Undeciphered Voynich manuscript may have been bound out of order, study finds

The mysterious and undeciphered Voynich manuscript has caused consternation among code-breakers, linguists and scholars of medieval literature for more than a century.

But now experts think they've worked out why it's so hard to crack: It was bound incorrectly in the 15th century, meaning the pages are out of order.

The new linguistic analysis of the document has moved researchers closer to figuring out what the text was all about.

The Voynich manuscript is a medieval codex made up of leaves of parchment carbon-dated to the early 15th century.

Its 240 pages are covered with about 38,000 words of a unique script called "Voynichese" along with illustrations of people, plants and astrological symbols.

Also known as the Beinecke Cipher manuscript, the document was initially owned by a Holy Roman emperor and was purchased by Wilhelm Voynich in 1912.

Since 1969, the manuscript has been in the collection of Yale University's rare book library .

Experts have unsuccessfully tried to decipher the manuscript for more than a century.

"We don't know if it's a code," Lisa Fagin Davis , study co-author and executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, told Live Science.

"But there are some odd characteristics of the Voynich manuscript in terms of its physical structure." When doing research on the number of scribes who copied the document, Davis realized from the handwriting that the manuscript's pages alternate in ways that don't make sense.

In addition, she said, "there are several examples where the image goes off the page in the middle and comes out on the other side, even though there are a bunch of pages in between." In a study published Monday (Oct.

19) in the journal Digital Medievalist , Davis and co-author Colin Layfield , an information systems researcher at the University of Malta, suggested that the inconsistent structure of the enigmatic manuscript is the result of someone mis-binding a manuscript they were unable to read.

An illustration of how the Voynich manuscript may have been bound incorrectly. (Image credit: Quinn Reynolds for Live Science) Medieval manuscripts were made up of rectangular sheets of parchment (animal skin), typically folded in half to produce what experts call a bifolium.

Around five bifolia would typically be nested together, creating what experts call a quire.