The Voynich Manuscript: Understanding the Untranslatable with Lisa Fagin Davis

The Voynich Manuscript has been a curiosity and mystery for hundreds of years - what can its strange history teach us about worldbuilding? This week, we’re joined by Lisa Fagin Davis, one of the world’s experts on this enigmatic text. Come along as we discuss the history of the text, its creation and contents, and how the sciences and humanities can come together using tools like latent semantic analysis to discover the nature of untranslatable texts.

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Citations & References:

Bowern, Claire. “Voynich.” Yale University CampusPress. Link . [List of Claire Bowern’s publications on the Voynich manuscript.]
Davis, Lisa Fagin, and Colin Layfield. “Singulion Structure and the Voynich Manuscript.” Digital Medievalist, vol. 19, 2026. DOI .
Davis, Lisa Fagin. “The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript.” Manuscript Road Trip, 17 January 2015. Link . [Blog post with an image of the comic page mentioned.]
Guzy, Stefan. “Book Transactions of Emperor Rudolf II, 1576–1612: New Findings on the Earliest Ownership of the Voynich Manuscript.” Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript 2022 (VOY2022), edited by Colin Layfield and John Abela, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2023.
Voynich Manuscript. Circa 1401-1599?, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut, Beinecke MS 408 1. Link .
The Voynich Manuscript. Edited by Raymond Clemens, Yale UP, 2016.
The Voynich Ninja. https://www.voynich.ninja/ .
Zandbergen, René. The Voynich Manuscript. https://voynich.nu/ .