The Voynich Manuscript: Understanding the Untranslatable with Lisa Fagin Davis

[MUSIC] >> Everybody, and welcome, or welcome back to the podcast. As usual, it is me, Zoe here with my co-host, Mack and we are two video game designers. >> I guess, well, I'm a video game designer, game designers, and the devilist. And we bring you the weirdest video nonsense, contextualize it for you, and teach you how to adapt it for your story crafting needs, whether that's TTRPGs, video games, novels, whatever you're creating, whether you want to create, or if you're just listening. That's great, too, we'd love to have you here. So, that's what we're doing today. And today, I am so excited. We're doing a fabulous guest episode about the Voynich main script, which is something that has captured my attention since I was a teenager. So, slightly star-struck at the minute. >> Yes, we're interviewing the author of the Voynich script of Voynich. >> Can you imagine? Oh, my God. >> Spoiler alert. >> Right? Anyway, anyway, before we get into all of that, if you would like to get in touch with us, of course, we have all of our social media. We've got a discord community, so if you want to get in touch, if you are looking for resources, ideas, community, all of that stuff is in our show notes. If you're looking for our citations, our sources, all of that could stuff also in the show notes. So, that's all there for ya. And special shout out and continue to our patrons. You guys keep the show running. And we write up some of these things that we've discussed and turn them into adventures, turn them into quests, turn them into magic items, and put them on a Patreon for you guys. So, if you're interested in that, again, all of it's in the show notes. >> And yeah, let's get into it. So, today with us, we have Lisa Fagan Davis, the executive director of the new people Academy of America, and professor of manuscript studies at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science in Boston. I did it one breath, nice. And she's been studying the people you're at the Voynich script and North American collections for about 30 years. >> So, thank you so much for coming on. >> Oh, it's such a pleasure. I'm really excited for the conversation. >> Yes, absolutely. So, first to introduce this, what is your primary area of research? It's the subject of today's episode. But just to introduce us to it, what is it? >> Yes, so I am an expert on all things having to do with medieval manuscripts. So, how they're made, how they're written, how they're decorated, who owned them, what happened to them after the Middle Ages, and what the heck are they doing in North America if they started in medieval Europe? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Not to immediately go off track, but I happen to have found, not a manuscript, but it is a 1602 copy of a Italian knight romance in Alaska of all places. I have no idea what the providence of the text is. I don't know how it got there, but that one was a cool store, that was a cool thrift store, $25. >> Nice, well, I will say that Alaska is the only state in the union where I have not found a single medieval manuscript yet. So, if we have listeners in Alaska, if you happen to know someone who has a page of a medieval manuscript or has it hanging on their wall, please let me know, and we will tick off our last license plate that we've been looking for for all these years. >> That would be incredible. >> They may be frozen in the ice, Captain America. >> That could happen. >> Crew, crew. >> Head out to your nearest glacier. >> Time capsule, all right, fabulous. So, expert on manuscripts, and you've got two books coming out next year about the Voynich manuscript. One is for Teams, focusing on the importance of evidence-based research and critical thinking. There's co-author Carolyn Chinamin, the Cristophano and award-winning children's STEM author, and the other is a collection of essays about the manuscript by computer scientist, linguists, AI specialists, and other scientists, as well as yourself, co-edited by you and Colin Lefield, who is in computer science at the University of Malta. So, do please check those out. If you have links to those, we'll put them in our citations. >> Nothing yet. >> Nothing yet. Okay. >> No worries. >> Two are linked together. >> We'll show that out. >> Fabulous. Okay. So, let's get straight into it. I know we're going to get into the Voynich itself, but if you don't mind, give us kind of a background on how you got into this area of study in the first place, because I'm always curious as to how people got into medieval studies, because it's such a fun field and particularly manuscripts. And your area of expertise is very, I'm going to say more hard science-y than, for instance, the type of study that I get. >> Yeah, in some ways, that's true, because I deal with forensic evidence, as well as the connoisseurship, that's certainly true. >> Yeah. >> And I think there's something there that people don't consider when they think of like, oh, medievalists, people who do middle ages stuff, they don't think about that aspect of it. So, if you could kind of illustrate your background for us before we dive into the Voynich itself. >> Yeah, sure. So, I came to medieval studies as many people of my particular generation did, that is through Tolkien. He was my on ramp as he is for many people. And I've also found that medievalists and coders get along really well and have a lot in common. And I think that's because we all start in the same place, which is sitting in our parents' basement playing D&D. And then some of us become medievalists and some of us become coders. And that's, you know, medievalists are very digitally savvy, which feels ironic, but it's absolutely the case. The very first digital humanities project ever was a medieval studies project in the late 1950s, where a priest named Father Busa collaborated with IBM and a whole team of female punch card operators to put together a concordance of Thomas Aquinas, the works of Thomas Aquinas. Literally the first digital humanities project ever was a medieval studies project. >> That's incredible. >> Yeah, I mean, it's nothing new for medievalists to be collaborating with scientists the way that I do. So I majored in medieval studies in college and managed to get my hands on a medieval manuscript as a senior in college. And that kind of tactile connection with the medieval object, really, you know, kind of lit me up. And so I went on to get a PhD in medieval studies. And I did that at Yale, where I was able to work at the Rare Book Library at the Biny Key Rare Book and manuscript library as part of my education, because I knew I wanted to be in the library world instead of being a professor. So I worked at the library for several years. And the curator, you know, if you're the curator at the Biny Key Library, you get to be responsible for one of the greatest collections in the world of medieval material. But it also means you're in charge of the Voynichman manuscript and everything that comes with it. And my boss, the curator, was more than happy to hand over that responsibility to me. Does this come with the kind of like librarian, analog, equivalent of running a late night call-in radio show? I'm done, yeah. You occasionally get like handwritten queries from conspiracy cranks. Yeah, that's exactly it. Long time reader, first time theorist, yes. Yeah, there you go. There you go. That's good. It's a really good, actually, a really good metaphor. But yes, it absolutely does. And so I was kind of put in charge of handling Voynich-related requests and correspondence. And this is the early '90s. We're not doing email yet. So it's all sort of snail mail requests for photographs where people would write with their theories and I would respond politely. And that's pretty much what goes on today, except they come in by email that are posted on blogs and self-published print-on-demand books. And that's sort of-- Wow, just to state my own curiosity, how frequent is that? Every day, every day. I believe it. This year, in 2026, there has not been a day that goes by when I have not gotten a emailed solution. I got one this morning. They come at me every single freaking day. Oh my gosh. Yeah, incredible. You know, I can't review them all. It could be the answers sitting in my inbox right now. I have a job. I have things I've got to do. I can't spend all my time reviewing every one's solutions. I was going to ask, like, if any of them's had good ideas or really how many of them are unique? Or are they like retreading the same ground? Yeah, it's a little of both. I mean, a lot of people just kind of regurgitate the things that we've heard before. It's abbreviated Latin. It's Hebrew. It's Arabic, you know, those sort of things that we can-- the linguists can pretty much prove can't be true, given the analytics and the statistics about the text in the manuscript. The biggest problem people have is that they don't do the reading first. Of course. You can't just come to it and say, hey, flawed, or chat GPT, read the Voynich manuscript for me. And then you're done. That's, you know, that's not going to work. Please tell me you have been getting those with people or I asked while, and it said. Yes. Oh my gosh. And it's someone who has sort of developed their own AI companion to work with them. Like they consider the AI a co-author. And they have some weird name. And they always have an acronym for whatever their theory is. And you know, there's a whole sort of template. I think what happens is people come up with a solution. And then they go online. They go to Claude or chat GPT. And they say, now that I've solved the Voynich manuscript, what should I do next? And the answer is, you should send it to Lisa Fagan Davis because she would love to hear from you. And I thought, "Don't really break it." but they're not the best thing to do. Those of you out there in listener land, you have a solution to the Voynich manuscript. Don't send it to me or any other scholar because they just can't do that for you. And there's no reward. People always ask where they get their reward. There is no reward for solving the manuscript. - Why would there be? - Nobody at Yale is gonna respond to you. So do not write the binding key library because they will not respond. They get hundreds of these all the time. - I bet. Good to know. - Yeah. - I assume the correct route would be to try and publish it on your own because if it has some kind of merit. - Get peer reviewed, right? That's the answer. You know, put some better review. - If you can't put it into like a journal article form, that's probably 'cause you don't have enough supporting evidence and maybe you should go back to square one. - There you go, come back. - Okay, so I'm gonna back at square one. - We're getting so off track. I'm sorry, we've decided. - No, no, no, no, no. This is fabulous. However, I am gonna back us up. So for our listeners who perhaps don't know what the Voynich manuscript is in the first place. - Surely that. - Introduce us to this manuscript. - Sure. - listeners, for context, we've done a couple episodes on manuscripts and how they're made before. So if you're interested, we do have a backlog for that. But I'm gonna introduce it very briefly by just saying manuscripts were not singular texts the way we think of books nowadays. Many times their collections of different works and different topics. Sometimes they were taken apart and put back together with other manuscripts. And we cannot necessarily assume anything off the top about the Voynich manuscript because it is as yet untranslated. - Very correct. So all of the forensic tests that have been done on the material of this manuscript. So carbon 14 on the parchment. We've seen x-ray fluorescence that tells you the elemental composition of the inks and pigments. None of those tests had found anything suspicious or out of the ordinary. So while you cannot absolutely prove that something is authentic, you can't prove that this 'cause the parchment is from the early 1400s, does that absolutely mean the manuscript was written? Then no, I mean parchment could sit around, I suppose, not for 600 years, but, you know, okay? - For a while. - But there's nothing to support the idea that it's a modern forgery or that it was an object that was made in the last century or even the last two centuries. There's just no question. - In order to do that, someone would have had to get period-appropriate materials all of which would have somehow been unused for hundreds of years. Like where would we get all this? - Or they made ink and pigment using medieval recipes and the same ingredients. And sure, you could do that, but a hundred years ago, why would you bother? There are no tests to prove you're wrong. - So why in the world would you go to the trouble when you could just go to the paint store down the street and buy some green paint and call it a day, you know? - Yep. - So the whole forgery hypothesis is not one that rings true to me. I spent a lot of time with this manuscript and there's nothing about it that does not feel authentic. - Just the fact that the parchment is carbon dated seems to like, obediently say like, if this were a forgery, it would have to be colossally high effort for like no reason. - Yeah, exactly. - I mean, where would you get blank 600 year old parchment? Oh, people have answers to that. You ask that question. There are people at there who will say, well, we know that Mr. Voynich bought something or other, bought some archive and there might have been blank parchment in it. Okay, fine, but about the ink and the pigments and the sewing threads and the multiple bindings and the provenance history. I mean, there's just too much that you would have to fake. - Yep, you know, it's one thing to fake one like a painting that's basically a flat two-dimensional surface. It's quite another to fake an entire three-dimensional object that's as complicated as a medieval mini script. I mean, it's just unimaginable to me that somebody could do it. - So what is the Voynich? - Well, that's nobody knows. So it is a book. It is written using a completely unknown alphabet of about 25 to 30 symbols. So it feels alphabetic. - I was just about to ask how you knew it was an alphabet. - All right. - We don't. It's in the Goldilocks Zone for an alphabet. You know, if there were 300 symbols, then it might be something else. If there were only 10 symbols, then that would tell us something too. But it is kind of in that Goldilocks Zone for most alphabets that aren't figural based, you know, like Mandarin or something. But for a kind of a Western style alphabet, it is totally in keeping with the number of symbols. - Might it be a syllabary? - It's unlikely based on what my linguist friends tell me. I am not a linguist. So don't ask me any complicated linguistics questions that I can send you some bibliography that will answer that question for you. So I collaborate very closely with a woman from the linguistics department at Yale, who's an absolute genius, her name's Claire Bowen, and she's done some really amazing work with some of her colleagues and students thinking about the statistical properties of Voina Cheese, and whether it is a syllabary or something else. But then it's also got these really insane illustrations of these crazy plants that look almost like you should be able to recognize them, but some of them are really not recognizable at all. So it's possible that the artist is just a really bad artist. I think like the quality of the illustrations is not great. There are a lot of fun and they're entertaining, and I love them. But it's not high art. This is not the book of Kels or the Treve Scher of the Duc de Berrie. This is a work-a-day, low, low quality manuscript. So you've got those plants. Then there are these sort of star diagrams, which get the conspiracy theorists pretty excited about aliens coming at us. Then there are a bunch of wheels with zodiac signs in the middle of the Western zodiac. So that's a clue. And then there's this section with the naked ladies in these green baths with these diagrams that look like internal organs. So when you put all of that together, it starts to feel like some kind of a scientific or medical misleading, preserving that kind of knowledge. What do you do with these plants? With your Pisces, what does that mean? Let's look at the stars. Let's think about how we take care of our bodies with medicinal bathing. I think we've talked on the podcast before about how late medieval medical-- let's go ahead and say science-- does incorporate astrology from time to time. Yeah, oh, absolutely. That's not necessarily like-- Yeah, that could all be-- Right, no, that's not contradictory at all. In fact, it would be weird if it didn't incorporate astrology. That's exactly what you would expect. You don't make a move without talking to somebody about what's your sign-- The stars. You pour an under, and that's all really important stuff. Especially for healers, right? I mean, for healing, that's extremely important. So that's basically what the manuscript is. It's this combination of texts. I mean, in some ways, it's really typical, right? It's a manuscript. It's written on parchment using iron-gull ink and really low-end pigments. There's no lapis here. There's no malachite. It's just like low-end botanical or mineral pigments. Not an expensive book. It is a book made for a person or community that didn't have a lot of resources that was probably making their own parchment and mixing their own ink and mixing their own pigments in sort of a DIY and a situation. So if it weren't for the fact that no one can read it, this would probably have been filed under, like, yet, another late medieval medical miscellaneous number 74-P. - Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. - That's the thing that gets me is that when you kind of look at it, you're like, okay, kind of standard, par for the course. Not in any language, any text, any understanding that we know. And so my immediate follow-up question is, why would you do that? Why would you encode it? Why would you put it in some other language? - For the laws. - Right, and then, as I was looking through your articles in your work, you've got multiple scribes going on here, which, like, I want to get into. So what the hell? - Yeah. - That's what's going on. - So in my own work, I have distinguished five different hands at work. I have identified five scribes working in the manuscript. And that immediately means there are five people who knew how to write this alphabet, who knew how to write this language, whatever it is. And the jury is still out on whether it is a cypher text or a lost language. We just don't know still what kind of category of text this manuscript falls into. The analytics are not determinative. Some of the analytics tell us it absolutely looks like a natural language. And others, it is really an outlier compared to natural languages. So the jury is still out there, and there's still a lot of work to be done, I think, on the linguistic side, before we can even make a determination about whether it's a code or a lost language. And remember, of course, only about five to 10% of medieval manuscripts survive. - Right. - But there is so much that's lost. There could have been an entire library of Voinichese, but just didn't survive for whatever reason. Right, you know, right now it's unique. But we have no way of knowing whether it has always been unique. - Dark manuscripts. possibility just grab. me so tightly. Like that's so fun for storytelling. So we'll come back to that. Yeah. Yeah. I can kind of imagine if you have a group of healers or whatever, them going like, oh, well, our knowledge is proprietary. It's trade secrets. So we're going to like design a little cipher and like tack that up on the wall in our workshop and then we'll all use that cipher to write our stuff. Yes, that's certainly one possibility, right? As you have this community of practice, this community of knowledge, trying to preserve their knowledge for future generations, right? Using either their own secret language. That's certainly not unknown. There were women's communities in the Middle Ages who lived in isolation outside of not even nunneries, but widows or other women who lived in community. Maybe it was a group of women that had their own language. Maybe it's women's knowledge that's being cast along. We just, we won't know until we know. Following the footsteps of Hildegard fun thing in there. That's right, exactly. People, there's a lot of talk about Hildegard because the illustrations do in some ways remind you of this Gideos, especially those circular diagrams. They look an awful lot like Hildegard's visions. Of course, the manuscript is much too late to have a connection to Hildegard, but there's certainly people who would like it to have something to do with her. So, now we kind of understand what the text is. We've got our multiple scribes. We've kind of gone through it a little bit. What is the short version of the history of attempts to understand this manuscript? Well, can I start in the 1600s? For sure. Can we start there? Okay. So, the manuscript first appears in the historic record around 1600, 1599, 1600. When it seems, we don't know this for sure, but the evidence, there's some circumstantial evidence that it was purchased by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in 1599. And if he did buy it then, he may have bought it from a physician in Augsburg named Carl Vittemann. That's a recent discovery by researcher named Stefan Guzi. He's done some just incredible archival work. So, then the manuscript stays in Prague until 1665. So, Rudolph, his court was in Prague. So, the manuscript is in Prague. Just that first bit already raises so many questions. Like, why did Rudolph buy this? Well, he was really into the occult and magic and that sort of thing. So, it's totally the sort of thing that would have appealed to him. It absolutely would have fit right into his book collection. So, then it gets sort of passed from hand to hand by Bequest or Gift. And then in 1665, the owner at that point was a sort of natural scientist or natural philosopher named Johannes Markis Marki. He sends the manuscript to Athanasius Kirker in Rome, who's a very well-known Jesuit scholar, who is an expert among other things on Egyptian hieroglyphics. I mean, he couldn't read them. Nobody could read them, but he thought he could, and he wrote a book about them. And so, Marki assumed if anybody could read it, it's going to be Kirker. So, he sends it to Rome to the Jesuit library in Rome, and it stays in Rome until 1912 when Mr. Voynich buys it. Now, we don't actually know if the Jesuits really paid attention to it. There's some letters from Kirker where he says, "Oh, looks like Glagolitic to me, but I don't know." And that's true. It sort of does look a little bit like Glagolitic. It's got the loopy bits. I can see the visuals in the library. Glagolitic, yes? Yeah, sure. To find that term real quick. Glagolitic? Yeah. Yeah, so Glagolitic is a Cyrillic alphabet. Oh, okay, okay. It's a writing system. It's the script traditionally used to write old church Slavonic. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Now, I can look at that. It's extremely pretty. Oh, it's lovely. Yeah. In my opinion, it is one of the prettiest scripts out there. It's a lovely lettering system. So we know Kirker seems to have looked at it, but he didn't really study it, per se. There is some evidence that Marke actually tried to crack it at one point because I found under ultraviolet light. I was able to identify Marke's hand on the first page where there's a list of Voynich letters and a list of Roman alphabet letters that were not visible. Yeah, and I discovered that and identified his hand. Maybe, I think that was like two years ago or so that that happened. And then once Voynich gets a hold of it, he wants to sell it for $100,000, which is just a shocking amount of money in 1912. And so he's trying to get JP Morgan to buy it. That's not the kind of thing the Morgan Library is going to be interested in. But his librarian, Belde Costa Green, was interested in the plant illustrations. And she actually did spend some time looking at it with Voynich's wife, Ethel. Voynich is like this PT Barnum character. He's a showman and a really good salesman because you've got to do that. If you're going to be a salesman, you've got to be a showman. I can see now why the idea that it's a hoax took off. Oh, totally. This is the guy it's named after. Oh yeah, absolutely. It would be right in keeping, right? It would be totally logical for him to have done something like that since just that the evidence doesn't support that. It doesn't add up. Right. Yeah, it really does it. Oh, how fun though. Yeah, exactly. But he takes the manuscript on tour. He takes it all over the country and he's showing it to people one time. He's at a dinner in Chicago and he's bragging about his mystery voted manuscript. And someone over here's him who works for the FBI and decides that he has to be investigated because he's got this thick Polish accent and he was Jewish and he was very suspicious. I did not realize the FBI wasn't involved in this. The full economy in this secret. I thought it was an army code book. They thought that he was a spy and that he had stolen a code book from the army. And so then there was this whole investigation that went on for years. It was just a big mess. And then finally, he was exonerated when he finally was able to convince them that what he had in an evil manuscript. But he was convinced that it was by Roger Bacon because if the manuscript could be associated with Roger Bacon, it would change the history of science and it would be worth a trillion dollars. So he found a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was an expert on bacon who of course then decided, oh my gosh, this must be Roger Bacon. And so they became known as the Roger Bacon Cypher Manuscript. And when they dropped this news in 1921, it was like around the world. Literally, it was in every newspaper. It was the biggest headline, you know, Roger Bacon stands as the greatest scientist of all time, that sort of thing. But that was unfortunately completely debunked in 1931. Oh, sad face. But then the US cryptologists, William and Elizabeth Friedman got a hold of it and they worked on it for decades. They were like the top cryptologists in the US. They gathered all their buddies together and they spent decades working on it. But they assumed it was a code. Right. Not a language. And they never were able to decode it. And of course, the problem with if it's a code, you can't decode it unless you know what language you're decoding into. Right. That's, I mean, that's one sticking point. A second, real sticking point for dealing with Voina cheese is that it's such a small sample for like an LLM, right. An LLM needs millions of data points. We can give it 80,000 data points of Voina cheese. It's just not enough to draw definitive conclusions because everything there's such a sampling error that it makes it extremely difficult to do data analytics that has the smell test, you know. But just not to say we can't because we have. And you know, hot off the presses, I just had an article come out with my colleague Colin Layfield from the University of Malta where we are using data analytics to make some pretty bold claims about the structure of the manuscript. We're pretty excited about the results. I would love to get into that moment terribly once we get through our little history here. Yep. All right. So Voynich has it. Voynich dies heartbroken that it is not Roger Bacon after all. He was very sad. His wife, Eiffel, then becomes the owner of the manuscript and she lives another 30 years and keeps, you know, she's the one who brings William and Elizabeth Friedman on board and they are the ones, you know, they really spend the next decades studying it until finally they give up. After Eiffel dies, the manuscript passes to her assistant Ann Nill who worked as Voynich's store manager basically an accountant for years and then went on to be Eiffel's companion and caretaker. And then after Eiffel died and so Ann gets the manuscript, she's trying to sell it. She can't get anybody to buy it. She finally sells it for $24,500 in 1961 to a bookseller in New York named Hans Kraus. And so that's a lot less than 100,000 that they wanted, right? I mean, it's not nothing, but it's not what they'd hoped for. Right. So now Kraus has the manuscript and he can't sell it. Nobody wants to buy the thing. Everybody wants to study it, but there's so much uncertainty about whether it's authentic at nobody will buy it and so finally Proust decides he's just going to take the tax break and he donates it to Yale in 1969 and so it's and it's been there ever since. What a blessing? Yeah thank you for that but he did get a big tax break. You take what you can get for your original manuscript man. Exactly. There was there was some big change in the law that was about to be enacted and it would have changed the tax break so he decided to beat the buzzer and get his tax break while he still could. The practicality won out that's hilarious. Yeah exactly but that's how it ended up at Yale. He really wanted it to be at a university where it could be freely studied and he had a long-standing relationship with Yale. He bought a lot of manuscripts and books from him so it was sort of an obvious choice for him to give it to the barbecue library and now it is manuscript 408 at the barbecue library at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut in the United States. What a crazy story like what is that even doing in Connecticut? Yeah how fabulous though. So since it's been studied in one way or another for decades and decades now and people have been trying to figure out what this thing is for ages do you have any favorite theories that have come up like either ones that you think like sound particularly plausible or things that you think are wrong in a particularly funny way or you know I don't like to shame people who have theories that are completely wrong that that seems unkind to me so I don't do that anymore but there is kind of a growing group of people who are starting to lean towards thinking of it as produced by a community of women you know we've had for years and years and years decades even this prevailing hypothesis always starts with it has to have been the work of one genius man hiding knowledge from women that's what people always say you can tell he's a genius because he can't draw plants yeah right he's a terrible artist I think it is much more likely that it's by women for women just given the contents of the thing and then another thing that people always want to do is they sort of want to reverse engineer it by trying to identify a really smart man in the early 1400s who could have done it and the fallacy there of course is assuming that we know all the people who lived in the early 15th century right I mean how many names do we have a few thousand maybe other than millions of people who were alive then so that you know that is not an effective strategy this does bring up something that kind of connects to what you said earlier about like we've lost like 90 some percent of the manuscripts we don't really know like maybe there were others there have I think I don't I don't remember what any of them are called off hand but like there have been writing systems that were used exclusively by women as like yes separate from the mainstream culture so is it possible that that's what we're looking at and this is just the only one that we have yeah it's absolutely possible you know I mean the truth is almost anything is possible it's just that some things are more possible than others you know I mean is it possible that it was a gift from aliens and we're all living in a simulation yes that's possible right take the red pill but you know can't prove it and certainly some ideas are more likely than others right right that's just what I thought of when you said community of women like oh maybe they they had their own writing system and we just don't have others I mean I'd be happier if we could prove that but I think for a lot of things about this manuscript we're not gonna know until we know right know what I mean like we have all sorts of theories we have all sorts of ideas there's a lot of of evidence that leads us to draw some hypothetical but well-supported conclusions we won't know for sure until we know what catches me is that if we were to look at this as kind of any other medical up chemical star signs whatever text and we did understand the language I think we would be fairly comfortable saying hey yeah multiple scribes yeah that makes sense again standard standard standard but the second that we don't understand what the language or text or script is the second we go oh yes where is the genius who wrote this thing it was it had to be one person and so when I saw the man continually yes yes Leonardo of course everybody wants to pin it on Leonardo he was like for when the manuscript was written so that seems unlikely but that the other piece of course is there is a misogynistic piece of this too in that there's this kind of online community of people like all the Voynich Bros who don't like ladies who Voynich it makes them uncomfortable because they think it is that absolutely should be the purview of men folk and not as ladies with our little lady brains they're not aware of the existence of the incredibly named Ethel Voynich then right exactly right exactly they just don't like ladies who Voynich but I guess there's such a long tradition of that and that ties us that ties us back to many of the studies too right I mean many of the studies for many years was not a place that was particularly welcoming to women but you know that's changing quickly at this now so sort of getting over to the theories to kind of what we know what do we or what can we know about the text itself aside from the beautiful if clumsy shall I say illustrations what can we understand about the text itself because that's something you've been kind of digging into and so I guess this is this is my segue into the LSA the latent somatic analysis kind of and because that fascinated me when I when I was reading through your work on that it's really cool I have to say and Colin is my right hand computer science nerd guy and we work very very well together he had this idea of using this older technique called latent semantic analytics that is actually really apparently it's very effective on small datasets which is one reason why it's a really good methodology to use with the Voynich manuscript because it is this very small data set and it also is language agnostic which is the latent part of the title so it has nothing to do with what the semantic meaning of the text is it looks at patterns in the symbols the way the symbols are used and at word length and character level to cause it relationships between pages chunks of text and we we're chunking up the book I'm not by paragraphs but by pages and our analytics showed at kind of the level of the forest as opposed to the trees the sections of the manuscript hang together in terms of their topics so the plants are actually half of the manuscript and the comparison across all the pages of the LSA scores you compare each page to every other page and you see which pairs have the highest scores in which pages group together and we ended up with groups that reflect these illustrative topics so that suggests that it isn't just that there are all these pages with plants it's that a text also hangs together so it's not just some random gibberish it's not a random illustration it's not a random piece of like I'm going to draw a pretty plant here yeah there seems to be an actual relationship between the illustrative topics and the actual text so that's big because that can move you down the road towards well that starts to feel like there's actual meaning underneath this that it's not random it's not randomly generated text it's not nonsense that there's there may actually be meaning which is something that I've heard people argue that it's an example of like a systemic writing that like it's just someone is just it's just doing it for shiggles exactly and that is starting to seem more unlikely that's just so cool it's it's very exciting and then the other piece of this is that will be sort of got more granular and really dug into the page by page data the patterns we found I made Colin run the numbers again because I thought this cannot be right because it's crazy if you know how medieval manuscripts are put together right so you've talked about this on the show but very quickly basically the way the way you make a medieval manuscript is you've got your you know we're talking about parchment here so you've got your animal skin you cut it into rectangles full rectangles in half so you have connected sheets bifolia like this and then you nest them in groups of usually four five or six and then you attach them in the middle and then stack them up and sew them between attach them to the binding that's basically how you make a book so the key structural component are bifolia in nested choirs nested gatherings yep I'm going to interrupt you real quick and just say if you pick up a book on your shelf right now listeners can generally speaking you can kind of look at the end of it look at the end and you'll see the choirs and you'll see the bifolia on modern books as well so you can you can look at it we still construct books this way so well constructed books like if you as a Chad when you wanted to make a book. You would take your eight by eleven sheets and stack them up, fold them and staple them right at the fold at the gutter and make a little book. That's how we made books in the Middle Ages. I say "we" because I'm really old. The author herself, we knew it the whole time. Still, it's too spoiler-like. So the Voynich manuscript, according to our data, was not meant to be nested choirs. It was meant to be a pile of bifolia, not nested, and not sewn together, just a loose pile of bifolia. Working case. Yeah, exactly. And that's crazy. That's not how manuscripts are supposed to work. But it is not at all. What the data tells us, it also explains several really strange things structurally about the manuscripts, such as the fact that with only two exceptions, every one of those bifolia is written by single scribe, all four pages of the bifolium, or by one percent. Even if they're mixed up in their nested choirs, which is weird. Like, that's weird to find them nested that way. Like, the third bifolium in the choir might be by scribe two, and the other bifolia are by scribe one. And that, to me, immediately tells me that something's wrong with the structure of the manuscript. Then you've also got these places where illustrations cross the gutter from one connected page to the other, even if there are deeply nested and there are lots of pages currently in between. So there's actually quite a lot of evidence to support this idea that the manuscript was not meant to be bound in nested choirs at all. It was meant to be what are called singliens or a single bifolium. So it's out of order, like, the way it's put together now, like, the pages aren't in the right order. Yeah. And how can you read a book if the pages are out of order? Right. Right. So we got to put the book in the right order and then start from scratch, which would also imply that whoever bound it couldn't read it, because they would have got a note. That's exactly what they're going to go. So the theory goes. So here's how it all plays out in what I'm going to call the singliens hypothesis. So you've got your manuscript. So I got a grant, I need a demo here. So you've got your folded bifolia like this, right? So there's one, two, three, four pages on each bifolium. And in order to you cannot sew them together, the structure of the binding wouldn't work. There's not enough for the thread to kind of grip to hold the book together. That's one reason why you nest to them so that there's enough heft for the sewing to dig into. So the idea is that at some point after the manuscript was created, no idea when, sometime in the 15th century, I know that much. Somebody got a hold of it, all of these stacked loose bifolia and decided, well, that's nothing makes sense. We got to put this in a binding. So we're going to make all these nested choirs, we're going to write choir numbers on them, and we're going to put it in a binding because that's what you do with the book. It has to be in a binding. And it is true that if it had not been bound, there's no way it would have survived. If it had just been like loose bifolia flying around, it would not have survived. The only reason it survived is because somebody sewed it and attached it to wooden boards to preserve it. So we're grateful to them. So even incorrectly, what a gift. Yeah, that's right. And each of the choirs that it's now structured in nested choirs, those choirs have numbers, but the numbers are later. There's also foliation. They're folio numbers. The folio numbers are also later. And now we're back to the like, we don't have most manuscripts because maybe the bifolia thing, like maybe that kind of book was really common as like the equivalent of like a loosely finder like so you can take one page or two for reference. That's right. You think anybody's spiral notebooks are going to survive. But that doesn't last very long so we don't have any others. Yeah, right, right. That's right. I have found a handful of examples from the early modern period. I've actually found a few manuscripts that are written this way in loose bifolia and they're preserved inside a wrapper that sort of secures them and holds them in place. But they're very rare. They're very few and very far between. But boy, the more you look at the manuscript, the more evident you find to support this idea. And I'm pretty convinced. Wow. That's incredible. We'll see when you know the article literally just came out a week ago. So I don't know what people are thinking about it. We're hot off the presses here. Well, we'll definitely throw that in the sure notes for people are interested. Yeah. Yeah, it's and totally open access journal. It's in digital medievalist. So if you're interested, you can just google digital medievalist and you'll find it. Yeah, it's very exciting. I did want to circle back to the multiple scribes, multiple languages thing. Like, how did you find this out? How do you know there are multiple scribes and multiple languages of a thing we can't read? Right. So back in the 1970s, a guy named Prescott Courier was the first to figure out that there are actually two different ways of writing Voina cheese. It's the same characters, the same symbols. But the data analytics are a little bit different. A letter frequency that top 10 words are slightly different. There are different suffixes in language A as opposed to language B. And what I established with my scribes is that scribe one is the only scribe who uses language A and the other four scribes I'll use language B. Now I'm saying language in square quotes, which your listeners can't see, but square quotes because the linguists tell me that they're not different enough to really be different languages. They were like dialects, then different languages. So they're more similar than they are different. Let me put it that way. And in terms of identifying how many scribes there were, this is really my main area of expertise within manuscript studies. It's called paleography. So I am a paleographer, which means that I am trained to look at a medieval manuscript. This is not one. It's packed similarly, but I could look at this and tell you immediately, it's from 15th century Italy because that's why they pay me the big bucks because I can do that. That's the language, the language, the translation, all the stuff. The shape of letters, the decoration. Wait, wait, I thought you were an academic. You're getting grade big bucks. So many big bucks. You have no idea. And yes, become a paleographer and never be impoverished again. I am lying. Children do not become the paleographer. There's zero money in it. It's fun, but there's not money. If you're independently wealthy or you have a partner who's really rich, those are the two parts here. There you go. I want to be a paleographer. Applies to just getting into English or medieval studies. So it's about anything. And this is why all the all the rich white dudes are the ones who were doing all the scholarship for so long is because they were they were the independently wealthy ones who could afford to do so. And also they had servants and or family members who were doing all the daily chores for them. Right. Right. Anyway, anyway. Anyway, this is not the moment to have that covered. So I forgot, what was I getting at? What were we talking about? Paleography, the language is. All right. Yes. Okay. Subscribe. So what I what I do is in addition to telling you when it where something was written, I'm also trained to distinguish one's grad from another. By looking at particular letter forms or the way the pen moves, the ductus, that's called. And no one had really done that before with boinichis. So I had to kind of figure out for myself what the useful letter forms were for making those distinctions. So it took several years a very intense study. But I was able to zero in on, you know, there's one letter form that was almost exclusively found at the end of words in the kind of substitution alphabet that we use just so that we can talk about boinichis and it's substance that substitution is N. It is not actually the letter N. It's just a convenient placeholder for that. At least I assume until the Unicode Consortium gets their acts together and gets us. Yes. That's correct. We're working on that. There is someone working on that actually. And so that N, what I figured out is that on any given page, it has a similar form. But on the next page, it might have a totally different form. And I found several other letters that showed those same patterns. And so that's how I was able to make the argument that we'd actually have these five scribes working all across the manuscript. And then I could take those assignments of what pages were written by which scribes. And overlay that onto the structure of the manuscript, which is how I realized that that the pattern was by Bifolia, that each scribe is writing their own Bifolia, which is, which is weird. What about this manuscript isn't weird, you know what I'm saying? So this letter that almost only appears at the end of words. And I assume this is something that you know since you've done all this computer analysis, is it consistent statistically with like, oh, it just so happens that this is a sound that usually goes at the end of a word in this language? Or is it like, this is some sort of other like symbol that means something other than just a phoneme? Right, you're right. And that's exactly the kind of stuff that linguists get after, right? So they're looking for these patterns where they can say, well, this tends to be at the beginning. That tends to be at the end. This combination is only in the middle right and so the those are the kind of clues that help linguists identify, say, consonants and vowels, which every language has. So that's one thing. There's certain, like, if you look at the really short words, vowels tend to be in the middle. Pat, dog, you know, so those kind of, you know, they take their knowledge of human language, natural human language, and apply it to these statistics to see what we can kind of tease out about what the underlying language might be and what it definitely is not. And they've been able to rule out certain language families. It's almost certainly not Asian. It's almost certainly not African. It seems to be most closely related to some kind of Indo-European language, but we just don't know yet which one. Just the largest and most widespread language family on the planet, you know, it's narrowed in town. But well, but that's actually pretty significant, I mean, there are people who really want it to be African or who really want it to be from China, or there's a whole book about arguing that it's Mesoamerican, it's not Mesoamerican, it just isn't. Yeah, but like if they come out and said, like, this is a drividian language, like, we'd have a much more narrow field to work with. Yeah, right, right. So that's the purview of the linguist is to do that to run those kind of analytics. And to see what you find, right, like in some ways, it very much looks like a natural language. So Bayes being called Zipz law, Zipz law, which basically says that the most common word in a language appears twice as often as the next. And that appears twice as often as the one after. And so you get this, you know, inverted curve when you graph the word frequency and the voinichese is perfect, absolutely, and so that suggests that it's not nonsense. And that suggests it's not a made up language, that it's an actual natural human language. And yet, when you look at how predictable the spelling is, which is a measure of entropy, it's really, really low, like it's a huge outlier among languages, which means the spelling is super predictable. Like if you were doing wordal with voinichese, you'd get it in three every time. Wow. If you tell me one voinichese letter, I'm almost certainly going to be able to guess what comes next because the spelling so incredibly predictable. And in that way, it doesn't fit in with any known language family. So that's a contradiction that hasn't yet been resolved. So there's still work to be done. It's exciting. We're finding out all these new things and every new thing you find moves you forward. But we're not there yet. There's a lot to do. It's fun and exciting. And I love collaborating with all these scientists. One of the books I have coming out is me and a bunch of scientists. And you know, getting them to use proper footnote formatting, that's not an easy, just saying. It was a real struggle. I love them. I admire them. They're brilliant. But come on, people. Follow the style guide. It's not that hard. I'm sorry to keep throwing, like, technical questions that you have on the language literature intersections. I've got like enough linguistic knowledge to ask stupid questions. Does the predictability of the spelling suggest that there is only a limited number of, like, maybe not words, but morphines? Like there's a small vocabulary that's being used here, which would suggest a constructed language. You just don't have a lot to say. Well, except it's not really about vocabulary. It's more has to do with how you break down the words into, we don't know if they're syllables, but into bi-grams. So it seems to be more about how many bi-grams are available versus not. So for example, in English, if you tell me a word starts with Q, we know what the next letter is going to be. It's got to be a U. If you tell me it starts with O, you've got a lot more options, right? So it's that the spelling in English has a very high entropy. It is not predictable. It is hard to guess. Whereas in Voina cheese, if you tell me what the first letter is, there are only a limited number of options for the next one. And then once you have those two, there's only a limited number for what could be third. So the way that you build Voina cheese words is very rule driven. And we still don't know exactly what that implies, but it's really interesting. That's so cool. I can see that also being an argument in favor of it being an alphabet rather than a syllabary, if we think like maybe these are like a consonant vowel pair. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Currently, there's a linguist who's doing work trying to figure out which are the vowels of which are the consonants. And how many there are. That's so cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. It's pretty mind blowing. My colleagues amaze me every single day. I feel very fortunate that we all found one another because we're having a good time. Yeah, absolutely. So one more thing I wanted to ask before I kind of want to pivot to the T-Terecordee Stuck. Yeah. You're doing language analysis. You're doing LSA. You're doing like all of this if you're working hand-to-hand with what I'm going to call the tech side. And I think a lot of our listeners get a little antsy about, for instance, language models and AI and things, things in that space. Could we? Right. For sure. Absolutely. And so I was wondering, though, if you could, because again, I think people generally think of medieval studies and they go, oh, yes, old books and toms, forget the tech. But I was wondering if you could kind of speak to that bridge because it's a tool. It's a useful tool. It's something that is essential and you're using kind of older tech, even to look at this stuff. And so I was wondering if you could bridge that gap for us, because I think a lot of people think about it as the old dusty tomes, Gandalf, you know, in the archives. When it isn't necessarily that, and I'm wondering if you could kind of broaden that horizon even for me as well. Yeah. Sure. So it's, I mean, I have a lot of feelings about AI, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about it. I think it is extremely important that we always remember that it is our servant, not our master, and that the way that we use it needs to always center the human who is the one asking the questions. And so there are ways where it can be extremely helpful for Voynich studies. So if we are, for example, comparing every page with every other page statistically, that's an enormous number. There are, you know, 200-something sides pages of the manuscript. And so combinations and permutations is a really, really big number. And so that's where LLM is really, that's where they really shine, right, is when you've got a big data set that you need to wrangle. And so that has been extremely helpful. And it's work we could not have done without an LLM, you know, there's no way that a human could possibly do that. It's just physically impossible. And so you really do need the LLM for that. What you don't need it for is to say, "Hey, Claude, tell me what the Voynich Men used themselves." Right, right. It's not just about ethical usage. It's about responsible usage, an intellectual ingredient. It's very similar to something I tell my students about like why they shouldn't be using AI to write their papers is that AI is very, very good AI in quotation marks as a marketing term. But LLM are very, very good at pattern recognition, and that's what they're useful for. But the idea that that pattern recognition can then be turned into, and now it can like know things, that's where it falls down. Like, it is an analyze pattern for you, but that's all that you did. Exactly. So, like, Collin could use an LLM to crunch the numbers and give us all this data, just like thousands and thousands and thousands of a CSV. But I had to come in and then interpret the data. Right. That's what you needed the humanist for was to look at the data and go, "Oh, these are the implications." Well, that seems weird, can we double-check and make sure that's right? Oh my gosh, it's right. Wow, that's really something new and exciting. So, for me, that's where I draw that line and that it's really about centering the human and making sure that we're not imagining it to be human. You know, I used chat GPT for something yesterday, and the response was, "Gosh, that really made me smile when you said that," and I thought, "You're not a human. You don't have a face." That's really unsettling. It was extremely unsettling. It really bothered me. I was like, "Okay, we're done. This conversation's over because you've just crossed a line." That's where people can really get into trouble is when you start believing that this is a human and it is not. When you were talking about the people who are like, "Say, I asked an LLM about the Voynatch," and I'm now telling you what it said, that did remind me of what I've heard about cases of what they're calling AI psychosis, where you just get this feedback loop where the AI keeps reassuring you that you're definitely right, even though what you're saying is ridiculous. Well, that's what people do. They go, "Well, the AI told me I was brilliant and that I'm right." So, I must be right. You know, that's not how this works. It's not how it works. It's not how scholarship works. It's not how responsible research works. It's not how you consider evidence. All of these things that fall into the critical thinking zone, we are the things that we have to hang on to. Yep. I'm going straight into that for somebody who is interested in the manuscript. who is somebody who is interested in paleography and things like that. Where would you point them? Because there's a lot of misinformation. Let's see. Let's see. I would start with the Yale University Facsimile. It's just called the Voynich manuscript edited by Raymond Clemens. Fantastic place to start. It includes a dozen really excellent essays plus a full photographic text simile with the foldouts and everything so you can really get a sense of how the manuscript works and it's very inexpensive. I think it's only $30 which is amazing for a big hardcover book like this. It's a very very strongly that they wanted it to be accessible to everyone. I have that one. It's amazingly high quality for something. It's excellent. I mean for the price you'll never find anything like it. But the website is open access. Yale's website. So if you Google the Voynich manuscript, you know, it's one of the top results is going to be Yale University's website. And there you can find the whole manuscript. You'll get a link to buying this book. There's a link to it there on that website. And those are the two best places to start. There's also an online forum that I like very much called the Voynich Ninja where there are hundreds of people discussing ideas and theories and fighting with each other. But generally in polite and respectful ways, even if we disagree with one another, we can disagree respectfully. So that's also a nice place to start because you can really see what's going on. And then the last thing I would recommend is a website Voynich.nu which is run by a Voynich scholar named Renee Zanberg and who is really one of the people who's been working on this manuscript the longest. And it's just constantly updated with everything there is to know about the manuscript. Perfect, fabulous. So those who go to resource. Go there. Until my book comes out. Don't email you. Don't email me. No, I mean, I hate to say that. But the truth is if you email me, I probably won't answer. You're busy. You've got plenty of it. I'm a busy person. I'm a very, very busy person. So no, you're welcome to email me that I want to answer. If you have a solution, rather than send it to me, post it on Voynich Ninja and you'll get lots of feedback. I guarantee it. Yeah, perfect. But I do want your Voynich novels. If you are a Voynich novelist or you designing a Voynich game, that I want. I have a whole bookshelf here. Oh, a Voynich novel. Let's get into that. Let's get into that. I just got this one. Yes, should I have a chance to read it yet? But I'm kind of excited about it. A Voynich enigma. Brand new. Very excited to read it. My absolute favorite thing that I possess is this. This is Canon Black Widow in the Avengers and the Voynich manuscript, right? In here. This is Canon people. They are called to New Haven because a criminal named Diablo is stolen the Voynich manuscript. And so they all come to New Haven and they meet up with the librarian. So this is the actual rare book library at Yale. That's what it actually looks like. And she's telling them, "Please don't hurt the manuscript but go and find it." So they go fly around New Haven, Connecticut, and they find the manuscript in a parking garage because it's New Haven. And Diablo is there and they get the manuscript back and Iron Man says, "Why'd you steal the Voynich manuscript?" And Diablo says, "Well, I needed it for my alchemy research, obviously." And then Black Widow says, "You didn't have to steal it. It's been digitized." I love that. It's Canon. It's Canon people. It's amazing. And that's the digitized manuscripts so that they won't have to risk. You can read it online. But that is my favorite piece of Voynich fiction. I'm a fan of Voynich that I have a Voynich tarot card deck. That's another thing that I'm kind of excited about. This came from someone in Australia, my unicorn oracle Voynich deck. I have some Voynich art in my living room downstairs. I've got all sorts of things. I have some clothing. I'll buy anything that has Voynich on it. Beautiful. And a game. And I have my Voynich tabletop game called the Voynich code. It's fun. That does link us to what I think was many people's initial introduction to the Voynich manuscript, given the reach of this particular website. Of course, the XKCD comic where they suggest-- Oh, brilliant! Yes, classic. RPG manual. Yes, yes. It's a classic. It's a classic. What do you think are the odds that it's actually an RPG manual? Just out of curiosity. Could be. Maybe. I love that. I love that. There's all the tables. There's also a really awesome science fiction story called manuscript tradition that is posted online. It's an open access story where basically what happens is the curator wakes up one morning, 200 years from now. And turns on the news and she sees that a probe we have sent to an exoplanet has finally sent back pictures. And they're going to show them right now on the television. And it's Ruins architectural Ruins with inscriptions in Voyniches. And the curator goes, oh, am it? I got to get to work. And so she has to get to the library because she knows all hell's gonna break loose. It's great. It's amazing. It has so many emails. Yeah, exactly. The press is going to be waiting for me. I got to go. It's great. It's genius. It's absolute. Oh, I love it. I love it. It's wonderful. So digging into this for our listeners. Yes. When it comes to any ideas for T2 RPGs. And this can be out there. This can be the Voyniches specifically, like whatever pops into your head because my brain immediately goes to thinking starting with library of Voyniches. You can have a group. Maybe it's a background for your character where they have this specific language. They carry a book like the Voynich main script. You could you could go so many ways. And I tell you when I saw Wicked, I was like, oh, Grimmery. And I like sneaking photographs of it because I was like, is it inspired by the Voynich? Where did they get that? Yeah. It looks very voynichy. That Grimmery looks very voynichy. I'm just saying. Yeah. Yeah. It would be. Absolutely. There's also, when my son was playing Roomscape a million years ago in the archaeology center in the Roomscape universe, the Voynich manuscript sits on a table. It just sits there. You can't do anything, but then it's just there. But it's there. Yeah. He recognized it. He called me and he was like, mom, is that that thing? Is that that manuscript? Like, oh, my God. You are right there. Oh, how fun. In the Roomscape archaeology center. I don't know if it's still there. This was like 20 years ago. So do people still play Grimmscape? I don't even know. Oh, yeah. I think so. So it's everywhere. So when it comes to, for instance, mystery texts in ETRPGs, how would you want people to play with that as an idea, whether as a quest item, background character? I mean, the trope of Find a Magic book that has magic spells. That's pretty old, right? I mean, that's kind of old and boring. Everybody does that. One cool thing about the Voynich, however, is it's missing 14 pages. That's true. We have around 14 missing leaves and what is on them and where will we go to find them on our quests? We have to find the missing leaves. Oh, I like that. Instant quest. Yeah. Instant quest. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one where are the missing leaves? Another one would be to think about all the owners, all the former owners, passing the book along from one to the other. I don't know, you know, as a game, you could have different characters, be different owners, right? Who all have different things that they have different kinds of expertise and different things that they're interested in about the manuscript. You know, Kirker is interested in the, whether it's Hieroglyphics or not, Newbold, who was the professor at Penn, wants to prove it's Roger Bacon. Voynich just wants the money, right? So everyone, you found all these characters, almost like a game of clue, right? Where everyone has their own goals, their own interests. That could actually be really fun, as long as we throw the ladies in there. We've got Apple Voynich, for sure, who's really interested in the plants. We've got Ann Nill, who, you know, just wants to sell the damn things so she can get some money in her life and, you know, there, one of the early researchers was a woman named Mary Demkerio in the 20th century. She was really the first woman to do really serious computational work on the manuscript. Elizabeth Friedman is another one. Ladies, who Voynich is the thing that I'm interested in. I would like to see something about the ladies who Voynich. I don't know what. I made that into a verb. I like to keep it in my house. I talked to me. I'm voyniching, you know, I love it. That's just a verb in my house now. So, there are a few ideas. I like the idea of having to find the missing pages. I think that could be fun. Oh, definitely. Which could definitely be expanded out further. Because if we take the idea that like, okay, this, this idea of having a bunch of loose bifolia in a wrapper was way more common than we think it is, then suddenly that can be a pretty common quest item is like, we're missing a cup or like, there's this really important book that's been dispersed and we need to go like gather them all back up. Oh, and, and, yes, yes, yes. So of the 14 leaves that are missing, 12 of them are six bifolia. So there are six bifolia that were removed. And then there are two single pages that were just sort of cut out like that and left little stubs behind. But most of them are these bifolias. So you run around and you try and find them missing bifolia. One of the novels actually, I think it's this one. The Voynich deception has as a plot point trying to find missing leaves that are like as cool as it box. They're in Mr. Voynich's old safe to posit box in London and you have to go find the key. You know, it's all about it going on quests. That's what these novels are. They're all they're you know they're all video quests anyway. I can't help but imagine it like if it's in Voynich's old safe deposit box then like one of those leaves that that got cut out. Obviously he was going to cut it out and that's because it's the key to the cipher and it turns out it's all quick. So if you've got it if you're running around with your with in your game trying to find the missing bifolia they all have different functions and different purposes, right? Do you need all of them in order to crack the code or maybe you only need one of them or maybe you need these two but not those four, you know, or some of them red herrings, you know? I don't know. Who knows? Nonplay. I like that. But they're all sorts of fun things you can do. I think generally since from the history you talked about is especially thinking of like the 17th century portion of it. I think manuscript provenance is something that is not explored enough in fiction generally whether or TTRPTs or what? Like the chain of owners and how it passes from person to person and under what circumstances and what motivates them to be collecting this like I think there's a lot there. So when Umberto Echo came to the Bina key library 30 something years ago the only thing he wanted to see was the Voynich manuscript. Wow. That was the only thing that he was talking about. Wow. Isn't that cool? It's amazing to me that Dan Brown has not yet written a Voynich novel. Call me Dan. Yeah. We'll collaborate. I'll be your cousin. There you go. There you go. That's where the money is. See I should be a movie consultant and a game consultant instead of a paleographer. You can do both. I could do both. Very often. We we consulted quite a few people for Pintament, which is also incidentally partially inspired by Umberto Echo. Yep. Oh is that true? Oh. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Name of the Rose baby. What a book. Yes, indeed. Well, I think that about covers it. Lisa, thank you so much for coming on. So much fun. I think I was talking with you. Run down. If anybody designs I want to hear them and keep an eye out for the books. Book for kids and a book for grand ups. Fabulous. All right. And thank you. All of that will be in the show. And we will see you next time. Perfect. All right. Thanks a lot so much. Lisa, that was fabulous. So fun. Thank you for listening to the Maniculum podcast. Please consider leaving a rating and review on iTunes or Spotify to help support us. If you're interested in exclusive merch and continuous exclusive content, consider becoming a patron on Patreon. To see our sources, check out the show notes. And for more content, check out our blog at themaniculumpodcast.com. And hey, come get involved in our community. We have a discord group that you can join and you can find links to our server, the Facebook group, the Maniculum podcast, our Blue Sky and our Instagram @Maniculumpodcast in the show notes. Original music by Walker. Check out their project at Sugar last on Spotify.