The most mysterious manuscript! The Yale Beineke Library provides a full digital facsimile of MS 408, the boringly-titled Cipher Manuscript.
I don’t know what it says, but I am talking about it at ConFusion 2026 regardless.
Reliable Resources
There’s a lot of weird or just plain bad information out there. Here are some things I find useful.
- René Zandbergen’s website voynich.nu
- Nick Pelling’s snarkier website cyphermysteries.com
- Lisa Fagin Davis’s blog on multispectral imaging
Formal Publications
- International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript 2022
- Bowern and Lindemann 2021, The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript
- Davis 2020, How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes?
Books
- Clemens 2016, The Voynich Manuscript (complete facsimile)
- Edwards 2024, Voynich Reconsidered (surprisingly good overview; inexpensive in ebook)
Fiction
There’s a LOT of very bad Voynich fiction, and some good stuff.
I can enthusiastically recommend “Manuscript Tradition,” by Harry Turtledove (2020).
Related Resources
Some of my older analyses of VMS are online at astronomicum.com, although they’re not up to date with current research or my current thinking. Other articles on that site cover medieval cryptography, my favorite medieval herbal manuscripts (some of which were mentioned in this talk), astrology, and related topics of interest to a fifteenth-century scholar.