To quote medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis , there is “no medieval manuscript that has been seen, studied, analyzed, and debated more than the mysterious and as-yet-unread Voynich Manuscript.” Indeed, historians, linguists, and codebreakers have struggled to decipher this odd collection of letters—but what if there’s an issue with the manuscript itself?

New evidence, published in Digital Medievalist, suggests that the Voynich Manuscript was misbound. That is, the pages of the codex aren’t even in the right order, and that’s probably why we’re struggling to make sense of it. According to the study, the manuscript was probably intended to be read as a series of stacked bifolia, or sheets folded in half. But the version we have today was interpreted to be a quire, or folded pages sewn together to make a booklet.…