March 26, 2026 • 10 mins
Some curiosities are hidden within secret tomes, while others are right there in the streets. Today's tour runs the spectrum.
Order the official Cabinet of Curiosities book by clicking here today, and get ready to enjoy some curious reading!
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
On the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut is the
Binicky Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It's one of the
largest of its kind, and its vast collection includes the
Gutenberg Bible, the first text printed mechanically, as well as
a twelve hundred and fifty year old Buddhist text and
thousands of other folios. But hidden in the stacks is
(00:57):
also a tome that has baffled scholars for over a century.
A four hundred and eighty page work covered in calfskin,
written in a language unknown to any living person. Its
pages are filled with cryptic tables and illustrations of bizarre
plants and astrological signs. Carbon dating places it in the
early fifteenth century, but there is no explanation for its
(01:20):
purpose or even a name for its author. It's called
the Voinage Manuscript, and it has utterly baffled scholars for
over a century. Uv imaging has shown a signature in
the book from the seventeenth century of one Yakubus Horsiki
de Tepenesh, the court pharmacist to the Habsburg Emperor Rudolph
(01:40):
the Second, suggesting that it was once held in their
imperial library, and from there we know that it ended
up decades later in the hands of a Jesuit scholar
named Marcus Barrish. Because of the small note that he
left in the margins in it, he asked a colleague
to help translate the script. He never found a solution
to the question of its meaning its origin, though. The
(02:02):
manuscript then disappeared from record until nineteen twelve, when it
reappeared at an auction at Sotheby's in London and was
sold to a Polish American antiquarian named Wilfrid Voinich. Now
Voynache must have been gobsmacked when he first perused the manuscript.
Inside its cafskin cover, there were six distinct sections, the
(02:22):
first containing herbs, presented over one hundred drawings, each labeled
in the inscrutable language. Only about thirty percent of the
illustrations of medieval plants are familiar to scientists. The other
seventy percent seem to be composites of known herbs or
are else made up entirely. The next section was astronomical
(02:42):
in nature, showing star clusters, suns and moons, and zodiac signs.
The biological section is truly bizarre, showing naked women in
water interacting with strange tubes and anatomical structures. Many who
have studied the manuscript believe it concerns alchemy or may
be human reproduction. Then there's the pharmacological section, with bottles, vials,
(03:05):
and jars that one might find in an old apothecary shop.
And then there's another section with blocks of text that's
interspersed with numbers, leading scholars to believe they are formulas
for medicine. All of this was written in a language
that no one can decipher that eventually became known as Voyinagees.
The language itself contains about two hundred glyphs used to
(03:28):
form the words of the text. Scientists have found that
their distribution across the document is extremely similar to modern languages,
meaning that it isn't merely random gibberish, but it follows
its own real linguistic logic. Voinage spent years studying and
sharing the book with his contemporaries, to the point that
his name itself became its unofficial title. Eventually, the Voyage
(03:50):
Manuscript landed at the Binikey Library at Yale University, where
cryptologists and linguists all used different types of language models
and statistical analysis to try to understand how the language works.
They were able using simple ciphers and machine learning to
reproduce Voyage style texts, but still could not translate it
(04:11):
into a modern language. Experts from other areas of study
have likewise tried to make sense of the strange document.
Historians have suggested a Northern Italian style to the illustrations,
and the carbon dating, as well as that original signature
in the book, place it squarely in Bohemia. Botanists have
thoroughly cataloged its illustrations and have identified many of the
(04:33):
real herbs portrayed. Astronomers have confirmed that the symbols of
the zodiac and the positions of the planets and stars
depicted adhere to what their medieval predecessors knew. Recently, the
Binicky Library's digital archives of the manuscript have been made public,
allowing amateur sleuths and cryptographers to assist in deciphering a
(04:53):
relic that has continued to prove itself stubbornly unreadable. An
annual symposium brings together experts across all interested fields to
discuss new discoveries, and recent advances in machine learning have
uncovered thematic groupings of texts that support the idea that
text is organized around specific topics. But the puzzle at
(05:15):
the core of the Voyage manuscript remains the same the
language itself. Could it be a lost tongue or the
author's personal shorthand maybe an intricate cipher. Whatever it is,
neither experts nor ai have been able to solve it,
and so it stands a reminder of humankind's unrelenting curiosity,
(05:35):
whether It's secrets are ever fully uncovered or remain an
enduring enigma. It reminds us that the thrill of a
mystery unites professional scientists, technologists, and amateur sleuths alike, all
drawn together by the shared desire to crack a good puzzle.
(06:06):
There is one thing that unites almost every culture across
human history, a love of dancing. It's a primal part
of who we are. Whether it's at a concerts or
a nightclub or a family wedding, whenever anyone around you
is moving to the same rhythm, the urge to get
up and join them can seem uncontrollable. But for the
residents of Strasbourg in the year fifteen eighteen, that urge
(06:29):
was literally uncontrollable. It started on a hot July day
when a woman walked on to the cobbled streets outside
her home and started twisting and shaking as if she
were dancing the music only she could hear. As minutes
turned to hours, she kept dancing, and nearby merchants and
curious townspeople gathered around to watch. The woman was breathing
(06:51):
hard and sweat was rolling down her face, but it
was like she physically could not stop, no matter how
hard she tried. As the sun went down, she finally
collapsed to the ground in exhaustion. A man in the
crowd stepped forward and knelt down to check on her,
but after taking a moment to catch her breath, the
woman got right back up and kept on dancing. By
(07:13):
the next morning, she was still going, and another passerby
was so inspired that he dropped what he was doing,
and enjoined the dance as well. So did another and another,
and within a week there were thirty people compulsively dancing
in the streets. Every so often, one of them would
fall down in exhaustion, but after a bit of rest,
they would get back up, despite bloody feet and even
(07:34):
broken limbs. As July turned to August, the number of
dancers had climbed into the hundreds. City officials were so
worried they called together a group of doctors and religious
leaders to figure out a solution. The clergy thought that
the townspeople had become possessed by Saint Vitas, a Christian
murdyr whose feast day is celebrated with dancing, but the
(07:55):
doctors theorized that it was a disease caused by overheated blood. Essentially,
they diagnosed the locals with boogiey fever. The group of experts, however,
agreed on the same solution. They just had to dance
it off and get it out of their system. So,
in an effort to encourage the frenzy, the city hired
carpenters to build massive dance floors for the dancers to
(08:17):
gather on. They brought in musicians to accompany the movement,
and they even hired professional dancers to help everyone keep
up the tempo. But the city officials had underestimated what
they were dealing with. The dancers indeed wore themselves out,
but they didn't or couldn't slow down, so as the
weeks wore on, some of them began to drop dead
(08:38):
from strokes or heart attacks. By late August, around four
hundred people were dancing, and more than a dozen of
them were dying each and every day. In an act
of desperation, the city council reversed course and banned both
music and dancing. The dance halls were torn down, and
anyone who refused to sit still was hauled off to
(08:58):
the shrine of Saint Vida and forced to pray for forgiveness.
Within a couple of weeks, the so called dancing plague
began to subside, just as mysteriously as it had begun.
By the end of September, after two months of chaos,
it was finally over. To this day, no one is
sure what caused the dancing plague. Some historians believe it
(09:20):
was food poisoning from a mind altering fungus called ergot.
Others think that it was simply a case of mass hysteria,
an extreme version of something that we all know to
be true. In the right time and place, dancing is contagious.
I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet
(09:42):
of Curiosities. This show was created by me Aaron Manke
in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the
Grim and Mild team, and produced by Jesse Funk. Learn
more about the show and the people who make it
over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities. You'll also find
a lo to the official Cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book,
(10:03):
available in bookstores and online, as well as ebook and audiobook.
And if you're looking for an ad free option, consider
joining our Patreon. It's all the same stories, but without
the interruption for a small monthly fee. Learn more and
sign up over at patreon dot com, slash Grimandmild, and
until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
On the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut is the
Binicky Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It's one of the
largest of its kind, and its vast collection includes the
Gutenberg Bible, the first text printed mechanically, as well as
a twelve hundred and fifty year old Buddhist text and
thousands of other folios. But hidden in the stacks is
(00:57):
also a tome that has baffled scholars for over a century.
A four hundred and eighty page work covered in calfskin,
written in a language unknown to any living person. Its
pages are filled with cryptic tables and illustrations of bizarre
plants and astrological signs. Carbon dating places it in the
early fifteenth century, but there is no explanation for its
(01:20):
purpose or even a name for its author. It's called
the Voinage Manuscript, and it has utterly baffled scholars for
over a century. Uv imaging has shown a signature in
the book from the seventeenth century of one Yakubus Horsiki
de Tepenesh, the court pharmacist to the Habsburg Emperor Rudolph
(01:40):
the Second, suggesting that it was once held in their
imperial library, and from there we know that it ended
up decades later in the hands of a Jesuit scholar
named Marcus Barrish. Because of the small note that he
left in the margins in it, he asked a colleague
to help translate the script. He never found a solution
to the question of its meaning its origin, though. The
(02:02):
manuscript then disappeared from record until nineteen twelve, when it
reappeared at an auction at Sotheby's in London and was
sold to a Polish American antiquarian named Wilfrid Voinich. Now
Voynache must have been gobsmacked when he first perused the manuscript.
Inside its cafskin cover, there were six distinct sections, the
(02:22):
first containing herbs, presented over one hundred drawings, each labeled
in the inscrutable language. Only about thirty percent of the
illustrations of medieval plants are familiar to scientists. The other
seventy percent seem to be composites of known herbs or
are else made up entirely. The next section was astronomical
(02:42):
in nature, showing star clusters, suns and moons, and zodiac signs.
The biological section is truly bizarre, showing naked women in
water interacting with strange tubes and anatomical structures. Many who
have studied the manuscript believe it concerns alchemy or may
be human reproduction. Then there's the pharmacological section, with bottles, vials,
(03:05):
and jars that one might find in an old apothecary shop.
And then there's another section with blocks of text that's
interspersed with numbers, leading scholars to believe they are formulas
for medicine. All of this was written in a language
that no one can decipher that eventually became known as Voyinagees.
The language itself contains about two hundred glyphs used to
(03:28):
form the words of the text. Scientists have found that
their distribution across the document is extremely similar to modern languages,
meaning that it isn't merely random gibberish, but it follows
its own real linguistic logic. Voinage spent years studying and
sharing the book with his contemporaries, to the point that
his name itself became its unofficial title. Eventually, the Voyage
(03:50):
Manuscript landed at the Binikey Library at Yale University, where
cryptologists and linguists all used different types of language models
and statistical analysis to try to understand how the language works.
They were able using simple ciphers and machine learning to
reproduce Voyage style texts, but still could not translate it
(04:11):
into a modern language. Experts from other areas of study
have likewise tried to make sense of the strange document.
Historians have suggested a Northern Italian style to the illustrations,
and the carbon dating, as well as that original signature
in the book, place it squarely in Bohemia. Botanists have
thoroughly cataloged its illustrations and have identified many of the
(04:33):
real herbs portrayed. Astronomers have confirmed that the symbols of
the zodiac and the positions of the planets and stars
depicted adhere to what their medieval predecessors knew. Recently, the
Binicky Library's digital archives of the manuscript have been made public,
allowing amateur sleuths and cryptographers to assist in deciphering a
(04:53):
relic that has continued to prove itself stubbornly unreadable. An
annual symposium brings together experts across all interested fields to
discuss new discoveries, and recent advances in machine learning have
uncovered thematic groupings of texts that support the idea that
text is organized around specific topics. But the puzzle at
(05:15):
the core of the Voyage manuscript remains the same the
language itself. Could it be a lost tongue or the
author's personal shorthand maybe an intricate cipher. Whatever it is,
neither experts nor ai have been able to solve it,
and so it stands a reminder of humankind's unrelenting curiosity,
(05:35):
whether It's secrets are ever fully uncovered or remain an
enduring enigma. It reminds us that the thrill of a
mystery unites professional scientists, technologists, and amateur sleuths alike, all
drawn together by the shared desire to crack a good puzzle.
(06:06):
There is one thing that unites almost every culture across
human history, a love of dancing. It's a primal part
of who we are. Whether it's at a concerts or
a nightclub or a family wedding, whenever anyone around you
is moving to the same rhythm, the urge to get
up and join them can seem uncontrollable. But for the
residents of Strasbourg in the year fifteen eighteen, that urge
(06:29):
was literally uncontrollable. It started on a hot July day
when a woman walked on to the cobbled streets outside
her home and started twisting and shaking as if she
were dancing the music only she could hear. As minutes
turned to hours, she kept dancing, and nearby merchants and
curious townspeople gathered around to watch. The woman was breathing
(06:51):
hard and sweat was rolling down her face, but it
was like she physically could not stop, no matter how
hard she tried. As the sun went down, she finally
collapsed to the ground in exhaustion. A man in the
crowd stepped forward and knelt down to check on her,
but after taking a moment to catch her breath, the
woman got right back up and kept on dancing. By
(07:13):
the next morning, she was still going, and another passerby
was so inspired that he dropped what he was doing,
and enjoined the dance as well. So did another and another,
and within a week there were thirty people compulsively dancing
in the streets. Every so often, one of them would
fall down in exhaustion, but after a bit of rest,
they would get back up, despite bloody feet and even
(07:34):
broken limbs. As July turned to August, the number of
dancers had climbed into the hundreds. City officials were so
worried they called together a group of doctors and religious
leaders to figure out a solution. The clergy thought that
the townspeople had become possessed by Saint Vitas, a Christian
murdyr whose feast day is celebrated with dancing, but the
(07:55):
doctors theorized that it was a disease caused by overheated blood. Essentially,
they diagnosed the locals with boogiey fever. The group of experts, however,
agreed on the same solution. They just had to dance
it off and get it out of their system. So,
in an effort to encourage the frenzy, the city hired
carpenters to build massive dance floors for the dancers to
(08:17):
gather on. They brought in musicians to accompany the movement,
and they even hired professional dancers to help everyone keep
up the tempo. But the city officials had underestimated what
they were dealing with. The dancers indeed wore themselves out,
but they didn't or couldn't slow down, so as the
weeks wore on, some of them began to drop dead
(08:38):
from strokes or heart attacks. By late August, around four
hundred people were dancing, and more than a dozen of
them were dying each and every day. In an act
of desperation, the city council reversed course and banned both
music and dancing. The dance halls were torn down, and
anyone who refused to sit still was hauled off to
(08:58):
the shrine of Saint Vida and forced to pray for forgiveness.
Within a couple of weeks, the so called dancing plague
began to subside, just as mysteriously as it had begun.
By the end of September, after two months of chaos,
it was finally over. To this day, no one is
sure what caused the dancing plague. Some historians believe it
(09:20):
was food poisoning from a mind altering fungus called ergot.
Others think that it was simply a case of mass hysteria,
an extreme version of something that we all know to
be true. In the right time and place, dancing is contagious.
I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet
(09:42):
of Curiosities. This show was created by me Aaron Manke
in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the
Grim and Mild team, and produced by Jesse Funk. Learn
more about the show and the people who make it
over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities. You'll also find
a lo to the official Cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book,
(10:03):
available in bookstores and online, as well as ebook and audiobook.
And if you're looking for an ad free option, consider
joining our Patreon. It's all the same stories, but without
the interruption for a small monthly fee. Learn more and
sign up over at patreon dot com, slash Grimandmild, and
until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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