Navigate to News section

Was the Author of the Voynich Manuscript, the Literary World’s Greatest Mystery, a Jew?

A new theory emerges, based on illustrations of naked ladies bathing

by
Sophie Aroesty
July 06, 2017

A book of drawings of leafy plants, astrological signs, and naked ladies might sound like something you’re more likely to find in a college dorm room rather than in one of the world’s finest collections of rare books. But that’s where you’ll find the Voynich Manuscript: in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which is only right for what may very well be the source of one of the literary world’s longest-running mysteries.

For decades, scholars and intellectuals have pored over the strange manuscript, which is written entirely in indecipherable code and whose vellum pages are carbon-dated to the 15th Century. Historians, psychologists, linguists, engineers, antique dealers, and physicists, to name a few, routinely offer contradictory explanations as for the manuscript’s origins, but now a medieval manuscript expert has a new and compelling theory: the Voynich was written by a north Italian Jew.

Why? Just look at those naked ladies, said the expert, Stephen Skinner. The Voynich contains a section in which nude women are shown bathing in green pools filled by strange pipes. Or, as some of us know it, a Mikveh.

“The only place you see women like that bathing together in Europe at that time was in the purification baths that have been used by Orthodox Jews for the last 2,000 years,” Skinner told the Guardian. The Voynich’s author, Skinner theorized, may have dreamt up those pipes as a new invention for how to supply the Mikveh with clean water. He also credits the lack of Christian symbols, “even in the cosmological sections,” as further evidence that the author, whoever he or she might’ve been, did not worship Jesus.

Other hints of the author’s possible Jewish identity abound. The author of the Voynich, Skinner added, may have been a physician and an herbalist, professions favored by Jews at the time. Skinner also believes that the author had written the book in Northern Italy, judging by an illustration of a castle that resembles the architectural structures of 15th century northern Italian castles. This concept, too, furthers the theory that the Voynich was written by a Jew, as that region of Italy had many Jewish residents.

Feeling “85 percent certain” that he’s right, Skinner will be publishing his own edition of the Voynich next month. If you’re into literary mysteries, reserve your copy and get busy.

Sophie Aroesty is an editorial intern at Tablet.