With the help of multispectral scanning, American medievalists have discovered exactly how a 17th-century Prague doctor tried to decipher a mysterious manuscript. Researchers from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (USA) tested equipment designed 10 years ago for multispectral analysis of ancient manuscripts. Among other things, they used this method to analyze the Voynich manuscript, one of the most mysterious manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

Multispectral imaging uses ultraviolet and infrared radiation to produce a digital image. Especially when working with medieval manuscripts, UV imaging can make faint or obliterated text readable. This is despite the fact that most medieval inks (especially those used to write the Voynich manuscript) contained significant amounts of iron.

When ink is scraped off or faded, the molecular bond remains, so faded text can fluoresce when exposed to UV light. With this technology, it is possible not only to read faded or distant text, but also to determine whether a manuscript is a palimpsest or has undergone serious corrections.

Historian and paleographer, executive director of the American Academy of Medieval Studies Lisa Fagin Davis (Lisa Fagin Davis) published on her blog Manuscript Road Trip multispectral images of 10 pages of the Voynich manuscript were taken In 2014.

Why had no one bothered to scan these scans for 10 years? Davis doesn’t know the answer to that question, but he assumes it was a personnel turnover. He scrutinized the images that were now available and discovered something that couldn’t be seen in macro photography of the manuscript.

One of the biggest difficulties in deciphering a manuscript is those written in an unknown alphabet. The lines run to the left, the letters are slightly inclined to the left. Some researchers tried to combine individual symbols of this alphabet with Latin letters due to external similarities. However, such a hypothesis did not find support in the scientific community and did not help in deciphering the code.

In addition to the ambiguous symbols, the manuscript contains several Latin letters and a German word (rot, “red”). Scientists assume that these letters are related to the instructions of the artist who made the pictures after writing the text.

After examining multi-band images of the manuscript’s pages, Davis discovered columns of symbols written vertically on one page. The first column contained the entire Latin alphabet from A to Z. The second had a symbol from the manuscript’s native alphabet written across each Latin letter. The third was also in Latin, offset vertically by only one symbol.

Altogether, it appears to be an attempt to decipher the text, long before Wilfred Voynich found the manuscript in the library of a Jesuit college in Italy in 1912. In the Middle Ages and modern times, cryptography primarily used symbol substitution, using tables similar to those found in manuscripts.

Whoever wrote these three-column letters followed a style called humanist minuscule, a style of writing developed by Italian humanists in the 14th and early 15th centuries. It was used by educated people who wanted to emphasize their commitment to humanist ideas until the 18th century. Davis and his colleagues decided to find out.

They collected handwriting samples of known manuscript owners: German botanist Leonard Rauwolf, his friend and heir, doctor Karl Wiedemann, Emperor Rudolph II, Jacob Sinapius (a pharmacist-herbalist close to the emperor), Prague alchemist Jiri Bareš, doctors Johannes Marcy and Athanasius Kircher, Yaphanas Kircher. To these were added the signatures of John Dee and Edward Kelly, who were able to see the manuscript in the collection of Emperor Rudolph.

Comparison of the handwriting showed that the painting was prepared by the scientist and medical doctor Johannes Markus Marcy. He owned the book for three years: in 1662 he inherited it from his friend Jiri Bareš and in 1665 he sold (or gave) it to Opanas Kircher. He was apparently one of the first to try to decipher the manuscript. And just like his followers in our century, nothing came of it.

The multispectral analysis also showed that the manuscript was not a palimpsest, as some scientists had assumed. This means that the final carbon-14 analysis correctly identified the year the manuscript was created as 1425.