The Voynich Manuscript, held at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as MS 408, is a medieval book whose writing has never been convincingly deciphered. Its pages are crowded with unfamiliar plants, zodiac signs and circles of stars, rows of what look like medicine jars, and small naked women standing in green pools. The characters repeat in regular patterns, but specialists have not accepted any proposed translation. The illustrations have prompted a more specific suggestion: the manuscript may contain medical material, perhaps including knowledge about women’s reproductive health.
The idea fits a familiar part of medieval medical practice. In late medieval Europe, medical practice could involve herbal remedies, astrological calculations and therapeutic baths, subjects we now tend to study separately. A healer might consult a plant book for ingredients, a calendar for the supposedly favourable time to use them, and a description of baths for a course of treatment. The Voynich women and their pools could belong to such a collection. Still, a resemblance to medical illustration cannot tell us that an image represents a particular remedy, or that the entire book was designed for midwives or as a gynaecological handbook. The pictures leave these questions unresolved.
We know more about the object than its contents. The parchment was made from animal skin in the early fifteenth century, while the writing and paint are consistent with medieval bookmaking. Some leaves are missing, and others have been rearranged and rebound. Researchers can recognize certain zodiac emblems and examine the jars, roots and pools in detail. What they cannot do is read any accompanying explanation of how those subjects connect. That is the central obstacle to testing the proposed medical interpretation.
What is actually known about the manuscript
The Beinecke Library’s description of MS 408 divides the illustrations into botanical, astronomical or astrological, bathing or ‘balneological’, cosmological, pharmaceutical and largely unillustrated textual sections. These are names modern scholars use to describe the pictures. No legible heading inside the manuscript confirms that the supposed herbal section was called a herbal, or that the short, star-marked passages near the end were recipes. The labels help readers navigate the book, but none is a translated medieval chapter title.
MS 408 contains 102 surviving parchment folios and one paper leaf, including several elaborate foldouts. A folio is a single leaf with two sides, rather than a single page. Missing leaves interrupt the sequence, and the detailed manuscript catalogue records both those gaps and the complex folds, as well as a binding made in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The catalogue also retains older suggestions linking the book to Roger Bacon and to supposedly New World plants. Later research has not established those identifications. Their presence in the catalogue records the history of research, not a confirmed identification.
The physical dating provides a firmer starting point. In 2009, the University of Arizona used radiocarbon dating on samples of the parchment and obtained the widely cited date range of 1404–1438 at 95 percent probability. That measurement dates the animal material, not necessarily the moment when a scribe applied ink. The university’s 2011 account of the testing also described pigment analysis consistent with a Renaissance palette, though it could not supply an exact writing date. Together these findings make the traditional attribution to the thirteenth-century scholar Roger Bacon untenable and a modern fabrication using newly made parchment implausible. They tell us nothing definite about the makers’ identities or the language of the writing.
The manuscript’s journey into modern collections is only partly traceable. In 1666, the Prague physician Johannes Marcus Marci wrote to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher that Emperor Rudolf II had bought the volume for 600 ducats and believed it was by Roger Bacon. Marci was passing on a report; no imperial purchase receipt survives to confirm the transaction. More secure traces connect the book to the Prague pharmacist Jacobus Horčický, whose erased name can be seen on a leaf, and to Georg Baresch, an alchemist who sought help reading it. The bookseller Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript from a Jesuit collection in Italy in 1912. Hans P. Kraus later donated it to Yale in 1969. Voynich gave the volume its modern name, but its first century or more remains largely undocumented.
The plants: a herbal without identifiable remedies
On many of the early folios, a large plant occupies most of the page, with the unfamiliar script arranged beside it. The drawings include broad leaves, intricate roots and flowers that seem oddly attached to their stems. Their arrangement resembles medieval European herbals, books that paired plant images and names with descriptions and supposed medicinal uses. Illustrators frequently copied earlier illustrations rather than living plants, which could distort a species over successive generations. It is therefore reasonable to place the Voynich drawings alongside the herbal tradition, though most of its plants still resist reliable identification.
The drawings are difficult to identify beyond their broad resemblance to herbals. A strangely drawn root could reflect a copying mistake, an established artistic convention, deliberate stylization or a species that modern viewers simply fail to recognize. Scholars have offered some plausible identifications, but no one has securely matched the full botanical sequence to a known herbal. René Zandbergen’s survey of the illustrations lays out both the similarities and the difficulties. Nor does the appearance of a plant prove that an artist constructed it from several species. Such a claim would require more specific evidence than a comparison of shapes.
A medical use would also depend on words that remain unreadable. In an ordinary herbal, a drawing might help a reader recognize the plant, but the remedy required its name, the relevant leaves or roots, instructions for preparation, and the complaint it was supposed to treat. None of that can be recovered from a Voynich picture alone. If the text contains recipes, it might supply precisely this information; it could equally discuss properties, classifications or a subject unrelated to treatment. Even the closest visual parallel to a medicinal herbal cannot establish what an individual entry prescribed.
There was no single type of medieval medical book. Some were expensive volumes prepared for wealthy patrons; others were working compilations enlarged by different hands. Illustrations might be copied across centuries while the words beside them changed language or purpose. A plant section and a later group of jar-like illustrations make a medical association plausible, but they leave the intended audience uncertain. The owner or reader could have been a physician, another kind of healer, a student, an aristocratic collector, or someone with no professional connection to medicine.
Why the bathing women matter
The pages most often cited in support of women’s medicine are those called the biological or balneological section, chiefly folios 75r–84v. They show little female figures standing in pools, emerging from vessels and gathering near green tubes or channels. Some wear crowns; others carry objects. Certain arrangements look as though liquid is passing through connected chambers. Yet the connections and proportions shift from drawing to drawing, preventing a straightforward reconstruction as a real bathhouse or water system. The imagery could refer to bathing, bodily processes, cosmology or a combination of ideas.
Balneology is the study and medicinal use of baths. Hot springs were visited in medieval Europe, and writers discussed the therapeutic qualities of their mineral waters. Peter of Eboli’s De balneis Puteolanis, a Latin poem on the baths near Pozzuoli in southern Italy, offers a documented example of the medical literature of bathing. In the Biblioteca Angelica’s thirteenth-century illuminated copy, illustrations of bathers and bathing places accompany descriptions of waters used for treatment. This establishes that baths could be the subject of serious, richly illustrated medical literature. It cannot tell us that the Voynich pools depict those same springs, a specific treatment or any actual bathing regimen.
Researchers have also proposed that some figures represent treatment connected with reproduction. Medieval practitioners certainly wrote about menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and sexual health, though their explanations of bodily function differ greatly from modern anatomy. The best-known surviving collection is the Trotula, three works rooted in the medical culture of Salerno. Monica H. Green’s critical edition and translation shows why the collection cannot be credited to one legendary female author called Trotula. One part preserves knowledge associated with a woman healer, Trota, while the others belong to different authors and traditions. The collection’s wide circulation demonstrates that women’s health was an established subject of medical writing centuries before the Voynich book was produced.
The Trotula shows that medieval writers discussed these conditions, but cannot identify any of the Voynich scenes. Medieval writers could prescribe baths for menstrual problems or other conditions without implying that any particular Voynich pool shows a womb being warmed, a cycle regulated or postpartum recovery. No such instruction can be read from MS 408. The number of female figures deserves attention, but medieval artists also depicted women in allegory, religious and moral art, personifications and astrological images. We cannot identify these figures as patients from their sex alone.
A more detailed argument appeared in 2024, when Keagan Brewer and Michelle L. Lewis published a study in Social History of Medicine. They compared the Voynich drawings with medieval writings about concealing what contemporaries called ‘women’s secrets’. Their discussion includes images in which figures appear to direct objects toward their genitals and the Bavarian physician Johannes Hartlieb’s advice to use secret letters when writing about contraception and abortion. This evidence places reproductive knowledge and deliberate secrecy within a documented medieval tradition. Brewer and Lewis also suggest that the great nine-rosette diagram depicts sexual intercourse and conception. Those readings come from visual comparison and historical context; they do not amount to a translation of the manuscript.
Online accounts sometimes describe the bathing women as if their function were already known. Brewer and Lewis present a specific hypothesis grounded in medieval texts and images. It remains possible to challenge their identification of particular objects, question whether the figures form one intended sequence, or find that another symbolic reading fits the pictures. A convincing medical explanation must account for the awkward details as well as the images that initially seem to support it.
Zodiac signs and the timing of treatment
The circular diagrams introduce another familiar part of medieval learning: the zodiac. Several emblems are recognizable, while small figures carrying or associated with stars form rings around some of the central signs. Physicians sometimes worked with astrological ideas, associating zodiac signs with parts of the body and choosing supposedly suitable dates for procedures such as bloodletting. Those beliefs help explain why a medical book might contain star charts. They were features of historical medical theory, not dependable medical rules.
Recognizing a zodiac sign does not give us a usable calendar. Pisces, Aries and Taurus can be identified, but missing leaves and repeated or divided panels complicate the surviving sequence. Some month names are written in a more familiar Latin alphabet, rather than the main Voynich characters. They may be additions by another hand, yet both their date and their place in the book’s original use remain disputed. Without readable accompanying text, we cannot reconstruct how a medieval owner interpreted the diagrams.
Someone practising astrological medicine could have believed that the moon’s or sun’s position affected when a plant remedy should be administered. That would connect the zodiac images naturally with the herbs and possible baths. But the same circles might have served calendrical, divinatory, cosmological or more general astrological purposes. Nothing about them specifically requires a gynaecological manual. The small figures are commonly called ‘nymphs’, a convenient modern label that should not be mistaken for proof that they depict mythological nymphs.
The jars, roots and star-marked paragraphs
Elsewhere the drawings change scale. Individual roots, leaves and flowers appear next to coloured vessels with tall necks, flared mouths or decorative bands. Because they resemble illustrations of containers associated with medicinal preparation and storage, cataloguers call these pages ‘pharmaceutical’. The term describes a visual resemblance, not a recovered explanation. No reliable comparison lets us identify the contents of any particular Voynich jar by its outline or decoration.
The small plant parts may also relate to the large botanical pictures earlier in the manuscript. Researchers have pointed to apparent repetitions of a leaf or root, which would make sense if a book first introduced plants and later described how to use them. An illustrator could just as readily have repeated familiar motifs across different sections. Neither interpretation establishes the meaning of the adjacent writing. These possible correspondences offer clues to the design of the book, but they are no substitute for translating its labels.
The final surviving section contains long stretches of script arranged into shorter entries, many introduced by star-shaped marks. Its appearance has earned it the informal name ‘recipe section’. A medieval medical recipe might specify ingredients, quantities, how to prepare them, when to apply them and to whom. We cannot identify any of those instructions here. Even the stars may be separators rather than numbers, categories or recipe markers. Their precise purpose is still unknown.
Taken together, the plant drawings, containers and short written entries could belong to a compilation moving from ingredients to preparation and use. The interpretation is plausible, but it assumes the modern order of the manuscript reflects its original arrangement, and that visually compatible sections were intended to work together. The evidence establishes strong affinities with medieval medical and natural-history books, but it has not demonstrated the supposed sequence of remedies.
The nine rosettes and the problem of interpreting diagrams
The large foldout known as the ‘nine rosettes’ is especially resistant to a single explanation. Nine round, flower-like shapes are connected by features resembling paths, pipes, towers and buildings across several folded panels. Some researchers see a map or cosmological diagram; others propose a representation of the body or of reproduction. The word ‘rosettes’ is only a description of their appearance. Even close inspection of the complicated connections does not establish what the diagram was designed to show.
Brewer and Lewis interpret this arrangement in light of medieval ideas about sexual anatomy, conception and intercourse. Other interpretations give more weight to the apparent architecture or to parallels with cosmological drawings. Swallowtail-shaped battlements have sometimes been taken as evidence for northern Italy or an adjacent region, where that architectural form was familiar. But a scribe might have copied the shape from an illustration. A crenellated tower cannot securely identify the place of manufacture, nor can it establish that the diagram depicts a particular town or an organ of the body.
The book’s physical construction introduces another uncertainty. In a 2026 study by Colin Layfield and Lisa Fagin Davis in Digital Medievalist, the researchers suggest that some of its pages may originally have been separate folded sheets, known as singulions, rather than the nested groups of folded sheets called quires common in medieval binding. They compared patterns in transcriptions of Voynich writing with other medieval manuscripts and examined disruptions where illustrations reach the binding. Their proposed arrangement could account for some of the apparently disjointed text and images in the volume as it survives today.
Layfield and Davis have not recovered an indisputable original page order, and their study does not decipher a word. It raises a concrete difficulty for any argument based on the present order of the pages. Pages showing plants, women in pools and jars could have been moved, bound differently or even produced at different times. A theory that depends on the present sequence needs to confront this possibility. The parchment, folds and binding can challenge an interpretation of the pictures even when the text remains unreadable.
Why the script has resisted translation
Voynich researchers commonly represent the recurring written signs with conventional Latin characters, allowing their distribution to be counted and compared. This is transliteration, an analytical substitute for the unfamiliar marks, not a translation. Some signs tend to occur in particular positions, groups recur, and different parts of the book show different distributions. The patterning makes a simple explanation as random scribbling difficult to sustain. It has not revealed whether the system represents an ordinary language, encrypted words, an invented language or something of another kind.
The handwriting offers another way to study the text without reading it. In a 2020 palaeographical study, the palaeographer Lisa Fagin Davis identified five distinct scribal hands from consistent differences in how individual signs were formed. Five hands are difficult to reconcile with the idea that one person wrote out the entire manuscript. Several scribes could have collaborated or divided the copying, but the shapes of their letters tell us nothing certain about whether they belonged to a medical circle, a religious institution, a group of midwives or another community.
One possibility is a cipher concealing a recognizable language. Another is a writing system constructed to imitate text without encoding ordinary sentences. The illustrations cannot distinguish between them. In 2025, Michael A. Greshko published an experimental cipher in Cryptologia that converted Latin and Italian passages into strings resembling several statistical characteristics of Voynich writing, using methods plausible for the fifteenth century. The experiment demonstrates that a period-appropriate cipher can reproduce some of the manuscript’s patterns. It does not identify the cipher used by the original scribes, or supply a reading for any actual passage.
We cannot yet establish that someone devised the script to protect a medical handbook. Brewer and Lewis show that some medieval writers did conceal sensitive knowledge, including matters involving reproduction. But that does not establish why these particular signs were used. The book might encode recipes to keep them from competitors, conceal reproductive information, record an unknown language or serve an entirely different purpose. ‘Invented script’ describes characters unfamiliar to modern readers. It does not establish encryption, commercial secrecy or the intentions of its makers.
What a women’s medical interpretation can explain
A medical hypothesis gains strength from the way several parts of the volume can be read together. Plants supplied the ingredients of many medieval treatments, jars might have held preparations, and short passages could conceivably record their use. Medical astrology provides a place for the zodiac, while baths and reproductive concerns offer possible settings for the female figures. Historical evidence that sexual knowledge was sometimes hidden makes deliberate secrecy conceivable too. These parallels justify serious investigation, even though none of them, separately or together, proves that this is a medical text.
Even a recognizable image leaves most of the accompanying information inaccessible. Most plants remain unidentified; the vessels have unknown functions; the star-marked entries cannot be read; and we cannot confidently follow the sequence of women and pools. A female figure could signify a patient, a mythological subject, an aspect of the body, a period of time or an abstract principle. Likewise, water in an illustration is no proof of a prescribed bath. Medieval artists used bodily figures, channels and celestial images to express processes that could not be seen directly. Several distinct explanations may therefore fit the same drawing.
There is an important difference between a book that discusses women’s health and one designed as a practical guide to it. A guide implies readable instructions that someone could follow, whereas the Voynich volume could have been a learned compilation, a teaching book, an esoteric work or a genre that does not correspond to any modern label. Its readers might have been women, men, trained physicians or people outside the profession. Nor would an interest in women’s bodies establish female authorship. The three parts of the Trotula offer a reminder that medical writing about women was not necessarily all written by women.
Other unread or only partly understood systems present a related problem. With the Rongorongo inscriptions from Rapa Nui, for example, researchers can identify repeated signs and possible structural patterns without agreeing on a translation. The Voynich Manuscript has the advantage of surviving within a rich European world of medical, astrological and manuscript traditions against which its pictures can be compared. Such parallels make theories more specific and open to testing. They cannot remove the requirement to explain the writing itself.
Researchers can test the theories against physical and textual evidence by dating parchment, identifying pigments, distinguishing scribal hands, examining how folded leaves were assembled, and testing whether proposed ciphers really reproduce the observed textual patterns. Closer comparison of illustrations might establish a connection with a particular medieval manuscript or rule out a popular identification. A convincing decipherment would have to produce consistent meanings across many passages. Finding one plausible plant name or zodiac word on one page would not be sufficient.
The Voynich Manuscript may contain medieval medical knowledge, including material on women’s health. The botanical pictures, bathing figures, astrological circles and possible drug containers all belong comfortably within a period when medicine, cosmology and reproductive knowledge overlapped. Yet the words that might confirm their purpose have resisted interpretation. The medical reading deserves attention for its historical parallels and for the questions it allows researchers to test. Until those tests produce stronger evidence, the proposed medical purpose remains a hypothesis.
