My name is Carlos Rodríguez Morales and I have written a novel: El Protocolo de las Ninfas · El Libro de Alessandra. Here, answered by the person who wrote it, are the basic questions about it.

Who wrote it?

I did. It is my first novel. If you see it attributed to someone else, for example in a shared post, that is a mistake: I am its only author.

What is it about?

It is the story of a woman who could not sign her work, and of what she paid to protect it. In fifteenth-century Tuscany, Alessandra runs the workshop of a bathhouse. She has designed a regimen of baths that heals where the others fail, and she has neither a surname nor the right to sign it. When the Medici want to take the method, she cannot refuse and she cannot hand it over, so she writes it down in such a way that it will only answer to someone who never manages to master it. In the novel, that book is the Voynich manuscript, which is kept at Yale today. Six centuries later, in Alicante, in 2026, a systems analyst builds an emulation based on a hypothesis about how Alessandra’s system worked.

Is it a saga?

No. It is a standalone novel: one book, not a saga or a series.

Has it been published?

Not yet. It is unpublished: the novel is finished, revised and registered, and it is looking for an agent and a publisher.

Is it a book about the Voynich manuscript?

The manuscript is the vehicle, not the subject. It is neither a proposal for reading it nor a theory about it. The novel is about Alessandra: her craft, her life and what it cost her.

Did Alessandra exist?

No. She is a fictional character. The manuscript is real, and the places, people and books around her come from documents of the time.

Where can I find out more?

Here, in Letters: every month, a long pliego about Alessandra’s world (a place, a source, a craft) and, in between, the odd short note. The first ones are already in the archive: Horapollo, Savonarola’s Libreto, Lynn Conway and the folios of the manuscript. See the archive →

On the novel’s website you will find the author’s page, a folio of the manuscript looked at slowly every Monday, and the series Other Alessandras, about real works that lost the name of whoever made them. The author, on the novel’s website →

If you have just subscribed, your welcome email brings you the opening chapters, free.

Writing the story of a woman who was not allowed to sign has made me think a great deal about what it means to sign a book today. That will be the subject of a longer piece I will publish soon.

Novel · Tuscany, 15th century · Alicante, 2026

f. 1r · The first page. This is how the manuscript begins: with no drawing. Only text, four paragraphs, and in the left margin a few letters in red, as if marking where each part starts. Behind the ink, green stains show through: the plant painted on the other side, coming through the parchment after six centuries.

f. 2r · Thistle-like flowers. A tall plant with two flower heads that recall a thistle or a knapweed. Like almost every plant in the manuscript, it looks like several and is exactly none of them.

f. 3r · A plant no one can name. The leaves are painted as wavy bands, alternating red and green, and the root opens into fingers.

f. 4r · Red and green leaves. A thin stem, crowded with small two-coloured leaves, grows between the lines of text.

f. 9v · A pansy? Blue flowers with yellow centres. It has been compared to the wild pansy (Viola tricolor). It is a comparison, not a firm identification.

f. 25v · The plant and the creature. A star of green leaves and, by the root, a small animal with legs and a tail, somewhere between a lizard and a dragon. Almost none of the book’s plants has an animal beside it.

f. 99r · An apothecary’s inventory. Painted jars and, around them, loose roots and leaves, each with a short word beside it, like a label. It looks like a catalogue of ingredients, though no one has ever read a single label.

f. 116v · The last page. The manuscript ends with an almost empty leaf. At the top, four lines in another hand, in an alphabet we can read. Readings in Latin and in German have been proposed («so nim gaismich»: «take goat’s milk»), but there is no agreement on what they say.

All the folios, one every Monday →

f. 75r · The bathers. A green stream runs down from the top of the page, from a kind of flower-shaped fountain, and in it are naked women, one after another. Below, the water opens into a pool; further down there is another, with a group of women holding hands. No section of the manuscript has been talked about more. Some have seen thermal baths in it; others, a treatise on the body as a system of channels; others, allegories. The text around the figures, like the rest, cannot be read.

f. 78r · Figures in water. Two green pools joined by a pipe, each holding a group of women in the water. It is the image at the top of the novel’s website.

f. 80v · Figures in the bath. A page dense with text, with figures in the margins and, at the bottom, a band of blue water with women in it.

f. 81v · The pool. At the top, the page is text: two paragraphs. Below, a green pool with a drawn rim, and in it sixteen naked women, in two rows of eight, in the water. A green channel runs down the left side and reaches the pool at its upper corner; at the bottom right another, thinner one leaves it. Here the women are not in a row along a stream, as on 75r: they are together in the same pool, and they look very much alike.

In the novel, Alessandra spends thirteen years measuring the water of a spa: the heat of each pool, at elbow height. She puts it like this:

«With these hands I measured thirteen years.»

All the folios, one every Monday →

In 1968, a researcher on IBM’s ACS project was fired. Her name was left off the work she had done: a technique that let several instructions run at once outside their planned order, and which today sits inside almost every high-performance processor in the world.

The idea went on without her. For decades, nobody knew it was hers.

She started again under another name, and did it again: she co-wrote the book from which a whole generation learnt to design circuits.

IBM apologised in 2020.

Her name was Lynn Conway.

“If you want to change the future, just start living as if you are already there.”

Lynn Conway, Columbia University, 2016

These words closed the drafts of The Book of Alessandra for years. That is why the series begins with her.

Read the whole story, with its sources →

Other Alessandras: real works that were left under someone else’s name, or no name at all, and how it was later found out whose they were.

Michele Savonarola (Padua, c. 1385 – Ferrara, c. 1466) taught medicine at Padua and was physician to the Este court at Ferrara. Around 1450 he wrote, in the vernacular and for the duke, a book on food: wheat and bread, pulses, fruit, meat, fish, wine and water, with what each does to the body and how best to prepare it. It is one of the first treatises on diet written in an Italian vernacular. In the novel, Alessandra spends a summer in his house in Padua.

We have transcribed it in full from the Venice edition of 1515, without modernising, page by page, with the image of each page beside it. There are twenty-six chapters: from wheat and bread to honey, sugar, spices and salt, ending with rules for keeping healthy and a set of questions, by way of grapes, oysters, goat’s milk, wine, and water “raw” and “cooked”, from rivers, wells and cisterns.

The transcription is free to use (CC BY 4.0), with credit to the source. Read the Libreto in the Library →

From the Library: texts from Alessandra’s time, transcribed from the original sources.

In June 1419, on the island of Andros, a Greek codex was bought. Inside was a rare book, Horapollo’s “Hieroglyphica”, which read the signs of Egypt as figures with meaning: a bird for “god”, a snake biting its own tail for “the world”.

The codex passed through the hands of the Florentine traveller Cristoforo Buondelmonti, reached Florence and ended up in Niccolò Niccoli’s library. Today it is in the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Very few people read it in those years, but the idea that a figure could stand for a word was already going round among humanists.

It is the Florence of the Medici, the Florence that will one day come for Alessandra. Read the entry on the website →