[*] Well, a bit of it, anyway.

Over the last weeks, my Cipher Mysteries inbox has been inundated with AI-generated theories. But – and with my apologies to the genuine cipher theories that also landed there, which I promise I will get back to – I’ve been focused on the Voynich Manuscript. Or, more specifically, on a single line of text in it.

And I now think I can read a good part of it.

The f17r marginalia

Back in 2006, I was hugely fortunate to be allowed by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s curators to spend a few days working with the Voynich Manuscript. One of the highlights of that trip came when I borrowed their UV blacklamp to examine the tiny marginalia at the top of page f17r.

To my huge surprise back then, what the UV light made visible at the end of that line was some Voynichese text. Later on, another group did some multispectral scans of f17r, so here’s what they saw (“Voynich_17r_WBUVUVP_019_F”, auto-equalised in Gimp):

Why was all this important? Because it strongly suggested that there was some kind of direct link between (one of) the marginalia people and the curious Voynichese writing itself. (And also that the Voynichese letters on the final page (f116v) were probably not coincidental). For me, this all suggested that understanding the Voynich Manuscript’s marginalia might not only tell us something about a later owner of the manuscript, it might also tell us about its creator(s).

So the marginalia are a big deal to me. And if you’re interested in the Voynich Manuscript, they really should be a big deal to you too.

Theories about the f17r marginalia

So, what does it say, what does it say? Poundstone thought that the first word might refer to herbal writer Pierandrea Mattioli (1501-1577): Brumbaugh similarly thought it might refer to Mathias de l’Obel (1538-1616). But these both feel quite wrong, because the cursive gothic handwriting is typical of the (mid-)15th century, not of the 16th century.

There have been plenty of partial readings of the f17r marginalia, most of which seem – possibly emboldened by the apparent fragments of German writing on f116v – to be German-ish. But though such readings typically start promisingly, they quickly fall to pieces when you look more closely.

A special mention here to two good attempts:

• Marco Ponzi suggested: malhor allor luc[oru]m her[ba] vullamina (Marco also persuasively argues that the plant may be Herba Oculus Domini from the 15th century alchemical herbal BNF Lat. 17844).
• Rafal Prinke suggested: mallior allor fuez her villemnia

Back in The Curse of the Voynich (2006), I had my own proposal (pp.24-25), but more about that in a minute. Still, the important thing I noted was that the second letter of the first word appeared to have been emended: and so consequently the first word actually seemed to be “meilhor“.

The mysterious third word

Back in 2006, I wondered if the third word might be “lutz” (the Occitan word for “light”). Yet that (and almost all the other theories about how to read this word) failed to explain why there was a macron (overbar) over the end part of that word. In 14th-15th century texts, the macron was widely used as a way of inserting a missing ‘n’. So… why is there a macron over this word?

Back in 2017, Helmut Winkler posted this on Voynich Ninja:

I think there are several more ways to read the “lucz”, e.g. lucem or lucet, but in this contextI I would suggest luc[ea]m her[bam], one of the Alchemical Herbs

Now fast forward to a July 2025 comment by Marco Ponzi, mentioning some text from Fribourg MS L.52 (f.8v): “oleum lucet, balsamum redolet” (and I have a ton to say about L.52 on another day):

Marco then noted:

For the third word in the Voynich f17r marginalia, assuming that the text is Latin (very doubtful) and that the initial [letter] is ‘L’, a possible reading could maybe be “lucent” (where the macron stands for the missing ‘n’) – “they shine”, third person plural.

You can’t fault Marco’s logic here: even though adding the macron would ‘nasalise’ lucet into lucent, it overall does not look like Latin. So… how can we resolve all this?

Reading f17r marginalia (finally)

The reason I’ve ground through all the above (giving credit to everyone who helped with all the steps along the way) is that the final reading didn’t just magically pop into my head. I started looking at it properly in 2006, so it has taken nearly twenty years to get to the end line.

When writing Curse, my tentative reading of this marginalia was that this was Occitan, and that it began:

• meilhor aller lutz [kou?]…

…which was close, but no cigar. With the benefit of all the above, I am now pretty sure that it is Occitan, and that it reads (using a Latin abbreviation style to render the Occitan “lucent”):

• meilhor aller lucent ben balsamina [….]

Or, one multispectral block at a time:

meilhor aller

luc[ent] ben

balsamina

Balsamia / Balsamina

If you look at Wellcome MS.626 (Livres des simples médecines), you can easily find (because it’s arranged alphabetically) **balsamia **[balsam] on folio xxix:

To be precise, this is talking about the original (and mythical, almost unobtainium-like) balsam from the East, a plant known not to anyone by actual experience. So this is reporting – medieval herbal-style – on a plant without flowers yielding a kind of resin, and the artist is just guessing at what it might look like. It’s really not a literal drawing of a tree.

And yet a century later, Leonhart Fuchs in his 1542 Hist. Stirpium was using the word balsamine: “Duo Balsamines genera damus“, and the word balsamine was being used in French in 1545, i.e. to mean “balsam-like”. So even though this isn’t “balsamina” in its modern sense (e.g. impatiens balsamina), it is a word that is being use to evoke balsam-like qualities.

And I think the word we’re seeing at the top of f17r is “balsamina”.

Occitan marginalia. Really? Really.

So, my argument here is that the marginalia at the top of Voynich manuacript page f17r is written in Occitan. And guess what? Back in 2006, I argued long and hard that the zodiac roundel month names (which also appear to be marginalia) were also in Occitan. So this should, in theory, be the least surprising marginalia language identification ever.

And yet I already hear every single Voynich Ninja commenter disagreeing. Pffft. It is what it is. It’s Occitan.

If the Voynich Manuscript was written by people who appear to have been writing natively in Occitan, the first thing we should now be doing is looking at every single Occitan herbal-related manuscript from the period, such as BNCF Manuscript Palatino 586. Roll with it for a change.