To study it has been called “academic suicide,” but the Voynich manuscript, a book of mysterious handwritten script and illustrations, has drawn obsessive scholars ever since its discovery in an Italian monastery by a Lithuanian bookseller named Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Its combination of an uncrackable script, which may be either a coded language, an unknown written language, or a hoax, plus its strange illustrations of women and botanical and astronomical phenomena, has drawn linguists, physicists, statisticians, historians, botanists, and more. Two new papers on the Voynich prompt a look at the document that continues to bedevil scholars--and, regardless of its true identity, clearly has a highly unusual power to bring experts from many corners of the academic universe into conversation around a single object.