Read The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code (Undark Magazine)
It’s an approximately 600-year-old mystery that continues to stump scholars, cryptographers, physicists, and computer scientists: a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language, brimming with bizarre drawings of esoteric plants, naked women, and astrological symbols. Known...

a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language, brimming with bizarre drawings of esoteric plants, naked women, and astrological symbols. Known as the Voynich manuscript, it defies classification, much less comprehension. 

Something I hadn’t thought of before, but which could be highly likely given the contents: What if the manuscript is a personal memory palace? Without supporting materials, it’s entirely likely that what’s left on the page is a substrate to which the author attached the actual content and not having the other half, the entire enterprise is now worthless?
Annotated on February 16, 2020 at 08:51PM

All we know for certain, through forensic testing, is that the manuscript likely dates to the 15th century, when books were handmade and rare. 

This may provide some additional proof that it’s a memory aid in the potential form of a notebook or commonplace book. What were the likelihoods of these being more common that other books/texts? What other codes were used at the time? Was the major system or a variant in use at the time?
Annotated on February 16, 2020 at 08:54PM

Read No, someone hasn’t cracked the code of the mysterious Voynich manuscript [Updated] by Jennifer OulletteJennifer Oullette (Ars Technica)

Medieval scholar: "Sorry, folks, 'proto-Romance language' is not a thing."

The Voynich manuscript is a famous medieval text written in a mysterious language that so far has proven to be undecipherable. Now, Gerard Cheshire, a University of Bristol academic, has announced his own solution to the conundrum in a new paper in the journal Romance Studies. Cheshire identifies the mysterious writing as a "calligraphic proto-Romance" language, and he thinks the manuscript was put together by a Dominican nun as a reference source on behalf of Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon. Apparently it took him all of two weeks to accomplish a feat that has eluded our most brilliant scholars for at least a century.

🔖 Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script

Bookmarked Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script by Bradley Hauer, Grzegorz Kondrak (Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics)
Algorithmic decipherment is a prime example of a truly unsupervised problem. The first step in the decipherment process is the identification of the encrypted language. We propose three methods for determining the source language of a document enciphered with a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. The best method achieves 97% accuracy on 380 languages. We then present an approach to decoding anagrammed substitution ciphers, in which the letters within words have been arbitrarily transposed. It obtains the average decryption word accuracy of 93% on a set of 50 ciphertexts in 5 languages. Finally, we report the results on the Voynich manuscript, an unsolved fifteenth century cipher, which suggest Hebrew as the language of the document.
Aside: It’s been ages since I’ve seen someone with Refbacks listed on their site!

👓 Mysterious 15th century manuscript finally decoded 600 years later | The Independent

Read Code in the 'world's most mysterious book' deciphered by AI (The Independent)
Artificial intelligence has allowed scientists to make significant progress in cracking a mysterious ancient text, the meaning of which has eluded scholars for centuries.
Interesting news if it’s really true! Though I do feel a bit sad as there are some methods I had wanted to try on this longstanding puzzle, but never had the time to play with.