The Voynich manuscript – the book nobody can read

In the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale there is a small book, about the size of a hardback novel, written by hand on calfskin made in the early fifteenth century. Nearly every page carries drawings: plants that no botanist has managed to name, circles of stars, naked women bathing in green pools connected by pipes. Around the drawings, and filling the pages between them, there is text. It is neat and fluent, laid out in paragraphs, with what look like words. Nobody can read a line of it.

The library catalogues it as MS 408. Everyone else calls it the Voynich manuscript, after the bookseller who bought it in 1912 and spent the rest of his life looking for someone who could tell him what it said.

This is the first of a series of posts about it, and it is only an introduction to the object. It goes in this order:

1. The book at a glance: the basic facts in one table.
2. How it surfaced: Wilfrid Voynich and the purchase of 1912.
3. The book as an object: parchment, gatherings, missing leaves, ink, paint and date.
4. Where it had been: the owners from Prague in the early 1600s to Yale in 1969.
5. What is on its pages: the seven kinds of page, each with an example.
6. The script: how the text sits on the page, the letters, how words are built, the scribes, how the text is transcribed, and the little that is written in Latin letters.
7. Why nobody has read it.

I have kept interpretation out as far as I can. Who has tried to read the book, and how, is the subject of the next two posts. After that the series sets out the measurements any explanation of the text has to reproduce, and then turns to what such measurements show.

The book at a glance

The word count is of groups of letters separated by spaces, in the standard transcription, counting the spaces its makers marked as uncertain as spaces too. Calling them words already assumes something, and I come back to that below.

How it surfaced

Wilfrid Voynich was born Michał Habdank-Wojnicz in 1865 in Telšiai, then in the Russian Empire and now in Lithuania, into a family of the Polish minor nobility. As a young man he was arrested for his part in a Polish revolutionary circle and sent to Siberia. He escaped, reached London in 1890 and moved among the Russian émigrés there. Within a decade he had made himself into an antiquarian bookseller, and a very good one, with shops in London and later New York. In London he married Ethel Lilian Boole, the youngest daughter of the mathematician George Boole. She was a novelist in her own right: her The Gadfly sold in the millions in the Soviet Union.

In 1912 (or possibly 1911) the Society of Jesus quietly sold a collection of about 280 manuscripts and 30 printed books that had come from the old library of the Collegio Romano. Most of it went to Pope Pius X, who gave it to the Vatican Library. Voynich bought part of the rest, and this book was among his share. The sale was conducted in strict confidence, and Voynich kept it. In public he said he had found the book in a castle, in chests whose owners did not know what was in them. In 1937 the Jesuit origin came out anyway: slips found in his London shop named the library the books had come from, and a census of manuscripts printed it the same year. What remained secret until Ethel’s death in 1960 was the rest of the story, which a sealed letter she had left supplied: the promise of secrecy, and the go-between, a Father Joseph Strickland.¹ For a long time the books were thought to have been kept at Villa Mondragone, the Jesuit college at Frascati, and most accounts still put the purchase there. More recent work in the Vatican archives points instead to the Villa Torlonia at Castel Gandolfo.²

Voynich exhibited the manuscript, most famously at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1915. By 1921, when he read a paper on it to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, he had settled on an author, the thirteenth-century English friar Roger Bacon. That attribution has not survived, for reasons that come up below. He died in 1930 without learning anything about what the text said.

The book as an object

Parchment, size and binding

The book measures about 23.5 by 16.2 centimetres and is a little over five centimetres thick.³ It is written on calfskin parchment, and at least fourteen or fifteen whole skins went into it. The parchment is of ordinary quality, with the holes, tears and stitched repairs common in any medieval codex, but it was carefully prepared: the hair side and the flesh side are hard to tell apart. The present cover is limp goatskin, put on in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Inside it the leaves are sewn on old fibre thongs, possibly the original fifteenth-century ones, reinforced with leather in the 1960s.

Quires, missing leaves and foldouts

A medieval book was made from quires: a few sheets of parchment folded in half, nested inside each other and sewn through the fold. Each folded sheet is a bifolium, two leaves joined at the spine. A standard quire in this book has four bifolia, so eight leaves and sixteen pages. Someone numbered the quires at the foot of the last page of each, with two exceptions, at a date nobody knows but earlier than the leaf numbers; someone else later numbered the leaves in the top right corner.

Those numbers show how much has gone. The quire numbers run to 20 and the leaf numbers to 116, but only 18 quires survive, and fourteen leaves are missing: leaf 12, leaves 59 to 64, leaf 74, the whole of quires 16 and 18 (leaves 91–92 and 97–98), and leaves 109–110. All of that was already gone when Voynich bought the book. Some of the pages that remain are folded into it. Several open out to two or three times the width of a page, and the largest, at the heart of the book, opens out to about six pages’ worth of parchment. Pages on foldouts are numbered by panel, so leaf 67 has pages called 67r1, 67r2 and so on. That is why the number of pages is always given as “about 240”. The standard transcription, which the counts in this post follow, divides the book into 227 page units: most foldout panels get a unit of their own, but the whole side of the largest foldout is one.

Ink, paint and date

The text and the outlines of the drawings are in iron gall ink, the standard brown-black writing ink of medieval Europe, and a materials analysis judged them in all probability the same ink. The colours were painted over the outlines: blue from ground azurite, greens from copper compounds, a red-brown ochre. The text ink and the green paint are bound in gum; the Latin alphabet in the margin of folio 1r is in a different, carbon-based ink. That analysis, made in 2009 for a documentary film and published by the library, identified materials a European workshop of the period would have used.⁴ Multispectral photographs of ten pages, taken in 2014, found no earlier writing scraped off underneath, and nothing in the forensic work suggests that the book is a palimpsest.

In 2009 four samples of the parchment, taken from different leaves, were radiocarbon dated at the University of Arizona. They agree with each other, and together they place the death of the animals between 1404 and 1438, with 95 per cent probability.⁵

That date belongs to the parchment, not the writing. Parchment could be stored before use, and the dating cannot tell for how long. But writing on fresh parchment was the normal thing, and the date fits what the drawings and the handwriting suggest on their own. It rules out a thirteenth-century author such as Roger Bacon. It makes the most famous sixteenth-century candidates, John Dee and Edward Kelley, very unlikely, since they would have had to write on parchment already a century and a half old. The old suspicion that Voynich forged the book himself is disposed of by documents, not by the date: by 1912 the book had a documented history going back nearly three hundred years.

Where it had been

Prague

The history begins in Prague. The first page of the book carries a faded signature in its lower margin, visible today only under ultraviolet light. It names Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec, chemist to the Emperor Rudolf II and keeper of his botanical garden, who used the title de Tepenec from his ennoblement in 1608. How the book came to him is not known. A similar inscription, with a number beside it, appears in other books he owned. One doubt has been raised: it does not match a signature of his on a document found in 2003.

The earliest certain mention of the manuscript is a letter of April 1639 from Georg Baresch, an alchemist in Prague, to Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit polymath in Rome. Kircher had announced in a book of 1636 that he could read Egyptian hieroglyphs, which he could not, and Baresch hoped he could do the same for this book. He had sent Kircher a copy of some of its pages a year and a half earlier. He would not part with the book itself. A historian of Kircher’s correspondence had recorded the letter, but its connection with the manuscript went unnoticed until René Zandbergen, following that lead, obtained a copy in 1999.¹

When Baresch died, the book passed to his friend Johannes Marcus Marci, physician and rector of the university in Prague. In 1665 Marci sent it to Kircher with a covering letter in Latin. The letter was still tucked into the book when Voynich bought it, and it supplies most of what we know of the book’s early story:

This book, bequeathed to me by an intimate friend, I destined for you, my very dear Athanasius, as soon as it came into my possession, for I was convinced it could be read by no one except yourself. […] Dr. Raphael, tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, then King of Bohemia, told me the said book had belonged to the Emperor Rudolph and that he presented the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon, the Englishman. On this point I suspend judgment.

This is where both Rudolf II and Roger Bacon enter the story. Marci passes both on as hearsay, and says so. Rudolf certainly collected books of this kind, and the imperial accounts record a payment of 600 florins in 1599 to the collector Carl Widemann for books, delivered, in a clerk’s words, in “a small barrel with a couple of remarkable books”.⁶ (Ducats and florins were different coins; the hearsay and the accounts may still describe the same sale.) Whether that was this book, nobody can say. The Bacon attribution Marci declined to endorse, and the radiocarbon date has since disposed of it.

Someone in Prague also seems to have tried a key on the book itself. The right-hand margin of the first page has a faint column of Latin letters. Multispectral photographs show that it is really three columns: a Latin alphabet, a column of the manuscript’s own letters beside it, and a second Latin alphabet shifted by one place. Lisa Fagin Davis, comparing the letter forms, attributes it to Marci.⁷

Rome

After Marci’s letter the book disappears for two centuries into Kircher’s library at the Collegio Romano, the Jesuits’ university in Rome. Italian troops took Rome in 1870, and in 1873 the new state’s law confiscating Jesuit property reached the city. Before it took effect, the Jesuits moved part of the library into the private collections of members of the order, which were exempt. One of them was that of Petrus Beckx, the head of the order: the books from it carried slips naming his private library, which Voynich later removed to keep his promise of secrecy. From there the book went, eventually, to the villa where Voynich bought it.

From Voynich to Yale

After Voynich’s death the manuscript passed to Ethel and to their friend and assistant Anne Nill. Ethel died in 1960. The next year Nill sold the book to the New York dealer Hans P. Kraus for 24,500 dollars. Kraus asked 160,000 for it and found no buyer, and in 1969 he gave it to Yale.¹ The library put near-complete colour scans online in 2004, and the whole book can now be paged through in its digital collections.⁸

The whole chain, with the uncertain links marked:

What is on its pages

Nobody can read the text, so the book has been divided up by its pictures. The section names are modern and descriptive: they say what the drawings look like, not what the text is about. Here they are in the order of the book as it is bound now, with the number of pages and words each takes up in the standard transcription. Each is described below, with the quires it occupies and an example page.

Seven further pages, with about 2,300 words, have text and no drawing, among them the first page of the book. The counts follow the transcription’s 227 page units, so the whole side of the largest foldout counts as one page, and they include the labels beside the drawings.

Herbal

Quires 1–8, and again in quires 15 and 17. 129 pages, about 11,500 words.

The first and by far the longest section in pages is the herbal; in words the recipes at the end of the book are as long. Page after page shows a single plant, drawn large, usually complete from the root to the flower, with two or three blocks of text fitted around it.

(opens the full-size image)

The plants look like the ones in the medieval herbals that were copied all over Europe, and that resemblance is why the section is called a herbal. But only a few have been identified with any confidence, and botanists disagree even about those. Many look like composites, with the root of one plant, the leaves of another and the flowers of a third. The drawing generally came first and the text was written around it: lines stop short where they meet a leaf or a stem and carry on on the other side.

Astronomical

Quire 9. 8 pages, about 900 words.

The astronomical pages are circular diagrams, divided into sectors and rings, with suns, moons and stars, short labels in the sectors and lines of text running round the rings. Several are on foldouts.

(opens the full-size image)

Cosmological

Scattered through quires 8–10 and 14. 11 pages, about 2,200 words.

The cosmological pages are a looser group: large circular or many-part diagrams that are not obviously astronomical. Folio 57v is one of the most curious pages in the book. Its four rings hold three kinds of writing: running text, short separated words, and, in the second ring from the outside, a sequence of single letters, each standing on its own.

(opens the full-size image)

The largest foldout in the book belongs here too. It is usually called the Rosettes. Opened out, it shows nine circles in a three-by-three grid, joined by causeways, with towers, something like a castle and what may be a volcano, and text in the rings. It is the largest single drawing in the manuscript.

(opens the full-size image)

Zodiac

Quires 10–12. 12 pages, about 1,300 words.

The zodiac pages are the one place where the pictures can be read with some confidence. Each has a familiar sign at the centre: two fish for Pisces, a ram, a bull, and so on. Around it are concentric rings of small naked female figures, most standing in tubs or barrels and each holding a star on a short line. There are about thirty figures to a sign. The cycle starts with Pisces, not with Aries as it usually does, and the last two signs, Capricorn and Aquarius, are missing with the leaf that once held them. Aries and Taurus each take two pages, with fifteen figures on each.

(opens the full-size image)

Each figure has a label beside it, a single word in the manuscript’s script, and a line of text runs around each ring. If the labels are names of stars or of days, nobody has managed to show it.

(opens the full-size image)

Balneological

Quire 13. 19 pages, about 6,400 words.

The balneological section, the whole of quire 13, gets its name from its bathing scenes. Naked women stand and sit in pools of green or blue water, linked by tubes and channels that look sometimes like plumbing and sometimes like something anatomical. Similar bathing scenes appear in medieval manuscripts about the medicinal baths near Naples, and there too the water is usually painted green. The text on these pages is dense, and it runs right up to the drawings and continues on the other side of them.

(opens the full-size image)

Pharmaceutical

Quires 15 and 19. 16 pages, about 2,500 words.

The pharmaceutical section returns to plants, but in pieces. Roots and leaves are drawn in rows, each with a short label, and down the margin stand tall, elaborately painted containers that look like apothecaries’ jars. Many of the plant parts look like reduced versions of the drawings in the herbal.

(opens the full-size image)

Recipes

Quire 20, and both sides of folio 58 in quire 8. 25 pages, about 11,600 words.

The book ends with the recipes: page after page of short paragraphs, more than three hundred of them in all, with no drawings except a small star in the margin at the start of each paragraph. The section’s name comes from the look of the pages, which resemble the collections of short medical recipes common in the period. The stars are sometimes painted red, sometimes left plain, and some have a tail.

(opens the full-size image)

The order of the sections is the order of the book as it is bound now, and there are good reasons to think it is not the order in which it was written. Leaves may have been shuffled when it was rebound. That will come up again in this series.

The script

How the text sits on the page

The first page of the book is a fair place to start.

(opens the full-size image)

The writing runs from left to right in horizontal lines, and is grouped into paragraphs. A paragraph usually opens with one of the tall letters described below, often standing in the margin or rising high above the line. Its last line is often short and pushed to the right, a habit you can see on folio 1r. There is no punctuation of any kind and nothing that looks like numerals. The lines are broken by spaces into groups of letters. They look like words, and everyone calls them words, though nobody has shown that they are.

Running text in paragraphs is the commonest arrangement, but not the only one. There are labels: single words written beside a drawing or part of one, like the figures on the zodiac pages or the roots on the pharmaceutical pages. There is text written in rings round circular diagrams, and text running outwards along the spokes. And there are a few places, such as the second ring of folio 57v, where single letters stand on their own.

The hand is even and practised. It flows, and there are hardly any of the crossings-out, corrections and second thoughts you would expect from someone copying something unfamiliar.

The letters

Close up, the script looks like no known alphabet, and yet many of its letters look almost familiar. Here are sixteen words cut from two pages of the herbal, each labelled with the transcription explained further down. Between them they contain nearly every common letter.

• daiin
• chokaiin
• shodaiin
• qotaiin
• qokey
• otchal
• kydainy
• ypchol
• fodan
• cthy
• ckhy
• cphy
• cfhodar
• dals
• sor
• dam

The letters fall into a few families. The transcription letters given for each are explained in the section after next. For now they are only names.

• Round letters: o, a, y, d. A small circle; an a; a 9 with a tail, rather like a y; and an 8. They turn up anywhere in a word, and y very often at its end.

• Benches: ch, sh. Two c-strokes joined by a bar along the top. In sh a plume rises above the bar. They come at the start and in the middle of words.

• Gallows: k, t, p, f. Tall letters with two upright stems and loops, rising well above the line. p and f have a long stroke out to the left, and they stand mostly in the first line of a paragraph.

• Bench gallows: ckh, cth, cph, cfh. A gallows standing on a bench, as if on a pedestal. They come inside words and at their start.

• The e-stroke: e. A short stroke like a c, often doubled or tripled. It sits inside words, after the benches and the gallows.

• Minims: i, n. Short downstrokes, like the strokes of a written m; n ends in a curl. They come in runs before a closing letter: in, iin, iiin.

• Closing letters: l, r, m. A looped l; a 2 with a tail; and something like an n with a tail curling up. Mostly at the end of words.

• Others: q, s, g, x. q looks like a 4 and almost always stands first in its word, followed by o. s looks like an r or a 2 with a hook at the top. g and x are uncommon.

The gallows are the most striking. They are what makes a page of the manuscript recognisable from across a room, and they are the letters that open a paragraph. Some shapes resemble the abbreviation signs used in medieval Latin manuscripts, and the q followed by o, written in one movement, looks very much like a 4o.

How many letters there are depends on how they are counted. Is ch one letter or two? Is iin three, or one? Counted one way there are about twenty-five distinct signs, counted another about forty. Nobody yet agrees which count is right, and the answer matters a great deal for anything you might try to measure about the text.

How words are built

Even without reading a word, you can see that words are not put together at random. They seem to be built from a few parts in a fixed order. A q stands at the start and is followed by o. Gallows and benches come early or in the middle. A run of e-strokes follows them. The minims and the closing letters, aiin, ain, ar, al, dy, y, come at the end. Put together that way, the parts give words like qokeedy, chedy, shedy, daiin, okaiin and chol, and these come up again and again on page after page.

Words also repeat in a way that is unusual for written language. Here is part of a line from folio 75r, after the drawing that interrupts it:

(opens the full-size image)

The same word three times in a row, and then two more that differ from it by a letter or two. That is not rare in the manuscript. What it means, if it means anything, is one of the questions the rest of this series is about.

The scribes

Prescott Currier saw in 1976 that more than one hand had been at work. In 2020 the palaeographer Lisa Fagin Davis compared the letter forms page by page and distinguished five scribes.⁹ They wrote the same script, but each had a recognisable way with certain letters, and they divided the book between them roughly by section:

• Scribe 1, about 110 pages: most of the herbal in quires 1–7, and the pharmaceutical section.
• Scribe 2, about 45 pages: the balneological section, and herbal bifolia scattered through quires 4–7, between Scribe 1’s.
• Scribe 3, about 35 pages: the recipes and part of the later herbal.
• Scribe 4, about 25 pages: the astronomical and zodiac pages and most of the cosmological ones.
• Scribe 5, a handful of herbal pages.

The page counts follow the transcription, which leaves one page unassigned. This is the standard view, and the first by a trained palaeographer, but it is not settled. In 2026 Torsten Timm argued that the letter forms used to tell the scribes apart occur almost everywhere, and that the five scribes largely restate Currier’s two kinds of text. No reply has yet appeared in print.

Writing it down

To work with the text at all, it has to be turned into something that can be typed and counted. Most work today uses EVA, a transcription alphabet designed around 1998 by Gabriel Landini and René Zandbergen.¹⁰ EVA gives each shape a Latin letter chosen to look like it, not to sound like anything: the circle is o, the 8 is d, the 4 is q, and the gallows are k, t, p and f. The letter names in the list above are EVA. It deliberately records strokes rather than deciding what counts as a letter, which is why the bench is written as two letters, ch, and a run of minims as iin.

Here are the first five lines of the book, close up.

(opens the full-size image)

And here are the same five lines in the transcription by Zandbergen and Landini:

fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.[cth:oto]res.y.kor.sholdy
sory.ckhar.or,y.kair.chtaiin.shar.ase.cthar.cthar,dan
syaiir.sheky.or.ykaiin.shod.cthoary.cthes.daraiin.sy
soiin.oteey.oteo[s:r],roloty.cthiar,daiin.okaiin.or.okan
sair,y.chear.cthaiin.cphar.cfhaiin

A full stop is a space between words, a comma is a space the transcribers were unsure of, and a bracket holds two readings of a letter they could not agree on, such as [cth:oto] in the first line. Doubts of this kind are everywhere in the manuscript. Spaces in particular are often narrow, and whether two groups of letters are one word or two is a judgement call.

It looks like a language when it is typed out like this. It is important to remember that it is only a labelling of shapes. Nothing about EVA says what any letter sounds like or means.

Writing in Latin letters

There is a little writing in the book in Latin letters, and it does not help much. The month names on the zodiac pages, like the mars on the Pisces page, are in a different hand and a different ink from the main text and were probably added later. They are in a Romance language, often taken for French or Occitan; where they come from has never been settled. The alphabet in the margin of the first page has already come up. And on the last page, partly above and partly inside the frame of the text, someone wrote four lines in Latin letters.

(opens the full-size image)

Parts of these lines look like Latin and parts like German. One phrase has been read, following a suggestion of the art historian Erwin Panofsky, as so nim geismi[l]ch o, “so take goat’s milk, or …”, which sounds like a recipe; transcriptions of it differ. But no one has made the whole into sense, and it is not clear that these lines have anything to do with the rest of the book.

Why nobody has read it

Since 1912 the manuscript has been studied by professional cryptographers, among them some of the best the American government employed in two world wars, and by linguists, historians, botanists and statisticians. In the last few years machine learning has had a go too. Readings are announced every year, sometimes with some fanfare. Each one so far has failed under scrutiny: either it could not produce the same reading twice from the same procedure, or it produced something that no reader of the proposed language would accept as that language.

The failure goes deeper than having no key. It is not even known what kind of thing the text is. It could be a natural language written in an invented alphabet. It could be a cipher hiding a known language, or a language written in a way that leaves most of its vowels out. It could be an artificial language invented for the book, or a text with no meaning at all, produced by some procedure to look like writing. Each of these has serious defenders. The evidence that would settle the question is the text itself, and the text is the one thing nobody can read.

A genuine, well-dated medieval object, a large amount of fluently written text, and no agreement even about what sort of text it is: that combination is what makes the Voynich manuscript one of the best-known unsolved problems of its kind. It is not a puzzle with a missing piece, where we know what the answer will look like. Nobody yet knows what kind of answer to expect.

What comes next

The next two posts tell the story of the attempts to read the manuscript, and then to measure it, from its first owners to the present: who tried, what they claimed, and why each claim fell. After that comes a post on method: the measurements any explanation of the text has to reproduce, and how to take them so that they can be checked, repeated and fairly compared. A question narrower than “what does it say?”, and one that can be answered, is what sort of process could have produced text like this.

The manuscript is in the public domain, and the Beinecke has made every page of it freely available. All the images in this post come from its digital copy, and the photographs of pages can be clicked to open at twice the size. They are worth the time.

Footnotes

1. René Zandbergen’s site voynich.nu is the reference for the manuscript’s history, and this post follows its account of the provenance, the Baresch letter, the sale to Kraus and the gift to Yale: see The Voynich MS — Its history. The translation of Marci’s letter quoted above is the one usually given; voynich.nu quotes excerpts of it. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. The case for Villa Torlonia rests on the archival work of Francesca Potenza in the Vatican Library, as reported in Zandbergen’s history pages cited above. ↩

3. The physical description follows R. Clemens (ed.), The Voynich Manuscript (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Yale University Press, 2016), the facsimile with the library’s own essays, and the description of the quires and binding on voynich.nu. ↩

4. J. G. Barabe, Materials Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript (McCrone Associates, 2009), published by Yale University Library. The analysis was commissioned by the makers of a documentary film. ↩

5. G. Hodgins, Dating Results for Voynich Manuscript Parchment Leaves 8, 26, 47 and 68, letter to Yale University Library, 17 February 2009, reproduced at voynich.nu. The combined result is 516 ± 18 radiocarbon years before present. The letter itself makes the point that this dates the parchment and not the writing. ↩

6. S. Guzy, “Book Transactions of Emperor Rudolf II, 1576–1612: New Findings on the Earliest Ownership of the Voynich Manuscript”, CEUR Workshop Proceedings 3313 (2022). The seller was Carl Widemann, a collector of alchemical and medical manuscripts. ↩

7. L. Fagin Davis, “Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript”, Manuscript Road Trip, 8 September 2024. The images were taken in 2014 by the Lazarus Project, of ten pages only. ↩

8. Beinecke MS 408 in the Yale digital collections. The images here are courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. ↩

9. L. Fagin Davis, “How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript”, Manuscript Studies 5/1 (2020), 164–180, doi:10.1353/mns.2020.0011. The assignment of pages to scribes used in the list is the one recorded in the Zandbergen–Landini transcription. The challenge is T. Timm, One Hand, Five Labels (2026), a self-published deposit, doi:10.5281/zenodo.19169450. ↩

10. G. Landini and R. Zandbergen, EVA, the European Voynich Alphabet (1998–2000); see voynich.nu. The transcription quoted is Zandbergen and Landini’s file ZL3b, and the word and page counts in this post are taken from it by scripts/export-voynich-stats.mjs in this site’s source. ↩