Field Note1 min read
The Voynich Manuscript is older than its most famous theory
Radiocarbon dating put the Voynich parchment in the early 1400s, which quietly ruled out the idea that Roger Bacon wrote it.
When the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought the manuscript that now carries his name, he believed it was the work of Roger Bacon, the 13th-century English friar. For decades that was the story people repeated.
Then a team at the University of Arizona, led by physicist Greg Hodgins, cut four tiny samples of parchment from four different pages and radiocarbon-dated them.
That’s more than a century after Roger Bacon died (around 1292).
The manuscript is held today at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library as MS 408, and the whole book has been digitized, so anyone can page through it.
Sources
- University of Arizona radiocarbon results, announced in February 2011, reported by The Register and NBC News.
- René Zandbergen, notes on the radiocarbon dating, including the 95% probability range and the lack of a formal published paper.
- Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University: Voynich Manuscript, MS 408.