The Voynich verdict

Where it points

Each comparison further down ends with where and when its closest match was made, and how much weight it can bear. Lines of evidence that rest on the same source count once.

Area and date

Everything that can be placed north of the Alps lands in a strip from Lake Constance through Ulm and Augsburg to Munich and Regensburg, with the Austrian Alps at its eastern edge. The zodiac, the crossbow, the diagrams and the way bathing is tied to the planets all come from the house-books made there. The Italian evidence, the bath pictures, the herbal style and the castle, is all about models: things a German maker had seen in Italian books or on an Italian trip and copied.

The crossbow Sagittarius, the strongest single clue, is found only in German-speaking lands, and the earliest dated example on the published list is from St Gallen on Lake Constance, 1425–28. The Italian side looks like a route, not a home: swallow-tail castles, Bohemian-trained painters and German patrons all met in the Alpine valleys on the Brenner road, and the herbal models were Lombard.

The language of the one readable note agrees. It asks for poxleber, goat’s liver, spelling Bock with a p. That is how Bavarian, Austrian and Tyrolean writers of the 1400s spelled it: a mid-1400s Bavarian cookbook (Berlin, Ms. germ. qu. 1187) has “Nym ein Pokchsleber”, and a Tyrolean manuscript of the period uses pox for a billy goat.

The dates agree too. The vellum is 1404–38, the house-book relatives run from about 1400 to 1475, and the clothes and hairstyles of the figures belong to about 1400–1440. The book was most likely made between about 1420 and 1450 in the German-speaking south, by someone who had been to north Italy or seen its books.

Who fits

That is the profile of a south German town or court physician of the 1430s and 1440s who had studied in Padua or Bologna, practised astrology, and had books and painters to hand. Nine documented people or groups come near it. I scored each against the evidence, weighting place and date most.

• Johannes Hartlieb (13.5). c.1400–1468. Vienna, then Munich court physician from about 1440. Probably a Padua doctorate in 1439 (not confirmed). Wrote a herbal around 1440, a moon book, astrology for the dukes and books on the forbidden arts, and advised keeping recipes in “secret letters”. A German version of Hemmerli’s bath book is sometimes credited to him; others give it to Jordan Tömlinger.
• The Passau alchemists (11.5). Niklas Jankowitz, Michael von Prapach, Michel Wulfing and their circle, Passau area, east Bavaria, 1420s. Wrote Cpg 597 (1426): alchemical and medical recipes, charms, unlucky days, astrology, partly in ciphers they invented themselves. Bavarian dialect. Its practice of mixing self-made secret signs into German recipes is the closest yet to the Voynich’s world.
• Sigmund Gotzkircher (10). c.1410–1475. Munich city physician; wrote Munich’s 1453 drug-price list with Hartlieb. Owned a manuscript of 1428, partly written in north Italy, that collects secret alphabets.
• Giovanni Fontana (10). c.1395–c.1455. Padua doctor of medicine 1421, town physician of Udine. Drew machines captioned in an invented alphabet. Italian, with no known German link.
• Felix Hemmerli (9). c.1389–1460. Zurich canon lawyer, Bologna doctorate 1424, at the councils of Constance and Basel. Wrote De balneis naturalibus on the Swiss baths. Not a physician.
• Jan Šindel (8.5). 1370s–c.1456. Astronomer and physician of the Prague court; city physician of Nuremberg 1423–36. No Italian study, herbal or cipher known.
• Hermann Schedel (8.5). c.1410–1485. Studied in Italy; later city physician of Augsburg; great book collector, whose library went to the Fuggers of Augsburg. No herbal or cipher known.
• Heinrich Steinhöwel (8). 1410/11–1479. Studied in Vienna 1429–36 and Padua from 1438 (doctorate 1443); Ulm city physician from 1450, later tied to the Ulm printers. No herbal, bath or cipher work known.
• Heinrich Mynsinger (7.5). c.1397–c.1476. Probably the “Heinrich of Münsingen” sent to Padua by the Elector Palatine in 1421; Heidelberg court physician from 1428, with the Palatine library to hand. No astrology, herbal or cipher known.

The verdict on who

The best fit is Johannes Hartlieb, or someone in his circle at the Munich court in the 1440s. He is the only documented person who was in the right place at the right time, practised medicine and astrology, wrote a herbal, wrote about forbidden and secret arts, and had a court workshop behind him. Close behind is a group rather than a person: the Passau alchemists who began Cpg 597 in 1426 and mixed their own secret signs into German recipes. Gotzkircher, Hartlieb’s Munich colleague and co-author of the 1453 drug-price list, is third.

This is the strongest reading of the evidence, not proof. Nothing ties Hartlieb to the Voynich itself, no cipher of his survives, and his herbal paints plants in framed garden scenes, not flat on the page like the Voynich. The profile is what the evidence supports firmly. The name is the best fit to it among people we know about, and an unknown physician in the same circle fits just as well.

When, and what it is made of

The vellum was radiocarbon dated in 2009 by the University of Arizona. Four samples from different parts of the book agree, and together give 1404 to 1438. That dates the skins, not the writing, but vellum was normally used within a few years, so the writing most likely went on between about 1405 and 1450. The clothes in the drawings belong to the 1420s to 1450s, and the closest dated books on this page were made in 1356, 1425–28, 1426, about 1455–60 and 1463.

The materials are ordinary. The vellum is calf, 14 or 15 skins, not reused. The paints are azurite blue, a copper green, red ochre and chalk white, with no expensive lapis: a modest job using standard recipes that were known everywhere. Text and drawings are in the same iron-gall ink, and the paint went on before the text. The quire numbers are in a second ink and the page numbers in a third, so the book went through at least three stages. The pages are no longer in their original order. Nothing in the materials points to a region. They do point to a small team working cheaply.

The strongest single matches

The clues point to the German-speaking south: Lake Constance, Swabia, Alsace, the Swiss and Austrian Alps, Bavaria. The herbs and baths follow Italian models, which is normal there. Italy was a short trip over the passes, and its universities trained the region's doctors.

What kind of book it imitates

In the 1400s, southern Germany produced what are now called house books: a doctor's or a rich household's collection of herbs, the calendar, astrology for timing bloodletting, baths, charms and recipes. One was written in eastern Bavaria in 1426 (Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 597). Its sections line up with the Voynich's almost one for one.

These books belong to a family historians call the iatromathematical house book: a German text of about 1400 by a south German amateur physician, copied with pictures from Lake Constance to Bavaria until about 1475. Its copies have zodiac roundels, planets, bloodletting and bathing scenes, which covers three of the Voynich's sections. None has a herbal, so the Voynich's herbal had a second source; the nearest is Hartlieb's illustrated herbal, written in Munich around 1440 and surviving in a copy of about 1455–60. Whoever drew the Voynich knew this kind of book. The zodiac signs come in the right order, they're paired with months by a real calendar rule, and each sign has 30 figures, one for each degree.

The candidates

No portrait from life survives of any of them. Each is shown with the closest genuine image of the time: a woodcut made from his book, a leaf of his notes, his tomb, or the instrument he built. Where a picture was made after his death or is only an emblem, the caption says so. They are in order of how well they fit the evidence.

Johannes Hartlieb 13.5 of 16

Born about 1400, he was a master of arts in Vienna by 1437 and probably took a medical doctorate at Padua in 1439. From 1440 he was physician and councillor to Duke Albrecht III in Munich. He wrote a herbal, a moon book, a book of name-magic, a palmistry for the duchess (1448), a book on the forbidden arts (1456) and a Secreta mulierum on women’s medicine, in which he advised keeping certain recipes in “secret letters”. In 1453 he drew up Munich’s drug-price list with Sigmund Gotzkircher. He died in 1468.

Right place, right years, and the only one who wrote across medicine, herbs, astrology and secrecy.

The Passau alchemists 11.5 of 16

A group of alchemists in the Passau area of east Bavaria, named in their own book: Niklas Jankowitz, whose recipes fill much of it, Erhard Meister, Michael von Prapach, author of a list of unlucky days, and Michel Wulfing, to whom a fever charm is credited. The book was begun in 1426 and includes a letter addressed to Bishop Leonhard of Passau. They wrote in Bavarian German and hid parts of their recipes in two ciphers they say they made themselves. Little else is known of them.

The right date, the right region, medicine with astrology and charms, and self-made secret writing. Their habit of mixing invented signs into German recipes is the closest practice yet to the Voynich’s world.

Sigmund Gotzkircher 10 of 16

Born about 1410, Munich city physician who also served the court, and Hartlieb’s co-author on the Munich drug-price list of 1453. His working notebook of prices and recipes is in Graz (UB Ms 311). A Munich physicians’ notebook he helped write and owned (Munich UB, 4° Cod. ms. 810) holds the “Chaldean” alphabet from Duke Rudolf IV of Austria’s tomb, a Hebrew alphabet, and on the same leaf a letter to Antonio Cermisone of Padua, addressed as “my teacher”. He died in 1475.

Hartlieb’s colleague, with a documented interest in secret alphabets.

Giovanni Fontana 10 of 16

Born about 1395, a Padua graduate in arts (1418) and medicine (1421), later town physician of Udine. His book of machines shows rockets, automata and the first known magic lantern, and much of it, like his Secretum de thesauro experimentorum, is written in a cipher of invented signs that turn out to be plain Latin. He died after 1454.

The clearest case of a physician writing in invented letters in these years. But he was Italian, and the Voynich’s other evidence is German.

Felix Hemmerli 9 of 16

Born in Zurich about 1389, he studied canon law at Erfurt and took his doctorate at Bologna in 1424. He attended the councils of Constance and Basel, was canon and cantor in Zurich and provost of Solothurn, and wrote about forty works, among them De balneis naturalibus on the Swiss spas and a treatise on exorcism. A sharp pen landed him in confinement in Lucerne in 1454, where he died about 1460.

Lake Constance region, Italian training, and the one author on bathing. Not a physician, and no secret writing is known.

Jan Šindel 8.5 of 16

Born about 1375, master of arts in Prague, studied medicine in Vienna, professor of astronomy and in 1410 rector of Prague University. He was astrologer and physician to King Wenceslas IV, city physician of Nuremberg from 1423 to 1436 during the Hussite wars, physician to Emperor Sigismund from 1432, and dean of Vyšehrad from 1441. His astronomical tables were still used by Tycho Brahe. He died about 1456.

The leading astronomer-physician of central Europe, in Nuremberg in exactly these years, with a line back to the Prague court where the book later turns up.

Hermann Schedel 8.5 of 16

Born in 1410, he studied at Leipzig and took a medical doctorate at Padua in the 1440s, then served the Elector of Brandenburg and the bishop of Eichstätt before becoming city physician of Nuremberg and of Augsburg. A humanist and a great collector of medical, astrological and alchemical manuscripts, much of it now in Munich. His library passed to the Fuggers of Augsburg. He died in 1485. (His career dates here are from general reference works, not checked against a primary source.)

Padua-trained, a collector of exactly this kind of book, and a route through Augsburg.

Heinrich Steinhöwel 8 of 16

Born in Weil der Stadt in 1410 or 1411, he studied in Vienna from 1429 and at Padua, taking his medical doctorate about 1443. He was city physician of Esslingen and then of Ulm from about 1450 until his death in 1479. He wrote a plague tract in German and translated Boccaccio’s Famous Women and Aesop’s fables for the Ulm printers.

The Swabian candidate: Ulm, Padua, and the Ulm book trade. His Italian years come a little late for the vellum.

Heinrich Mynsinger 7.5 of 16

Born about 1397 in Münsingen in Swabia. In 1421 the Elector Palatine paid for a Heinrich of Münsingen to take a doctorate at Padua, very probably him. From 1428 he was physician to the Palatine court at Heidelberg, where he taught until at least 1465, and he translated Albertus Magnus on falcons, horses and dogs into German. He died about 1476.

Padua by 1421 and a court physician from 1428, the best dates of anyone, with the Palatine library to hand. Nothing ties him to astrology, herbs or ciphers.

Two more faces from the same world

Neither fits the dates or the profile, but both left real portraits and both show what the maker’s books looked like.

Konrad Kyeser

A physician from Eichstätt, 1366 to after 1405, exiled to Bohemia, whose illustrated book of war machines, magic and astrology was copied all over Bavaria. Too early to have made the Voynich, but his book shows what an illustrated technical manuscript of the Wenceslas court looked like, and it carries one of the earliest true portraits of a German author.

Hans Talhoffer

A Swabian fencing master, about 1410 to after 1482, not a physician. His 1443 book in Gotha bound fencing together with astrology and Hartlieb’s name-magic. He shows that a layman of the region could commission an illustrated house-book of mixed secret arts.

Their work beside the Voynich

The maker had to know medicine, herbs and astrology, have seen Italian herbals and bath books, have a workshop with vellum and paint, and care about secret writing. Five documented people from this time and region come close. Each is shown with whatever of theirs survives, next to the Voynich page it most resembles. Nothing ties any of them to the Voynich; they show what the maker's world looked like.

Similar to look at, different underneath

These scripts are real, from the same years and region, and they look a lot like the Voynich. But each one simply swaps the letters of Latin or German one for one and keeps the word spaces. That leaves the language's patterns in place: how likely each letter is to follow the one before, which words repeat, how long words run. The Voynich doesn't have those patterns.

I tested this directly. I took 60,000 words of Latin herbal and medical prose and enciphered them with every method a writer of the time could have used: simple letter swaps with filler signs, several signs for each vowel, code words for common names, vowel-only ciphers, heavily abbreviated Latin, letters shuffled within words, and the 2025 "Naibbe" proposal, which turns each letter into a Voynich-like group of signs. Each method got several settings to find its best. Laid out on the Voynich's own pages and checked against 24 measurable features of the real text, no method matched more than 10 or 11, and every judge told each one from the real Voynich every time. A scribe writing from habit with no message at all matches 18 to 21.

One more test looked at the text's skeleton rather than its letters. Real herbals and household books repeat fixed formulas in fixed places: a plant name, then "is called" or "is warm and dry"; recipes open with a small set of words like Item or Nim. In Latin herbal and household text those formula slots stand out strongly from chance. In the Voynich nothing does, at any of the first five positions of a paragraph, in any section, including the recipe pages. The habit scribe behaves the same way. (The comparison texts were Latin; no German herbal text could be obtained.)

I also took the period's solved secret scripts, the Bavarian house book's 23-sign cipher, Fontana's, the Chaldean alphabet and the monks' vowel ciphers, enciphered 37,000 words of German, Latin and Italian with each, and tried their conventions as keys on the Voynich. None looks like the Voynich's letters, none comes close to its short words or its rate of near-repeated words (about five times higher), and no key turned the Voynich into more real words than a shuffled key does. The same search recovered 90 to 100% of a planted test message.

Most of these tests first used modern German and French. The writing of the 1400s was different: unfixed spelling (the same scribe writing one word several ways), abbreviation signs on about one word in eight, vnd for und, and much shorter words. So I re-ran everything on diplomatic transcriptions that keep the original spelling: Upper German manuscripts of the 1300s to 1500s, early printed herbals, and French books of about 1475 to 1500. Period spelling brings word length close to the Voynich and doubles the rate of near-repeated words, but that rate is still about five times short of the Voynich's, and the letter patterns stay as varied as before. Checked against the same text in modern spelling, the rise comes from the short-word style, not from scribes respelling words. The best cipher, Naibbe, rises from 11 to 13 of 24 features. Nothing else moves.

Two great church councils met nearby, at Constance in 1414–18 and at Basel in 1431–49, and both brought papal secretaries and Italian diplomats who used ciphers. No cipher is recorded at either council, so all we can say is that the opportunity was there.

Can the text be read?

The other half of the case. If the text says something, it should behave like a language or a cipher, and its words should connect to its pictures. If it was made up, some procedure a person could follow with a pen in the 1430s should reproduce it. I tested both sides and set the results beside everything published.

How it got to Prague

Nobody is recorded as owning the book between its making and about 1600. The first firm owner is Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec, the emperor's chemist, whose name was written on the first page after 1608. Before him there is only hearsay: a letter of 1665 says Emperor Rudolf II paid 600 ducats for it. After Horčický it passed to Georg Baresch, who wrote about it to Athanasius Kircher in Rome in 1639, then to Johannes Marci, the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano, and in 1912 to Wilfrid Voynich.

One lead fits our picture. In 1599 Carl Widemann of Augsburg sold Rudolf II a group of rare books for 600 florins, the only sum in the court accounts that matches the story (Guzy, 2022). The Voynich is never named, so this stays a proposal, but it would bring a south-German book to Prague by exactly the route you would expect. Suggested links to the court of Wenceslaus IV or to John Dee have no documents behind them.

The paper trail before 1610

If the book came to Prague in the 1599 sale, an older owner might have listed it. I searched every surviving book list of the period that has been published or put online, for anything in unknown letters, with painted herbs, bathing women or star circles.

So the book is missing from every list that survives, which fits a private collection sold in a lot of “unusual books” without a description. Widemann lived in the Augsburg house of the botanist Leonhard Rauwolf, whose dried-plant collections Rudolf had bought in 1593, and Rauwolf’s estate is a possible earlier owner. No list of Rauwolf’s books survives. The one place a description could still be found is a list Widemann made before 1599, if one exists.

Why

Nobody left a note explaining why, so this part is guesswork. The time and place do record three reasons someone might make a book look secret.

The first is prestige. Rudolf IV of Austria had an invented alphabet carved on his own tomb, and in 1358–59 his chancery forged a whole bundle of ancient privileges, including fake charters from Caesar and Nero. Petrarch saw through them in 1361, but nobody proved them forged until the 1800s.

The second is protecting a trade. Doctors and alchemists kept their recipes to themselves, and both Hartlieb's advice about secret letters and the secret passages in the Bavarian house book are about recipes.

The third is money. Courts paid well for books of hidden knowledge, and about two centuries later the Voynich itself is said to have been sold to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague for 600 ducats.

A genuine book of secret recipes would use a cipher like the ones above, and those keep their language's patterns. The Voynich's text behaves instead like the output of a system, a writer copying and altering words he'd just written. That fits the first and third reasons better: a book made to look like a book of secrets, by someone who knew exactly what such a book should contain.

Every drawing, page by page

Below is every illustrated page of the Voynich, section by section, each beside the closest drawing found in manuscripts of the same century. The Voynich is always on the left. Each comparison ends with where and when its match points and how much weight it carries; those lines feed the map and tally at the top. Sections are folded to keep the page short; open any of them.

Plants with an agreed identification

Of the 125 plant pages, 46 have an identification that at least two independent researchers reached on their own. Each is shown with a real-plant plate and, for 20 of them, the same plant in a herbal of the period.

Two things stand out. The Voynich painter draws the whole plant, root included, flat and symmetrical, which is how the Italian Tractatus de herbis herbals and their German copies draw plants. And the identifications rest mostly on the leaves and flowers: the roots are often invented or exaggerated.

Plants nobody agrees on

These 79 pages have at most one published identification, or several that disagree. I looked for each in the period herbals as well and found nothing I would put beside it with a straight face. Many look like composites: the leaves of one plant on the root of another.

11 of the proposals here are American plants (sunflower, morning glory, milkweed, passion flower and others). The vellum was made between 1404 and 1438, decades before any American plant reached Europe, so those can be set aside.

Sun, moon and stars

Fifteen discs across the astronomical foldouts. Their shapes are the shapes of house-book diagrams: month and zodiac wheels, wind wheels, nested spheres. What fills them is different. Where a house-book writes the names of signs, winds or planets, the Voynich writes its own script, and where a house-book draws heads or animals, the Voynich draws stars, rays and faces.

Zodiac

The ten surviving zodiac pages, sign by sign, against the two zodiac types the maker seems to have mixed. Capricorn and Aquarius are on a missing leaf. The middle picture is the Bavarian house-book Cpg 298, the right one the Regensburg calendar Clm 13076.

Rosettes

The nine-rosette foldout is the largest drawing in the book: nine circles joined by causeways, one with a walled town. Two parallels hold up, one firmly and one loosely.

Baths

All twenty pages of the bathing quire, in three kinds. The pictures borrow the look of the Italian spa books and sit in a German house-book frame, where bathing is timed by the moon and the planets. No single manuscript has all of it.

Jars and roots

Ten pages and foldouts. The layout itself is an apothecary’s idea: each container sits beside the plant parts kept in it, labelled one by one. Medical house-books list simples this way in words; the Voynich does it in pictures.

Recipes

The last quire, f103r to f116r, is close-written text with a small star beside each paragraph and no other pictures. Star-marked paragraphs are a common way of setting out recipes or calendar entries, so there is nothing more to compare. The note on f116v, in German, is covered on the main page.

What we can and can't say

We can be fairly sure the book was made between about 1420 and 1450 in the German-speaking south, by someone who knew the house books of medicine and astrology and had seen Italian herbals and bath books. It's likely the herbal was put together to look like a herbal rather than copied from one, and that the text wasn't written in any cipher known from that time and place. We don't know who made it; the people above show the world the maker lived in. The text section above sets out what the words can and can’t tell us.

A few things complicate the picture. More than one person worked on the book, and the careful outlines and the rough paint may be by different people. Some details, such as a nose on one Aries figure, look added later by a better artist. The month names in the zodiac were added later in a Romance language, read as northern French, and a few signs, such as the Scorpio, look more French than German. None of this moves the centre of gravity away from the German-speaking south, but “the maker” may have been a small workshop, or the book may have passed through several owners.

The text tests have their own limits. They use the standard transcription, so a misread letter or a disputed word break carries through. The picture-link test is weak at the Voynich’s page length. The pen-refill test covers two pages. And no test can see a message hidden by a cipher that makes the same text with or without one.

Matches that didn't hold up

Some suggested matches turned out to show something else once I opened the actual page.

• Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 291, f. 17r, offered as a crossbow Sagittarius, is Capricorn.
• St. Gallen, Cod. Sang. 827, pp. 265–266, offered as the crossbowman, shows the months' farm work.
• Tübingen, Md 2, f. 321r, offered as a crossbow Sagittarius, shows planet houses.
• London, Sloane 4016, f. 81r, offered as the plant on f2r, doesn't look like it.
• Konrad Kyeser's Bellifortis (1405) is often said to contain cipher alphabets, but the main modern survey of its manuscripts (Cermann, 2013) doesn't mention any.
• The Theban and Malachim "magical alphabets" first appear in 1518 and 1533, too late.

A few good matches have images that can't be reused here, so they are links: Gemini as a clothed couple (Voynich f72r) in Vatican, Pal. lat. 1369, f. 147v, south Germany, 1444; the Pozzuoli bath pools in Vatican, Ross. 379; a world map made in Konstanz in 1448 with the same palette, Vatican, Pal. lat. 1362 B; the wind diagram (f69r) and the banded jars (f88v–89r), both compared on voynich.nu.

Sources

• Voynich images: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale, MS 408, public domain.
• Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. germ. 298, 311 (Hartlieb) and 597, public domain.
• Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 7269 and Clm 13076, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; Cod.icon. 242 (Fontana), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
• St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 760 and 827, and Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 135, e-codices.unifr.ch, CC BY-NC 4.0.
• Alphabetum Kaldeorum chart, Heiko Hahn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ponte Scaligero photo, Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Botanical plates: O. W. Thomé (1885); F. E. Köhler (1887); J. Sturm, Deutschlands Flora; via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
• Plant identifications: E. Voynich and T. Petersen via R. Zandbergen, voynich.nu; E. Sherwood via J. Bunn; A. Tucker and R. Talbert (2013); S. Bax (2014); J. Stolfi's list of repeated plants.
• Zodiac and dating: M. Ponzi and D. Worley on voynich.ninja; R. Zandbergen, voynich.nu; J.K. Petersen, Voynich Portal (2013–2024), all 308 posts read for this page; Munich, BSB, Cgm 8137.
• Ciphers of the period: N. Pelling, Fifteenth-century cryptography and on Cod. Pal. germ. 597; K. Schmeh on Rudolf IV's tomb; H. Kranz and W. Oberschelp on Fontana; D. Cermann (2013) on the Bellifortis.
• Physical evidence and provenance: University of Arizona radiocarbon report (2009); McCrone Associates materials report (2009); L. F. Davis on page order (2020) and the 2014 multispectral images (2024); R. Zandbergen, voynich.nu; S. Guzy (2022) on Widemann.
• People: Neue Deutsche Biographie on Hartlieb; Brewer and Lewis (2024) on Hartlieb's secret letters; Wellcome Collection on Gotzkircher; Habsburger.net on the Privilegium maius.
• Herbals and house-books: Paris, BnF latin 6823 via Mandragore; Tübingen UB Md 2; Cologny, Bodmer 135 via e-codices; Oxford, St John’s College MS 17 via Digital Bodleian; Wolfegg house-book via Wikimedia Commons; Copenhagen, Thott 290 2º; Göttingen, 2° Cod. Ms. philos. 63; Munich BSB Xylogr. 35, Clm 29702, Cod.icon. 242 and 2 Inc.s.a. 835 oa; Heidelberg Cod. Pal. germ. 408.
• Zodiac surveys: M. Ponzi and D. Worley on stephenbax.net (the crossbow Sagittarius list and the 131-cycle comparison); N. Pelling on ciphermysteries.com (zodiac bath hypothesis, swallow-tail merlons, Aries hats).
• Text: Montemurro & Zanette, PLoS ONE 2013; Bowern & Lindemann, Annual Review of Linguistics 2021; Davis, Manuscript Studies 2020; Rugg, Cryptologia 2004; Timm & Schinner, Cryptologia 2020; Gaskell & Bowern, Voynich 2022 (CEUR-WS 3313); Greshko, Cryptologia 2025; Layfield & Davis, Digital Medievalist 2026, reported by Live Science.
• Provenance: S. Guzy, Voynich 2022 (CEUR-WS 3313) on the 1599 Widemann sale; R. Zandbergen, voynich.nu, on the letters of Baresch and Marci.
• People: Deutsche Biographie on Hartlieb, Mynsinger and Kyeser; Wikipedia on Šindel, Steinhöwel, Hemmerli and Talhoffer; Dressendörfer on Gotzkircher.
• Paper trail: S. Guzy, “Rudolf II. und das väßl mitt allerlai selzamen büchern”, Herold-Jahrbuch NF 28 (2023) and CEUR-WS 3313 (2022); Widemann lists via Theatrum Paracelsicum; Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Nachlassinventar Erzherzog Ferdinands II.; P. Lehmann, Eine Geschichte der alten Fuggerbibliotheken (1956–60), Heidelberg digital; R. Zandbergen, voynich.nu history pages.
• The German note: CoReMA, Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages (Graz), for Berlin Ms. germ. qu. 1187; Voynich Ninja threads on “pox”; N. Pelling on ciphermysteries.com on f116v.
• Text tests: transcription ZL IVTFF 2b (Zandbergen–Landini); recipe-star table from J. Stolfi, Note 076; f57v word positions from the voynich-units repository; German herbal controls from the RIDGES Herbology corpus; Dioscorides via First1KGreek; Culpeper’s Complete Herbal; secret alphabet in Dresden, SLUB, Mscr.Dresd.M.206.