The Voynich Manuscript

I’m fascinated about the types of things that people are able to create in their notebooks. Most recently the most impressive stuff that I see are the sketch notes that you get from a lot of the conferences these days, but this is something else.

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex that is thought to have been written in the 15th Century (carbon dated between 1404—1438) and gets it’s name from a Polish book dealer who bought the Voynich Manuscript in 1912.

The Voynich manuscript has an unknown origin and no one knows exactly what the content actually says.

Sounds weird right?

Cryptographers

Some of the worlds foremost Cryptographers have tried to identify what the manuscript actually says but as of yet no one has been able to crack the code (I often wonder if it’s gibberish with no real meaning, but I’m pretty sure that codebreakers from the 1st and 2nd World War would know code from gibberish).

Illustrations

The illustrations in the manuscript are divided into six distinct categories.

• Herbal
• Astronomical
• Biological
• Cosmological
• Pharmaceutical
• Recipes

What codex would you create?

First of all, what’s a codex? Well a codex was a name given to differentiate between a scroll and what we’ve come to call a book today…. so essentially it’s a book. These days we differentiate a codex from a book by saying a codex is handwritten.

So, if you were going to use your notebook to write a codex what would you choose to write about? What could you cover in the 48 pages, or maybe combine them in a set of three. If you really wanted to put something lengthy together you could write from the Sun to the end of the Solar System