clusters of the same marker in the same color band indicate topic consistency within a section. Sudden changes of marker shape within a section may suggest variation or topic.
Heatmap (Bottom)
Rows (Y) = Illustrated sections of the manuscript.
Columns (X) = Detected topics from the model.
Cell value (and color) = Proportion of pages in that section assigned to each topic (normalized so each row sums to 1).
How to interpret: A bright yellow cell (value near 1) means that almost all folios in that section belong to a single topic → high homogeneity. A row with several colored cells means that section contains multiple topics → possible internal diversity or mixed content.
Note 1: topic numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are not the same topics for all the models. It is just a label for a topic in a model.
Note 2: ordered folios in timeline diagram should be read as "pages". Eg: page 48 should be f25v and 49 should be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (as page 1 is f1r)
LDA (5 Topics)
Botanical and Pharmacological sections include all 5 topics, suggesting vocabulary variety and perhaps multiple subthemes.
Astronomical section covers 4 topics (all except Topic 4; Topic 5 appears only in one page).
Biological and cosmological sections are entirely assigned to Topic 1 – extremely homogeneous.
Recipes section is mostly Topic 1, with some pages in Topic 3.
BERTopic (5 Topics)
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Botanical is dominated by Topic 2 (but touches all other topics to some degree).
Astronomical is mostly Topic 4 with some Topic 1.
Biological is entirely Topic 3.
Cosmological uses Topics 3 and 1.
Pharmacological touches all 5 topics.
Recipes uses all topics except Topic 2 (striking, since Topic 2 dominates Botanical and Pharmacological) and leans toward Topics 3 and 1.
NMF (3 Topics)
Botanical spans all 3 topics, but is dominated by Topic 2 up to around page 48 (folio 24) before alternating among the three.
Astronomical is entirely Topic 3.
Biological is entirely Topic 1.
Cosmological is entirely Topic 3 (like Astronomical).
Pharmacological alternates between Topics 2 and 3.
Recipes alternates between Topics 1 and 3.
MY THOUGHTS
Across all three models, the Biological and Cosmological sections appear linguistically homogeneous (each model consistently assigns a single dominant topic to them, with at most two topics for the Cosmological section in the BERTopic model). This could reflect genuine stylistic uniformity or simply the models’ sensitivity to repeated patterns in the text. But what if the Cosmological section is in fact closely linked to the Biological section?
Botanical and Pharmacological sections consistently appear more heterogeneous:
LDA and BERTopic detect a wider spread of topics here, possibly due to multiple subsections or thematic variation within the illustrations.
Recipes are particularly interesting: they often share topics with Botanical or Pharmacological sections in LDA/BERTopic, but show different topic distributions in NMF.
A striking observation in BERTopic:
Topic 1 dominates Botanical and Pharmacological, but is absent from Recipes.
This might suggest a shift in terminology or a distinct textual purpose for the Recipes section despite visual similarity to Pharmacological folios.
In NMF:
Topic 3 covers Astronomical and Cosmological sections entirely.
This may mean that NMF sees these two illustrated sections as linguistically similar — perhaps due to formulaic text or repeated glyph patterns.
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![[Image: Ay7kGky.png]](https://i.imgur.com/Ay7kGky.png)