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I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - Printable Version

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I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - 99b86aeea - 09-05-2026

Hi everyone, it is a pleasure to meet you all. I am an independent researcher, and I believe that the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500. My claim goes against the carbon dating of the parchment, which puts the manuscript almost a century earlier, but I think that the parchment was used later for writing this famous manuscript.

I hope that my arguments will convince, or at least provoke some debate. And of course, I am really happy to have the opportunity to do so, in a forum of such renowned researchers.

So I will begin by saying that I am enthousiastic about the Renaissance period, I am not a historian but my father was one. And so, it struck me that when looking at the Voynich manuscript, it has many elements that look like the famous engineer's book that was published between 1500 and 1520, by Francesco di Giorgio Martini. I will present some visual comparisons, sorry for the quality of the pictures, which I made with the Windows snipping feature.

1. The tubes

These tubes are the same type:

   

These barrels have the same kind of bad perspective:

   

This water flow looks similar:

   

These pipes look like the Voynich manuscript:

   


2. The containers

Several column designs look like the Voynich manuscript containers:

   

And this:

   

And also this:

   


3. The architecture diagrams

Please take a look at the extremities of these circular diagrams:

   

In fact, many have the same details as the Voynich manuscript:

   

4. Top-down, or bottom-up view or buildings

Such diagrams as below look like Voynich manuscript illustrations, if we interpret tham as top-down or bottom-up views of some building's interior, such as a church or a basilica:

   


5. Green coloured water illustrations

In the following images, you will see water illustrations that are coloured green, like in the Voynich manuscript, for some reason:

   


I would like to share with you the online facsimile of this manuscript, which is here:

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Interestingly, it is also in the Beineke rare books collection. An amusing coincidence, I will add.

In conclusion, I will allow myself to enjoy a small conjecture. In particular, if we assume that the author(s) of the Voynich manuscript were indeed readers of Martini's book, then the timing of the Voynich manuscript creation is much later than 1400. In fact, it would be dated after the invention of Alberti's cipher disk. And therefore, my conjecture is that the writing in the Voynich manuscript is an Alberti disk type of substitution. I will go a step further. I will say that that the so-called "gallows" characters are giving the offsets of the disk, if such a disk exists, in the "mobilis" position. The way that these gallows characters do this, is, in my opinion, by encoding the number of crossings in the character itself. So if there is one crossing, then we shift the disk by "1" position. If there are two crossings, then we shift it by "2" positions. I have described these kind of crossings in the classification below:

   

And so forth. It would then be easy for the writer, and the reader, to translate the text to ciphertext and vice versa, if they knew the "stabilis" portion of the disk.

Anyway, I am very happy to present my small personal theory to this distinguished forum of researchers, and I hope that you will find it somewhat interesting.

Have a great day

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - RobGea - 10-05-2026

Mmhh, not bad, but your arguments are a trifle thin.

Some thoughts:
1. Add a reason for the use of old parchment. Much better would be an actual example.
2. The image comparisons are nice but that's easy to do. More examples would be good
3. Gallows characters as offset markers is a really nice idea - because then there would be no reason for a double Gallows, and there are very few instances of a double Gallows , 2 iirc.
4. I don't think the glyph stats compare well to a polyalphabetic cipher of this type, letter counts, positional rigidity etc
5. Add a demonstration of how the proposed encryption and decryption would work, for clarity.

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - Koen G - 10-05-2026

The MS you link is by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, 1439-1502. His work is based on that of Taccola, who we have been discussing a lot recently here on the forum. (I knew the drawings looked familiar).

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"Taccola greatly influenced the Italian engineers of the Renaissance. Many of his designs were subsequently incorporated into the works of Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Roberto Valturio, through whom they reached a wider audience."

No need to wait for the 16th century. You might be interested in this thread: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - Jorge_Stolfi - 10-05-2026

(09-05-2026, 10:52 PM)99b86aeea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.it struck me that when looking at the Voynich manuscript, it has many elements that look like the famous engineer's book that was published between 1500 and 1520, by Francesco di Giorgio Martini.

Wow! Indeed the similarities of details to the VMS Bio section are quite remarkable.  Good find!

Quote:I believe that the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500.

I don't think that it is a strong conclusion.  Manuscript illustrations were often copied from previous books. (The VMS is far from being unique on this aspect.)  So it is quite possible that both Martini and the VMS author copied from some book that was created by 1420 or earlier.

Have you seen anything in Martini's book that resembles the VMS Zodiac and Cosmo diagrams?

All the best, --stolfi

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - Rafal - 10-05-2026

I was going to say that same as Koen. These pipes are similar but the link may be Taccola's De Ingeneis and De Machinis. Definitely check this out.

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - 99b86aeea - 10-05-2026

Thank you all. I already knew Taccola's work, but Martini's is the only one where I saw the columns (as shown in my first post above), that look like the multi-level containers in the Voynich manuscript. Of course he might have copied them from another manuscript, too. I cannot prove that he didn't.

I will quickly try to respond to RobGea's question concerning an example encryption/decryption method, assuming that we are indeed looking at an Alberti-type disk.

I propose a disk like this (sorry for the bad quality):

   

Of course, I placed the Voynich characters in the inner disk in a completely arbitrary manner, just for illustration purposes. 

In this system, we could encode "LOREM IPSUM" in such a manner:

   

Recall that in my first post, I introduced the gallows characters as a manner to rotate the disk, by as many positions as there are crossings in the calligraphy. In this case, there are 3, so we rotate the inner disk 3 positions clockwise.

I have a few remarks about this system, which I invite you to consider not as a "solution" or even a "suggestion", but merely a bad example, which, nevertheless produces Voynichy looking text.
  • Every phrase, and in fact every letter, can be encoded in more than one way by using a different gallows character to indicate a different spin of the disk.
  • In the middle of a word, one can decide to spin the disk again, in order to further confuse the decrypter. In such a case, the disk would be rotated relative to the current position, by the number that is represented by the gallow. We see this occurence many times in the Voynich manuscript, where a gallow character is sitting inside a word.
  • There could be some "internal convention" that all the scribes had to follow, such as, after "aiin", you must start a new word, i.e., insert a space. This can also be the case before every "qo" character.
  • The disk would contain groupings of letters, as in my example above, instead of individual letters. This would account for multiple "word repetitions", as it were, in the text. For instance, "daiin daiin" could simply be "CC", if the disk is appropriately rotated beforehand.
  • For encoding numbers, perhaps a secondary disk would be used, which would be indicated by a special charater before a gallow. An example, in the "labellese" section would be the "o" letter.
  • Finding a correct combination of tokens for the inner disk, i.e., one that produces actual Voynich text, seems to be a hard problem. Perhaps there is a computationally efficient manner to brute force such a combination, or some linguistic clues that call fill in some of the positions intelligently. Either way, this appears to be at this time unfeasible.

I hope this makes sense. Of course, I could be terribly wrong about all this. Furthermore, if the manuscript predates Alberti, then this hypothesis could quickly be thrown out. I am assuming af course, that it is either contemporaneous with, or post Alberti.

Thank you very much for your attention.

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - Koen G - 10-05-2026

I agree that the columns are interesting, but they seem to be sketches of existing items or copies. Clearly something of the genre renaissance men were interested in. It would be worthwhile to figure out their origins.

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - rikforto - 10-05-2026

The force of the Taccola comparisons has given me the sense the 1420 mean from the carbon date might be off. I agree not enough to get us over into the 1500s, and other lines of evidence have put the manuscript closer to 1420, but certainly enough to wonder how confident I should be about the 95% confidence interval in the findings. I am aware that it could be an early copy, or share a source, and then we would not have to rethink those dates. But it does strike me that 1438 (the top of the confidence interval) would be considered an early date for Taccola copies if extant copies were our anchor point and not the carbon dating instead.

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - DG97EEB - 10-05-2026


There's a face sun on 30r and what looks a lot like a different VMS pharmaceutical container..

RE: I think the Voynich Manuscript was written after 1500 - Jimmy123 - 13-05-2026

(10-05-2026, 03:42 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree that the columns are interesting, but they seem to be sketches of existing items or copies. Clearly something of the genre renaissance men were interested in. It would be worthwhile to figure out their origins.

Did you figure out more columns from other manuscripts? I did not find some other examples. But also I'm not veyr good at looking in good places