CLAVIS: How the Voynich Manuscript Tells the Story of the Modern World

The Voynich Manuscript, the Riverbank Institute, and the philosophical origins of the American military-information-technology complex.

Seven Sessions  |  Thursdays,   1 Oct – 12 Nov, 2026

10:00 LA  |  13:00 NY  |  18:00 London  |  19:00 Paris

This course explores one of the most improbable episodes in modern intellectual history. At its center stands the Riverbank Institute, the private research laboratory in the suburbs of Chicago, founded in 1909 by the industrialist George Fabyan, where Renaissance cryptography, experimental acoustics and agronomy, and military intelligence converged. Its most enduring intellectual obsession, however, was the Voynich Manuscript, the world’s most famous undeciphered text, which drew to Riverbank some of the greatest cryptanalytic minds of the 20th century. From this unlikely setting emerged the power-couple William and Elizebeth Friedman, pioneers of modern American cryptanalysis, whose careers permanently reshaped the study of codes and ciphers.

Following the intertwined histories of Riverbank and the Voynich Manuscript, the course examines an unmistakably American epistemology: the interplay of eccentric private initiative, scientific rigor, technological innovation, and state power in the pursuit of hidden knowledge. What began as an effort to discover secret messages in Shakespeare ultimately helped establish the principles of modern cryptography, whose influence extends from the First World War to the age of artificial intelligence.