Sources & acknowledgments

The work this record stands on

The libraries, transcriptions, scholars and community whose work made the research register possible

This research record consumes a great deal of upstream work: the digitization labour of the holding libraries, the transcription corpora maintained by the Voynich research community, the typological and codicological scholarship done by named researchers over decades, the open datasets and software that make any of it tractable. Attribution belongs on the record. This page is where it goes; it is meant to be complete and to grow as new sources are drawn on. If credit is missing or wrong here, the research register’s author wants to fix it, reach out via the contact below.

Snapshot (UTC)2026-10-03

research register manuscripts649 catalogued

Named figures221

Citations rowed6,861

Holding libraries & digital collections

The institutions whose digitized manuscripts the research register reads against. Image rights remain with the holding library; reproduction here is under each library’s digital-collections terms.

Historical presentation counts, compilation dated June 11, 2026. These per-library counts have not been recomputed for the current snapshot.
Institution	Mss drawn on	Digital collection
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven: holding institution for MS 408 and the bedrock digital surrogate this work rests on	17+ (incl. MS 408)	collections.library.yale.edu
British Library, London	69	bl.uk/manuscripts
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford	69	digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), Munich: Cgm + Clm shelfmarks; the principal Hartlieb-tradition holding	59	digitale-sammlungen.de
Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg: Cpg (Codices Palatini germanici)	23	digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV): Pal.lat. (Palatina Latina)	18	digi.vatlib.it
Morgan Library & Museum, New York	15	themorgan.org/manuscripts
Wellcome Collection, London	14	wellcomecollection.org
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Paris: via Gallica	14	gallica.bnf.fr
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ONB), Vienna	13	onb.digital
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (HAB)	7	hab.de/digitale-bibliothek
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB)	7	digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de
Yale Marston / Mellon / Cushing-Whitney collections	6	via Beinecke
Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna (BUB)	4	bub.unibo.it
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg (GNM)	4	gnm.de
Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB)	3	digital.slub-dresden.de
Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg, Landesbibliothek Coburg, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka Wrocław, Johns Hopkins University	1 each	via individual digital collections

MS 408 imagery on this site is reproduced from Beinecke’s public digitized manifest under the Beinecke’s reuse terms. Comparator imagery is reproduced under each holding library’s digital-collections terms; where a library requires explicit per-image attribution, that attribution is carried on the relevant page.

Transcription corpora & encoding

The research register’s textual layer is not its own transcription. Every Voynichese token used here comes from corpora maintained by the Voynich research community over decades.

IVTFF	Interlinear Voynich Transliteration File Format, the consolidated multi-transcriber corpus maintained by René Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini. The research register’s folio-level token map (`ZL_ivtff_2b.txt`) is the IVTFF release used as the canonical transcription. voynich.nu/transcr.html
EVA	European Voynich Alphabet, the dominant ASCII transliteration scheme. Originally developed by René Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini in the mid-1990s.
Takahashi transcription	Takeshi Takahashi’s line-level transcription, one of the foundational transcribers folded into IVTFF.
Currier transcription	Capt. Prescott Currier’s transcription and the “Currier A / B” hand-distinction that underpins many later analyses.
FSG (First Study Group)	The 1944–46 First Study Group transcription, the earliest mechanized rendering of MS 408 into a tabulated alphabet.
Reeds transcription	Jim Reeds’s transcription work, additionally folded into the modern IVTFF corpus.

The Voynich research community

Decades of independent and academic work on MS 408 form the research register’s load-bearing prior. The list below is incomplete by construction, it names the researchers, resources and communities the research register explicitly draws on. The omissions are work to do, not statements of credit.

Resources & communities

voynich.nu: René Zandbergen’s long-running canonical reference site. voynich.nu
Voynich Mailing List (VML): the standing community forum since the mid-1990s.
voynich.ninja: contemporary community forum.
The Yale Beinecke MS 408 page: the primary scholarly entry-point. brbl-dl.library.yale.edu
IVTFF / EVA tooling community: the transcription-tooling work that makes corpus analysis possible.

Named researchers (research register-cited)

The research register cites and reads against a long list of named researchers. Among those whose work the research register has explicitly touched and reads from:

René Zandbergen · Gabriel Landini · Mary D’Imperio · Prescott Currier · Jim Reeds · Jorge Stolfi · Takeshi Takahashi · Lisa Fagin Davis · Stephen Bax · Claire Bowern · Luke Lindemann · Keagan Brewer · Michelle Lewis · Cary Rapaport · Marco Ponzi · Nick Pelling · the Beinecke digitization team · and the broader scholarly + community contributors whose individual citations appear on the internal research register.

“The point was to get people past the graveyard.” Ed Honeycutt, on what this work is for. 2026-05-23.

This bibliography lists selected source publications and institutions. The public index provides finding titles and statuses; full internal citation chains and research notes are not reproduced in that index.

Contemporary scholarship the research register reads against

2015–2025 peer-reviewed and scholarly work the research register engages with directly, whether by extending a result, citing it as comparator stratum, or testing it and finding it broken. Grouped by lane.

Cipher & operator-grammar lane

Davis, Lisa Fagin (2020). “How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript.” Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 5(1):164–180., digital-paleographic attribution concluding that MS 408 was written by five distinct scribal hands.
Layfield, Colin & Davis, Lisa Fagin (2026). “The Application of Latent Semantic Analysis to the Voynich Manuscript.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 20(1). DOI 10.63744/2ezxpskcezq4., LSA-based test of textual coherence across MS 408 sections; control comparator is the Latin Speculum Humanae Salvationis. Finds anticipated similarity-score drops at section / page breaks and an overall coherence pattern, methodologically distinct from the Timm & Schinner self-citing-table hypothesis and structurally consonant with the research register’s operator-grammar / section-grammar finding (F-CORE-1). Engages Timm & Schinner (2023), Reddy & Knight (2011), and Sterneker, Polish & Bowern (2021) directly.
Zattera, Massimiliano (2022). “A New Slot-Grammar-Based Computer Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript.” CEUR-WS Vol-3313, paper 10 (Malta Voynich conference)., automated F1-optimising slot-grammar inducer (open-source v4j Java); 12-slot positional model with 86.6% of tokens (51.3% of types) fully decomposable; section-specific grammars classify pages at 92% accuracy. SLOT_MACHINE CFG F1 = 0.270 vs Stolfi F1 ≈ 0. Directly parallel to the research register’s operator-grammar finding (F-CORE-1).
Greshko, Michael Anthony (2025). “The Naibbe Cipher: A Substitution Cipher That Encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript–Like Ciphertext.” Cryptologia. DOI 10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408; open-access supplement 10.5281/zenodo.17219445., verbose-homophonic dice-and-cards substitution executable with 15th-century materials; reproduces Voynichese B’s slot grammar, glyph frequencies, word lengths, and qok-clustering simultaneously. Current related findings are listed separately in the public research index.
Lindemann, Luke & Bowern, Claire (2020). “Character Entropy in Modern and Historical Texts: Comparison Metrics for an Undeciphered Manuscript.” arXiv:2010.14697., entropy analysis of MS 408 in comparative context. The research register carries an explicit caveat against over-reading the result, EVA re-fusion reduces but does not eliminate the conditional-entropy anomaly (h2 ≈ 2 for Voynichese vs 3–4 for natural languages).
Timm, Torsten & Schinner, Andreas (2020). “A Possible Generating Algorithm of the Voynich Manuscript.” Cryptologia 44(1):1–19., self-citing-table / algorithmic-generation hypothesis. The research register cites it as the textbook hoax-end of the literature the framework needs to engage.
Zandbergen, René (2022). “Towards a Better Transliteration Alphabet for the Voynich Manuscript.” CEUR-WS Vol-3313 (Malta keynote)., Super Transliteration Alphabet (STA) defined by EVA’s co-creator, fusing pedestalled gallows at family level; explicit admission that EVA is “sub-optimal for most statistical analyses.”

Burgundian-corridor & apothecary lane

Bolt, Nanno: six-paper peer-reviewed corpus plus two monographs on Burgundian-state apothecaries; the research register’s primary scholarly anchor on the apothecary layer of F-CORRIDOR-1. Database covers ~1,000 named apothecaries across 77+ towns of the Burgundian state.
- Bolt, N. (2015a). “Ages at First Mention as Active Master-Apothecary in the Burgundian State.” American Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences 5(3):113–120.
- Bolt, N. (2015b). “Apothecary Clothing in Burgundian Colors.” American Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences 5(6):273–278.
- Bolt, N. (2016). “Apothecary Clientele in the State of Burgundy.” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 64(390):227–240. PMID 29485780; Persée.
- Bolt, N. (2017). “Apothecaries in the Low Countries Registered in the Burgundian-Ducal Archives.” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 104(395):389–396. Persée.
- Bolt, N. (2018). Middeleeuwse apothekers in het Bourgondisch Rijk. Boekscout., the database book.
- Bolt, N. (2021). “Guild Regulation of Burgundian Apothecaries.” Pharmaceutical Historian (BSHP) 51(1):1–5.
- Bolt, N. (2024). Apothecaries in Medieval Burgundy (1200–1600). Eburon Academic., current consolidated monograph.
Baveye-Kouidrat, Laurie (2015). Burgundy Apothecary Archival Research (doctoral thesis)., the primary scholarship the research register’s Burgundian dossier extracts from; read directly off Vol. I (306 pp, ~12k lines).
DALME database: Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe; uncited in any Voynich publication located by the research register’s scholarship survey; treated as live comparator-data surface.
Doutrepont (1906); De Winter (1985); Wijsman (2010); Falmagne & Van den Abeele (2016); Vaughan: the Burgundian-court manuscript-culture scholarship the research register reads against on the Bavaria-Straubing ↔ Burgundian-Wittelsbach kinship branch. All return zero Voynich citations in the surveyed corpus; the research register carries them as comparator-stratum primary anchors.

Padua-scholastic, computus & Alfonsine lane

Battisti, Eugenio & Battisti, Giuseppa Saccaro (1984). Le Macchine Cifrate di Giovanni Fontana. Arcadia Edizioni., the standard reference on Fontana’s enciphered-manuscript work; the closest Quattrocento parallel to MS 408 in the literature.
Chabás, José (2007). “From Toledo to Venice: The Alfonsine Tables of Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi of Padua (1424).” Journal for the History of Astronomy 38:269–281., Padua–Alfonsine astronomical-tables anchor.
Chabás, José & Goldstein, Bernard R. (2003). The Alfonsine Tables of Toledo. Springer., foundational astronomical-tables scholarship.
Chabás, José & Goldstein, Bernard R. (2012). A Survey of European Astronomical Tables in the Late Middle Ages. Brill., astronomical-tables reference framework the research register’s zodiac / cosmological reading reads against.
Schuba, Ludwig (1981; 1992). Palatine catalogues (medical, 1981; quadrivium, 1992)., Pal.lat. shelfmark reference framework; absent from every located Voynich bibliography but the index the research register uses to read against Pal.lat. 1115 / 1262 / 1373 / 1368 / Barb.lat. 186.
Crisciani, Chiara; Agrimi & Crisciani; Pesenti, Tiziana; Nicoud, Marilyn; Park, Katharine: Padua / Italian-scholastic medical-tradition scholarship the research register reads against for Cermisone, Montagnana, Hugo Senensis, Prosdocimo, the Santasofia hand.
Sniezynska-Stolot, Ewa (2003). Astrological Iconography in the Middle Ages: The Decanal Planets. Jagiellonian University Press., natural framework for reading VMS zodiac’s 30 nymphs as decanal / paranatellonta. Does not itself mention the VMS.
Blume, Dieter (2016). Personal correspondence with René Zandbergen, August 2016., reaffirms “the probable relevance of the manuscripts of Alfonso el Sabio” (Castilian Libros del saber) as iconographic anchor for the VMS zodiac. The strongest external-expert anchor available; never elaborated in any peer-reviewed venue.
Wallis, Faith (1999). Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Liverpool University Press., computus framework; never applied to VMS in peer-reviewed work; the research register carries it as the standard computus reference.

Hartlieb & women’s-secrets lane

Brewer, Keagan & Lewis, Michelle (2024). “The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets.” Social History of Medicine 37(3):559–582., women’s-secrets reading of MS 408 anchored on the Bavaria-Munich Hartlieb tradition. Current related findings are listed separately in the public research index.
Schneider; Bosselmann-Cyran: Hartlieb-tradition catalogue scholarship; the GNM / BSB catalogue traditions; the reference framework the research register’s Hartlieb-corridor dissection wave reads against.

EVA transcription-critique lane

Cham, Julian J. & Jackson, Patrick (2014). “The Curve-Line System and the Voynich Manuscript.”, independent statistical confirmation of glyph affinity; cited downstream by Zattera, Lindemann-Bowern, Tucker-Janick, Feaster.
Ponzi, Marco (Medium + ViridisGreen blog); Ponzi, M. & Smith, K. (2019). “Statistical Properties of the Voynich Text.” Cryptologia 43(6)., comparative transcription work showing how transcription choice alters Sukhotin/Hulden vowel detection.
Feaster, Patrick (2020). “Voynichese: A New Transliteration Approach.” Griffonage-Dot-Com (blog post)., addresses the arc-class undercounting issue head-on.
Claston, Glen / Petersen, Theodore C. (c. 2009). v101 transcription (~200 distinct characters)., foundational alternative to EVA.

Provenance & transmission lane

Zandbergen, René & Prinke, Rafał T. (2016); Hunt; Rampling, Jennifer; Harkness, Deborah E.: the standard published transmission-history work (Tepenec / Baresch / Marci / Kircher post-1608).
Guzy, Stefan (2022). “The Augsburg Hoffinanz Transaction of 1599.” CEUR-WS Vol-3313, paper 16 (Malta)., March 1599 Hoffinanz transaction Rudolf II → Carl Widemann of Augsburg for “barrel of remarkable books.” The research register carries this as the late-corridor Augsburg anchor.
Pelling, Nicholas (2006). The Curse of the Voynich. Compelling Press; ongoing work at Cipher Mysteries., long-running Northern Italian / Milan-Sforza production framework with the swallowtail-merlon and “4o”-cipher arguments. The research register reads against this as the most well-developed competing framework.
D’Imperio, Mary E. (1978). The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. National Security Agency., with Currier, Prescott H. (1976 NSA seminar); Tiltman, John H. (1967, repr. 2002 NSA Technical Journal); Reeds, James; Stolfi, Jorge (2000), the foundational priors the research register’s operator-grammar lineage descends from.

Historical bibliography survey, April 2026. Source-list audit method: cross-referenced against the 2026-04-26 AC-relay scholarship survey of Cryptologia, Manuscript Studies, Social History of Medicine, Annual Review of Linguistics, Early Science and Medicine, Journal for the History of Astronomy, Pharmaceutical Historian, Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie, the Yale 2016 Clemens facsimile, Voynich-2022 Malta CEUR-WS Vol-3313, arXiv, academia.edu, ResearchGate, and principal monographs (Pelling 2006; Kennedy & Churchill 2004; D’Imperio 1978; Brumbaugh 1978; Janick & Tucker 2018; Edwards 2024). The published Voynich field has not engaged most of these scholarly anchors against MS 408; the research register carries them as primary-source comparator material.

Research instruments & the working stack

What the lab actually uses to produce, store, and read against the research register, the analytical equipment, the pipelines, and the open-source standards the work runs on.

The research register: 684 findings, 649 manuscript records and 221 named figures in the 2026-10-03 public snapshot. Search the public index.
The Coviewer: public catalog images of MS 408 and comparator manuscripts, with image comparison, pan and zoom. Read manuscript images.
AI as a research instrument: language models assist transcription, comparison and review. Finding statuses remain the researcher’s recorded assessments.
HTR & image pipeline: Tesseract for OCR / HTR passes on PDF-backed scholarly sources; pdftotext for body-text extraction from monograph PDFs; Pillow and ImageMagick for plate transcoding, cropping, and IIIF caching.
IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework): an image and presentation standard used by many holding libraries. Image availability and reuse terms depend on the source institution.
Python ecosystem: lxml, beautifulsoup, requests, sqlite3, FastAPI, and the broader PyPI toolchain the transcription-extraction, comparator-dissection, and analysis pipelines are built on.
OpenStreetMap tiles: corridor and figure-region visualisations use OSM tiles via Leaflet (© OpenStreetMap contributors).
Research and public access: the public site provides dated records and manuscript images. The internal research workspace is maintained separately.

Lab deposits on the record

Honeycutt Ai Labs preprints and datasets directly relevant to the research register, deposited on Zenodo with live DOIs. Cite these where they support a claim below.

Selected previously listed deposits. This bibliography is not a complete list of the lab’s current publications.

Voynich Manuscript Paduan Medical Reference (dataset, deposited 2026-02-19; copyright 2025-08-27), priority anchor for the Paduan medical–computational reading of MS 408. 10.5281/zenodo.18687530.
Multilayer Cipher Architecture in Fontana’s Secretum and Bellicorum: A Twenty-Lens Template Return with Negative-Control Differential: twenty-lens analytical instrument applied to three Fontana witnesses against a held-out negative-control corpus; 3.17× SIGNAL ratio observed on the Fontana arm. 10.5281/zenodo.20648866.
The Despars Avicenna Canon Corpus: A Seven-Witness Substrate-Anchored Inventory (1431–1498): seven-witness Despars-commentary inventory across the French branch parallel to the Padua-scholastic line; Jacques Despars as anchoring figure. 10.5281/zenodo.20648863.
Systematic Structural Differentiation in the Voynich Manuscript Zodiac Section (f70v–f73v): Five Convergent Lines of Evidence for Constitution-Archetype Encoding: ten-sign × lunar structural differentiation across the zodiac quire; five convergent lines of evidence for constitution-archetype encoding. 10.5281/zenodo.20648862.
Closure of the Constructed Cipher Class for the Voynich Manuscript Across Thirteen Folios: A Substrate Grammar Distinguishability Argument: cipher-class closure across thirteen folios via a research register-grammar distinguishability scorer. 10.5281/zenodo.20648867.
Model-Protective Conversation Behavior: observational analysis of model-protective conversation patterns in long-form research dialogue. 10.5281/zenodo.20649756.
HCIP Step 1, f58r: Human–Computer Interpretation Protocol applied to MS 408 folio f58r as a worked first-step example. 10.5281/zenodo.20649753.
HCIP Step 2, Balneological Section: second-step Human–Computer Interpretation Protocol pass over the balneological quires of MS 408. 10.5281/zenodo.20649755.
HCIP Step 3B, Herbal Section: step-3B Human–Computer Interpretation Protocol pass over the herbal quires of MS 408. 10.5281/zenodo.20649754.

The links above identify the cited deposits. Their publication dates and titles are retained as bibliographic information.

Disclosure, license & how to be cited

Where the research lives, how it’s licensed, and how a third party should cite it.

Maintainer

This research record and the research register database behind it are maintained by Honeycutt Ai Labs, Princeton, Texas. The research register is a personal research workspace; no institutional funding is disclosed because none is involved.

License

research register output (findings, schemas, derived tables, code, this site’s text), CC BY-NC 4.0. Underlying manuscript images, per each holding library’s digital-collections terms; reproduction here is under those terms.

How to cite

Honeycutt Ai Labs, thevoynich.org, a research record of Beinecke MS 408, working draft, snapshot 2026-10-03 (UTC).

Corrections welcome

If credit is missing, wrong, or the scope of attribution is off, the research register’s author wants to know. Reach out at hello@honeycuttailabs.com and the row will be updated. Source-completeness is part of the work, not a finishing flourish.