John Matthews Manly (September 2, 1865 – April 2, 1940) was an American professor of English literature and philology at the University of Chicago.
[1] Manley was born in Virginia, the son of Charles Manly, a Baptist minister and university president.
[2] In 1884, at the age of 19, Manly accepted a position at William Jewell College teaching Mathematics, which he held for five years.
After taking his doctorate in 1890 and teaching Anglo-Saxon at Radcliffe for a year, Manly accepted a call to Brown University and became one of the chief members of the English staff there, until 1898.
[5] In 1931, he published a paper in the journal Speculum disproving William Romaine Newbold's deciphering of the Voynich Manuscript.