In 1912, rare-books-dealer, Wilfrid Voynich acquired a mediaeval codex in an unknown script and unknown language from a Jesuit collection in Italy.
In 1989, Lisa Fagin Davis was starting her mediaeval-studies Ph.D. at Yale when she landed a part-time job at the universityâs Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
One of the books she was handling contained almost 40,000 words but none of them were readable. Did these never-before-seen symbols represent a natural or constructed language?
Was it a secret code, or gibberish?
This mysterious tome garnered the catchphrase of âThe most Mysterious Manuscript in hte Worldâ due to itâs illegibility and mystery. Was it an enciphered language that has been lost to time? Was it enciphered in some way or was it just gibberish?
A group of individuals led by Dr Colin Layfield from our University's Department of Computer Information Systems within the Faculty of Information & Communication Technology, was assembled to collaborate on trying to learn more about this tome.
The group is multidisciplinary in nature due to the facts it was realised early on that many different disciplines needed to be involved to coordinate any investigation into this mysterious manuscript; be it computer scientists, linguistics, historians and mediaeval paleographers. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the most interdisciplinary team to ever take a closer look a this tome.
In 2022, the Voynich Research Group, formed by Dr Layfield held its first conference with 16 peer-reviewed papers, touching on history, literature, linguistics, and cryptology amongst other topics in the context of the Voynich.
According to Dr Layfield, AI can potentially contribute in various ways including the disciplines of image processing (are there similar works we can match to the creators of the Voynich?) and natural language processing (does this have the hallmarks of a legitimate language or body of knowledge?).
More info about the Manuscript can be found online.