That said, anyone hoping this multispectral analysis of the scans will finally solve the mystery of the Voynich manuscript once and for all is bound to be disappointed, although any new textual evidence is significant for scholars.

"These alphabets will likely not help us actually decipher the manuscript," Fagin Davis wrote on her blog. "This is because linguists... and other researchers have established that the manuscript is almost certainly not encrypted using a simple substitution cipher, and the substitutions in these columns result in nonsense anyway. Even so, they do add an interesting and new chapter to the early history of the manuscript. I look forward to hearing from other researchers about this new evidence, especially from experts in cryptography who may have ideas about why Marci or any other early-modern decrypter would need three columns of alphabets to do their work."