LITERATURE REVIEW, Continued

William F. Friedman, beginning in 1944, first undertook a systematic analysis of the Voynich manuscript, using the computational tools of cryptanalysis. Friedman, one of the most famous American cryptographers of the Second World War, organized a study group to investigate the manuscript on an extracurricular basis (Reeds 1995). They developed the first transcription alphabet to make Voynich characters machine-readable. Using an early RCA computer and punch cards, the study group performed some rudimentary analyses with the assumption that the Voynich manuscript was a standard cipher text. The results of this investigation are not entirely known, but it is thought that many of the records - and the original IBM punch card set - are somewhere in the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland (Reeds, private communication, 10 Oct. 2000).

Others have looked at the Voynich manuscript through the lens of a scholarly specialty. Hugh O'Neill (1944), a botanist, identified several plants in the botanical section of the manuscript, notably the plant that dominates folio 93 recto - Helianthus annuus, the common sunflower. This identification, if correct, antedates the manuscript to 1493 at the earliest - the sunflower was not seen in Europe until brought back by Columbus.

In the late sixties and early seventies, Prescott Currier advanced the state of Voynich research with an important discovery. Currier proved statistically that there are two distinct "hands" in the manuscript, each with a distinct subset of the Voynich script, representing multiple scribes (Currier 1975). He also demonstrated mathematically that, as in natural languages, lines are functional entities in the text. The importance of these observations cannot be emphasized enough. Most importantly, multiple authorship tends to rule out "grapholalia", or meaningless text. It is clear that more than one person copied the Voynich manuscript from an earlier source, and Currier identified the idiosyncrasies of the individual copyists. The concept of multiple "languages" has influenced critical thought on the nature of the Voynich manuscript.

In the 1970's, Mary D'Imperio, a mathematician and NSA consultant, was instrumental in encouraging the rigorous scientific examination of the manuscript. Her The Voynich Manuscript--An Elegant Enigma (1978) provides a thorough and accurate picture of the state of research up until that time, building on a series of articles she wrote for Manuscript (1977). I will discuss it at length because it is generally accepted as the starting point for all serious Voynich manuscript research.

D'Imperio begins with a brief history of the manuscript, including the known provenance and ownership history. This takes all of two pages, so scant is our knowledge of the manuscript's past. She then dives into a survey of "methods of attack" - possible avenues of approach in the decipherment effort, including content analysis of the drawings and cryptanalytic attacks on the text itself.

An Elegant Enigma covers the failed decipherment efforts of Newbold, Brumbaugh, and others gently, and then reviews the more serious efforts of her mid-seventies contemporaries, including Prescott Currier, with whom D'Imperio worked closely. Her book could be seen as a continuation and expansion of both Currier and Friedman's work on the Voynich manuscript. This "pedigree" represented the most authoritative decipherment effort up until the late nineties.

Three large sections cover collateral research in the areas of medieval iconography, secret languages, and early herbal manuscripts thought to be contemporary with the Voynich manuscript. D'Imperio concludes with suggestions for further research, some of which have been acted on (Stallings 1998, Zandbergen 1997, Guy 1991). The manuscripts current owner, Yale University, has resisted others, such as a paleographic examination of the text itself. Because of this, we do not know the age of the manuscript (the vellum could be easily carbon dated, giving us a "not before the calf died" approximate date of origination).

Much of the work related to the Voynich manuscript has taken place in the realm of cryptography. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to cryptanalytic examination of the manuscript in the late seventies was the lack of a consistent machine-readable draft of the text, something that was remedied in the eighties and nineties. This allowed a detailed analysis of the Voynich manuscript using information retrieval techniques and large-scale data manipulation, which has lead to some interesting conclusions.

With so opaque an artifact as the Voynich manuscript, scholarship has taken a subtractive approach - we are slowly learning what it is not, rather than gaining any insight into what it is.

O'Neill (1944), if correct, placed the manuscript after 1493. Currier (1976) established that it is statistically not gibberish. Landini (1997) and Landini and Zandbergen (1998) demonstrated that the Voynich manuscript exhibits lower entropy than comparable natural language texts, possibly indicating a similarity to sixteenth-century artificial languages. Stallings (1998) investigated the roots of second-order entropy in the text, dismissing the possibility of a low-entropy language, like Hawaiian, as the plaintext (Stallings does not suppose Hawaiian to be a realistic possibility - he uses it as a real-world test for a polysyllabic, low-entropy plaintext, most likely an artificial language). Stallings also demonstrated conditions in which a cipher can return results similar to those exhibited by the Voynich manuscript. Perakh (1999), using letter serial correlation, independently confirmed that the Voynich manuscript is not a random or quasi-random collection of characters.

The more contemporary studies (those of Landini, Zandbergen, Perakh, and Stallings as mentioned above) represent a "new wave" of Voynich manuscript research. Its features include independent cryptanalytic studies without peer review and open availability through the medium of the World Wide Web. While not methodologically rigorous, findings generated and shared in this method are open to review, commentary, replication, and criticism. They are the work of both professionals (like Jim Reeds, a mathematician and cryptanalyst), and talented amateurs. Each study has a point of contact with the Voynich manuscript that is relevant and familiar to the researcher, but does not necessarily build on previous work. The fact that legitimate inquiry into the Voynich manuscript is frowned upon in academia greatly hampers decipherment efforts, since research is necessarily done in free time and published sporadically, generally on the Web.

While "serious" Voynich manuscript research has been sidelined since the humiliation of Newbold and Brumbaugh, a community of scholars continues to do important work in an informal and cooperative forum. The connectivity scholars enjoy thanks to the Internet has accelerated progress in several potentially fruitful areas. A unified transcription alphabet, developed by the European Voynich Manuscript Transcription project (under the direction of Gabriel Landini) now seeks to supercede the assorted alphabets individual researchers developed in the past. The entire text is available in ASCII form. Negotiations are underway with the Beinecke library to create a digital copy of the Voynich manuscript in meticulous detail (approximately 20 MB per folio page). An active, dedicated mailing list offers a forum for those interested in Voynichiana to share ideas, sources, and techniques.