Monday 30 June 2008

"Mappamundi" Voynich novel...

Note: this article has now moved to mappamundi-voynich-novel on Cipher Mysteries

Fans of historical novelist Christopher Harris have a new Voynich Manuscript-themed book of his heading their way in early 2009: to be published by Dedalus Books, "Mappamundi" is a non-Byzantine sequel to the final book in Harris' Byzantine trilogy, "False Ambassador" (if that's not too confusing). I asked him how he came to find the Voynich Manuscript:-
"As far as I can remember, I first came across the Voynich MS in an article in New Scientist (17 November 2001). As you would expect, the focus of the article is on cryptography, linguistics, statistical analysis, etc. I was intrigued by the strangeness of the MS, and thought I might be able to use it in a novel. (I have an interest in lost or mysterious manuscripts, e.g Plethon's 'Book of Laws', which features in my 'False Ambassador'.) I read what I could about the MS, and later got hold of the Gawsewitch facsimile edition (I don't know if it's available in the UK. I bought mine from Amazon.fr)."

Aside from the role the VMs takes on Mappamundi, what are his thoughts on what the VMs is or contains?

"Personally, I am inclined to believe the Art Brut theory, which suggests that the MS may be the production of a psychotic outsider who had seen herbal/ alchemical/ esoteric manuscripts, and attempted to replicate them obsessively, but without any understanding of the originals. There are examples of this in the 19th & 20th centuries, and it is quite possible that some 15th century monk, or amateur scholar, was similarly afflicted.

However, it would be a lot more interesting if it turned out to be a coherent document, capable of being translated."


All of which is fair enough: more on this as it happens...

Sunday 29 June 2008

More Voynich jokes...

Note: this article has now moved to more-voynich-jokes on Cipher Mysteries

After my Voynich light bulb joke, I thought you might like this one (Andy did):-


  • "Doctor, Doctor, I think I can read the Voynich Manuscript?!"
    "Fantastic! If you can do audio typing as well, you can start on Monday!"

I also found a Voynich gag on Mediadesk's Voynich page:

  • Who [made the VMs], when and why?
    [...]

    It's from The Central Library of Atlantis, and you can't imagine how much the overdue charge is going to be when it's returned.
Voynich completists might prefer this:-


  • What's black and white and red all over?
    Oh yes: that would be
    f1r, f67r1, f67r2... my website lists them all...

Or this:-

  • A Voynich researcher is at the Pearly Gates.
    "Sorry", says Saint Peter, "but because of your sins, you'll have to spend a century in Purgatory before you can enter Heaven."
    "That's terrible!", wails the man, "Ten years on the Voynich Manuscript and now this!"
    "Oh dear", says St Peter, "nobody told me
    that. You'd better come straight in!"

Or finally (and perhaps inevitably):

  • Knock, knock!
    Who's there?
    The author of the Voynich Manuscript!
    Errrrm... could you narrow it down a bit?
:-)

Saturday 28 June 2008

Egyptian / Arabic link to the VMs...?

Note: this article has now moved to egyptian-arabic-link-to-the-vms on Cipher Mysteries

If (like me) you are a bit of a bibliophile, you may quite enjoy a little social web site called LibraryThing, which is based around a community of bibliophiles listing all the books they own (or rather, the ones they're happy to admit owning). Thanks to a low-tech web interface, adding your own books is a surprisingly quick process (marred only by its apparent inability to handle apostrophes in book titles effectively, *sigh*), and you can add up to 200 for free. So far, I 've added most of my VMs research titles, which you can see on my LibraryThing catalogue.

But it's then that LibraryThing starts to get interesting, because you can start to see who else there has similar bookshelves, and what they're reading - and what you haven't read. There are also user reviews, and various other tricksy book-related things you can do (like adding tags to books).

Which is where I wanted to start: one LibraryThing user called "morgan42" (Morgan Roussel) has a (frankly huge) book collection of all the right kind of stuff, and blogs about it etc. While searching for LibraryThing books tagged with "Voynich", I noticed that he had applied this tag to a most unusual book..

Morgan had been reading "Egyptology: The Missing Millennium" by Okasha el Daly: this concerns the transmission of Egyptian ideas through Arabic texts over a thousand year period that most accounts simply omit. In the book's Figure 24, there is a colour reproduction of folio 50a of British Library MS Add 25724 by the 13th-14th century Arab alchemist Abu Al-Qasim Al-'Iraqi, which itself reproduces (with various alchemical embellishments) "A stela of King Amenemhat II (ca 1928-1895 BCE) of the Twelfth Dynasty".

A quick web search reveals that Okasha el Daly is a professor at UCL, who revealed to a surprised world in 2004 that various Arabic alchemists were able to read hieroglyphics an entire millennium before Champollion. There's a decent-sized UCL press release about this over on the ArcheoBlog.

All fascinating stuff: but presumably nothing to do with the Voynich Manuscript, right? Well... Morgan noticed that Al-Qasim's drawing appears to contain the common Voynichese letter pair "ot", clear as day. And here it is:-




Note also that the letter one to the right of the "ot" looks not unlike like a "ch" struckthrough gallows, while the letter two to its right looks not like a "4" (EVA "q"). Of course, any Voynich researcher would tell you that these letters would never appear in that order in the actual VMs: but it's interesting, nonetheless.

So, I thought, let's have a look at the BL catalogue entry for this ms: rather unhelpfully, it says "For description of No. 25,724, see the Catalogue, of Oriental MSS". So I emailed the BL, and was told that "descriptions of [the BL's Oriental MSS] are at present only available in handwritten and printed catalogues kept for consultation on the open access shelves in our Reading Room". *sigh*

But the BL person also typed in the entry for MS 25,724 to save me the trouble of going on, which was very kind: it is "a volume containing several treatises on alchemy by Abu-l-Ka'sim al-Iraki, Balamaghus [?] al-Maghribi and others, with coloured symbolical drawings and cabbalistic writings. Arabic, 18th century". Which then raises the question... "18th century"?

In summary: though I don't honestly think this mysterious lettering is Voynichese, I must admit to being a little intrigued. Might the lettering in a similar 14th century Arabic document (of which this is apparently a copy) have been the specific inspiration for the Voynich's cipher alphabet?

I asked Okasha el Daly about this phrase: he said that he had "...no clue but they may be corrupted Greek or some other deformed Egyptian scripts. They may well be some of the many alchemical symbols used in these manuscripts."

A reasonable prediction would therefore be that this is a (possibly 18th century?) scribal corruption of stylized Ancient Greek or deformed Egyptian text - I'd guess Greek, in that the "o" is probably an omicron. But can we possibly reconstruct what that six-letter word originally was? It was located between a curious face and an alchemist at his furnace, with large ravens to the right (not shown below):-

Friday 27 June 2008

More Dan Burisch Voynichification...

Note: this article has now moved to more-dan-burisch-voynichification on Cipher Mysteries

It used to be the case that Google could find hardly anything connecting Dan Burisch and the Voynich Manuscript apart from my postings here: but now there are over 50 hits.

Some of these, such as this one, are from people on the inside of the labyrinth/RPG: these tend to throw yet more sand in the face of anyone trying to understand Burisch's claim, by asserting things such as "The Voynich Manuscript may provide clues to the shape and function of items found in the YSC cells, spooled material". No, you're absolutely right: it means nothing to me either.

Other discussion boards have whole bunches of people saying Dan Burisch is a fraud, though with occasional rambling posters popping up to defend him:-
From the website ‘world mysteries’ concerning the Voynich document we read in an except from Dr. Levitov: "There is not a single so-called botanical illustration that does not contain some Cathari symbol or Isis symbol. The astrological drawings are likewise easy to deal with; the innumerable stars are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle.” The fate of the the Cathars resembles that of the Knights Templar, does not the dualism of the former also receive a modicum of redemption in the restoration of the latter?With Dr. Burisch’s background in microbiology, the Voynich ‘botanical illustrations’ were child’s play, and the astrological designations had already been previously noted as corresponding to the Milky Way Galaxy, and by conversion of linear transformations into ‘diagrammatic notation,’ the determinant of the matrix was solved. ‘As above so below’ was not, in this case, a spiritual derivative, it was simply and starkly a ‘spacial’ one.
Ohhhh dear: if a novelist tried to get away with froth like this, he/she would get taken apart. There is no Milky Way link, there is no microbiology, there is no Cathar link, there is no Templar link, there is no matrix (spatial or otherwise), there is no religion, no gnosis, no dualism. The Voynich Manuscript being summoned up here is an imaginary one, a heretical MacGuffin for a potboiler that never quite got written.
In many ways, I get a sense from all this of a deeply tragic situation, of a bright (but disturbed) person grasping at anything they can find on the glittering, shallow surface of Net knowledge that might just explain (however temporarily) their personal pain, the loss they feel: but it never does, and their pain never goes away.
I have no idea if that person is Dan Burisch or someone else: and in most of the important ways, it really doesn't matter. John Manly was right in detail but not in scope: more than simply a blank cryptographic screen to project ideas and emptions upon, the VMs is actually like a magnet for unhappy PhDs, a sandpit for them to play out their make-believe stories of intellectual redemption. By doing this, they can "rescue" someone from historical oblivion whose frustrated life-experience somehow chimes with theirs: all of which amounts to a kind of intellectual displacement activity directed at the past when they should be putting the effort into their own lives in the present to save themselves - but perhaps that's too emotionally hard for them to do.
Perhaps I'm no less guilty (with my reconstructed story of Antonio Averlino "Filarete") as Levitov, or Rugg, or any of the other 20+ Voynich theories out there. I don't feel unhappy: but I can at least see that maybe I was hoping for redemption in some other way. In my defence, all I can say is that I at least tried my best to let the manuscript do the talking... and hope that this will in the end prove to be enough to move the history forward. Isn't that as good as it gets?
As a (frankly slightly spooky) postnote on the whole Dan Burisch affair, there's an online novel (with a bit of a Voynich thing going on) posted to a blog that you might well find fascinating. It's called "Josef6" by Benjamin Kerstein, and deals with a claimed time-traveller from the future posting messages to an online community, and all the cultish madness that follows on.
The peril of science fiction is that it attracts the worst kind of lunatics
-- those prepared to believe not only their own delusions but each others. The
frenzied construction of delusional architectures of thought is a fascinating
talent, and one which reached its pinnacle in the late twentieth century.
Sounds familiar, Burisch fans? Though it's not strictly a Voynich novel per se, I really quite enjoyed it (and even donated $5 to the author via PayPal for posting it up). Recommended! :-)

Thursday 26 June 2008

"The Alchemyst"...

Note: this article has now moved to the-alchemyst on Cipher Mysteries

Nosing around in Borders the other day, I noticed a popular teen alchemist-themed book called "The Alchemyst" (2007) by Michael Scott: it had a nice cover, good in-store marketing (early-teen-eye-high positioning, right next to some Philip Pullman books), and featured John Dee and Nicholas Flamel, doing a whole bunch of the-world-is-in-danger demonological things with two children (Josh and Sophie) who begin the story working in Flamel's bookshop. Of course, the star of the show is arguably The Codex (containing the recipe for the Elixir of Life) that gets stolen and endlessly pursued: but you probably guessed that already. :-)

And now I read (courtesy of Wikipedia) that there's a "The Alchemyst" film in pre-production, and the sequel's already in the shops. Alchemy: there's a lot of it about, isn't there, hmmm? :-o

Wednesday 25 June 2008

Voynich Manuscript as storyboard...?

Note: this article has now moved to voynich-manuscript-as-storyboard on Cipher Mysteries

A couple of VMs-related links for you today, one old and one new (but nothing blue, sorry): I thought I'd run them together for a bit of fun...

Back in January 2005, the Independent on Sunday ran a piece called "Nudes, triffids and the mother of all riddles", a review of Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill's book "The Voynich Manuscript: the unsolved riddle of an extraordinary book which has defied interpretation for centuries". The writer - Scarlett Thomas, who Voynich News regulars will doubtless recognise as being the author of crypto-geeky NoLogo-esque Voynich-themed novel "PopCo" - colourfully described the VMs as like "a storyboard for an other-dimensional remake of Day of the Triffids", and thought that the basic story of the VMs' history "(which makes The Da Vinci Code seem like a slightly lame round of Hangman) would work in the hands of any authors." The conclusion of her review was that Kennedy & Churchill's book should be sufficient to bring the "beautiful, frustrating and compelling" VMs to the attention of the world.

Fast forward to last weekend (June 2008), and the Guardian's book review section ran a short review by Steven Poole on "The Enigmas of History" (third piece down on the page) by Alan Baker. Though this covers a number of non-enigmas, the Voynich Manuscript does get a reasonable mention (I should hope so too!), with Poole describing the VMs as being "like a storyboard for The Matrix with annotations in an indecipherable language."

Hmmm... two book reviews, both with Voynich storyboard metaphors... Perhaps, back in 2005, Scarlett Thomas was secretly hoping for her book to be optioned by a moneybags film studio (these things do happen, though not as often as novelists would like) and this guided her choice of words; and then Steven Poole (or indeed Alan Baker) happened to read her review.

Or is there a Voynich film lurking in the collective unconscious? Even though the story of the VMs may well be something that a "proper" historian could never sign off on, it may well be a set of bones that Hollywood screenwriters could happily boil up into a tasty filmic soup. Do you think?

As long as they don't cast Tom bl**dy Hanks as a Warbugian-style secret historian again and they leave Jesuit priests right out of it (the VMs very probably predates the Society of Jesus by 50+ years!), I wish them luck! :-)

Tuesday 24 June 2008

Voynich word of the day: pareidolia

One thing I've noticed about people with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript is that they often have logophilia (a love of words), particularly manifesting itself as a passion for etymology (the histories [both real and imagined] coiled up inside words), for the consonance and dissonance of word and letter patterns, and for the child-like joy of finding the perfect word - a key to fit the lock of the world. Perhaps Voynich research somehow manages to tick all these boxes?

Anyway, here's your perfect Voynich word for today: pareidolia, which I would describe as being the delusional antipattern the human mind is tempted to succumb to when it sees something astonishing in basically the wrong place - such as Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun, Jesus Christ in a tortilla (1978), or the 2007 "monkey tree phenomenon" in Singapore.

People flock to see these (particularly religious pareidolia), and collectors even buy & sell them on eBay. The Internet has some fantastic collections of pareidolia photographs (and bizarre stories), such as on the Skeptic's Dictionary site, The Folklorist site, and this Pope Tart site (yes, really).

In the context of this blog, I think it is quite clear that most visual interpretations of the Voynich Manuscript (and I'm particularly thinking about its curiously-structured herbal pages here) are "pareidolic", manifesting the basic human need to find meaning in whatever it looks at.

And so if you look long enough (hours? weeks? years?) at anything, the danger is that you'll start to mis-see meaning in it. The paradox here is that long-term researchers (such as myself) surely become unable to tell whether they are extremely expert or extremely deluded, if not indeed both at the same time. Are they deluded as to their expertise, or experts in their delusion?

This whole thing can also be viewed as one of "semantically irregular verbs":-
  • I am an expert
  • You (singular) are a bit confused
  • He/she is deluded
  • We agree to differ
  • You (plural) have somewhat lost the plot
  • They are completely bonkers
On the bright side, there's an even more unnerving mental phenomenon called apophenia, which is where you see patterns in palpably random data (at which point I normally insert a reference to Mark Romanek's 1978 film "Static", which of course I wish I had made). Contemporary writers (like Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, Alan Moore, etc bleedin' etc) enjoy apophenia as a motif, perhaps because it is based on a peculiarly kind of desperate desire to find meaning anywhere in the world, where even pareidolic places aren't quite implausible enough.

In this sense, then, I think Newbold's quest to find meaning within the random craquelure of the Voynichese quillstrokes is something closer to apophenia than to pareidolia. Other Voynich theories based at the level of stroke decomposition (like the gloriously over-detailed one from Ursula Papke that used to be at ms408.com, and where the "meaning" is read off from each stroke of the letter) may well also be apophenic.

Monday 23 June 2008

Review of "The Philosopher's Stone"

If "The Philosopher's Stone" (1969) was a car, it would have a great big weld down the middle where author Colin Wilson had attached the (frankly rather turgid) H.G.Wells-style front end to the (actually reasonably OK) H.P.Lovecraft-style back end. It makes me wants to shout in his face: Oi, Wilson, No - the beginning is usually the wrong place to start your story.

Really, he should have dropped all his faux logical positivism guff (drearily moving the main character forward one atom at a time) and instead started from about page 190. Then, just three pages from the end, when the main character's mind is temporarily merged [a bit Mr Spock-y, but what the hey] with the mad God-like uber-priest K'tholo, Wilson could easily have punted the story off into an even higher state of Lovecraft emulation (but moved forward to the present day)... now that would have been a nice slice of occult horror to read. But he didn't. :-(

Including the Voynich Manuscript is a nice piece of intellectual decoupage on Wilson's part, but feels a bit like collateral damage from his high-speed drive-by scattershot blasts at culture, philosophy and history - Bruckner, Merleau-Ponty, George Bernard Shaw, Plato, de Maupassant, the Popol Vuh, etc - which fill most of the book.

Still, if you fancy reading a Lovecraftian short story disguised as a novel, you shouldn't be too disappointed. *sigh*

Sunday 22 June 2008

"The Montefeltro Conspiracy" arrives...

A copy of Marcello Simonetta's new book "The Montefeltro Conspiracy" (2008) has just arrived in the post (I first mentioned it here). I must admit to being a bit excited, as he covers a lot of ground I'd had to wade slowly through in the Italian sources when writing my own book - Cicco Simonetta, Francesco Sforza, the death of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Italian cryptography - as well as the fascinating web of intrigue and treachery threaded through so many of the condottieri and(mainly Florentine) princes which forms the book's focus.

Really, it's the kind of book I aspired to in "The Curse": a historical account of the politics of cryptography (though the cryptography aspect here is fairly light by comparison). And, quite unexpectedly, Marcello cites my book (though admittedly only in the endnote to p.24 - but hey, it's in the bibliography too, every little citation helps).

Even at a glance, it's obvious that his book is well illustrated, with even some nice pictures of the Urbino intarsia I mentioned here only a few days ago. But I'm getting way ahead of myself now: I have to go away and read it ASAP so that I can post a proper review here...

Saturday 21 June 2008

The Open Directory Project...

I've just been accepted as an editor of the Open Directory Project: for several years, its Voynich Manuscript category has been fairly moribund (if not actually dead), and I thought it would be a positive thing to try to update and restructure it, so that it could provide a set of links to Voynich-related things that was actually useful - image galleries, research, theories, etc.

I made a good start at doing this: but then I ran into a heap of problems...

Firstly, it turns out that nearly every interesting Voynich-related site I've looked at over the past six years has stopped working: Voynich dead links significantly outnumber the live links. Furthermore, many dead links (even recent ones such as ms408.com) don't appear to have made it into the Wayback Machine. And "deeplinking" (linking to sites inside a website) into the Wayback Machine is a no-no in the ODP.

Secondly, while the intention of the Open Directory Project is that it should provide a categorized directory of useful resources on a subject, Voynich Manuscript research only rarely works like that. For example, some ODP editors wouldn't even link to the Wikipedia page on their subject because it is a deeplink within another resource (i.e. within Wikipedia itself), as opposed to a user's subsite. So only a tiny handful of sites (such as Rene Zandbergen's exemplary pages on the subject, my Voynich News blog, etc) would satisfy a hardcore ODP editor's criteria for inclusion.

In other words, though I hoped that the ODP section might be the right place to bring some kind of order to the disjointed heap of fragments we call Voynich knowledge, many inside the ODP actively argue that that's not what it's for.

But if the ODP is the wrong answer, what is the right answer?

Having just spent a few days tracking down a long succession of dead links, I think there are two main types of webpage that should somehow be actively preserved: research pages (analyses of features, mainly of Voynichese) and theory/hypothesis pages ("my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine").

And so I've just started up Voynich Research and Voynich Theories (as subsites on GC's Voynich Central website), each of which I plan to maintain as a single index page giving links to (and brief summaries of) all the research papers and webpages placed there. Though the ODP won't allow links to the Wayback Machine, I can put them in here: though my plan (longer term) is to contact the people involved asking for their permission to put an actual copy on the site, which would be a somewhat better answer.

OK, it's not a perfect answer... but it's a start.

Friday 20 June 2008

How many Voynichologists does it take to change a light bulb?

It's a sad (but true) observation that most webpages (and particularly blog posts) on the VMs are serious, dull, dry, high-minded, conceptual guff, at best offering up a semi-quirky restatement of either the Wikipedia page, Rene Zandbergen's page, or of Gordon Rugg's hypothesis-of-possibility. You would scarce believe, dear reader, what oceans of cack I have to swim through to reach the occasional archipelago of Voynich-related interest... *sigh*

And so it is with great pleasure that I landed upon the shore of this gently satirical review of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Read it and enjoy!

As for the rest of the Voynichian web, it is (sadly) pretty much uniformly humourless, with the joyous exception of the excellent Uncyclopedia Voynich Manuscript entry, which has been heavily updated since I mentioned it last year (though I'm pleased to see the "medieval VCR manual" gag is still there). Recommended!

PS: the answer to the question is (of course) "None, they like being in the dark."

Thursday 19 June 2008

Mysterious intarsia panels from Urbino...

Here's another historical mystery from my favourite neck of the woods (the Quattrocento), and involving the amazing trompe-l'oeuil wooden intarsia (decorative inlays) in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, something I've wanted to visit for years.

Basically, when Federico da Montefeltro was decorating his new palace, he commissioned a wonderful set of intarsia, mainly destined for his studiolo (study room). When not furiously waging war, he loved Greek literature and the liberal arts, and the designs chosen reflect this: scenes with 3D platonic solids, an astrolabe, an armillary sphere, musical instruments, animals (such as squirrels), etc. You can see some of these in this "Procrastinating in Pittsburgh" blog post (and in this one too): the amount of technique that was required to execute these small marvels is frankly incredible.

Other Quattrocento palaces commissioned similar intarsia works, such as this perspective view of a cittern (lute-like instrument) and sand-timer from the Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio (from 1479-1482).

But what I didn't know was that there was also a set of three cityscapes done in this same intarsia style: one is in Urbino, one in Baltimore, one in Berlin. These have been attributed to Luciano Laurana, but this is hard to be sure about.

What do they depict? Jockusch concluded (in a 1993 dissertation) that while some intarsia panels depicting real scenery did exist (one of Monte Oliveto near Siena, the other of the Colosseum in Rome), the rest - including these three - were all very probably imaginary.

OK, so what were they for? According to a 2007 study by Macerata University geography professor Giorgio Mangani, these were probably memory aids (the "architectural mnemonic" in the Ars Memoria, as discussed by Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, etc).

I haven't yet seen Mangani's study, but his conclusion seems a bit of a stretch to me. This article (part of Kim Veltman's 2004 work here) notes plenty of other views: Krautheimer (1948) thought the Baltimore and Urbino panels represented tragedy and comedy, though Sanpaolesi (1949) disagreed; while Battisti (1960) speculated that they might instead be visualizations of ancient cities.

It's a mystery - or is it? Do these three idealized cityscapes actually need to be for anything, any more than the squirrel or the astrolabe or the sand-timer? Perhaps Mangani is right and that someone used or appropriated them for their own personal mnemotechnical odyssey, but that seems a little after-the-event.

My personal preference in this instance is, in broadly the same vein as Charles Hope's skepticism about claims of Neoplatonism in art, that these are just perspectival grandstanding, 3d technique for its own sake. If there is an art history link to these cityscapes, it might well turn out to be to Antonio Averlino's ideal city Sforzinda: but even this I'm not really holding my breath for.

Wednesday 18 June 2008

Codex Seraphinianus on Flickr...

If you haven't seen Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus before, I heartily recommend stomping over to this 230-photo Flickr set and checking it out.

It's now reasonably well-known that the book's strange page-numbering system has been cracked (it's a funny kind of base-21 counting, with various unlucky numbers removed), but the text itself remains enigmatic. Ivan Derzhanski has posted some observations here, but I think it's fair to say nobody yet has the foggiest idea how to go about trying to read it. Oh well!

Incidentally, there's even a ballet based on it!

Tuesday 17 June 2008

Another Voynich paper...

I've just found a German summary of the 2006 "Knowledge, Discipline and Power, 12th-17th Centuries" conference in Sheffield, at which Volkhard Huth of the University of Freiburg apparently presented a paper on the Voynich Manuscript. According to the description, Huth (whose expertise is in handwriting) broadly localizes the manuscript to Germany, provisionally dates it to 1480-1500, and places its encoded contents within a broadly philosophical tradition. According to this, he presented it in session three, just before the ubiquitous Charles Burnett. :-)

This page describes his paper (well, its title) and where it will be published:-
"The Critic on Magical Mystery Tour. Towards a serious location of the enigmatic ›Voynich Cipher Manuscript‹ in the history of knowledge, in: Knowledge, Discipline and Power, 12th-17th Centuries. An international conference organised by the University of Sheffield with the support of the British Academy in honour of Professor David E. Luscombe, FBA (University of Sheffield / Humanities Research Institute, 15.9. – 17.9. 2006). Papers, ed. by MARTIAL STAUB (erscheint bei Cambridge University Press; in Vorbereitung) "
That's two academics known to be actively looking at the VMs: hardly a tidal wave, but hopefully the start of something good. I'll try to get hold of a copy of the paper to review here...

Monday 16 June 2008

More Voynich music crossover stuff...

Many people reading this probably will already have vageuly heard of contemporary Swiss composer Hanspeter Kyburz (b.1960) and his orchestral work "The Voynich Cipher Manuscript", which was inspired by the VMs. Not a lot of people know (or care) that Kyburz also inserted in the work three short poems by maverick Futurist genius Velimir Khlebnikov, I'd guess because of Chlebnikov's "super-tale" Zangezi, which was partly written in an invented language of the birds: but now you know as well.

But now other musicians (though admittedly of the rock ilk) are starting to wake up to the smell of Voynich coffee. I mentioned one Californian band here not so long ago, but here are a few more to add to your Top Trumps collection of crossover Voynichiana.

So first off, a big hello to the FaceBook page of Mechatohm, a Californian band in the Alternative Rock Metal genre to add to your overworked networked music drive. Band member Zyclobonzaron (so Enochian!) is apparently influenced by "The Voynich Manuscript and shit like that...", which is pretty much on the mark, can't really complain. Just so you know, it's VMs page f68v (the "sun-face" solar calendar page) that graces the band's album cover (albeit Photoshopped halfway into next Tuesday).

And a grand welcome to a YouTube clip courtesy of The Phaser [Update: sorry! They've just removed it! Bah!]. I'm not entirely sure what the world has done to deserve a piece of music apparently played out on the Commodore 64's VIC chip played into a reverb unit, but it must have been something good because I quite like it. Having said that, I'm not entirely sure I could listen to it more than a couple of times, but it might be a good thing to put into your iPod if you're going for a 10-minute run. "Maybe you don't appreciate my interpretation [..]. but I really don't give a sheet". Bless.

Finally, a great big ¡hola! goes out to "The Voynich", a Spanish foursome mainly from Granada who formed at the end of 2007, playing rock/pop that is presumably as uncategorisable as the VMs itself. Here's a link to their "Voynich Dossier" blog: I'm sure they're lovely people.

Sunday 15 June 2008

Strange ciphered message at Fermilab...

Not a big story, but fun all the same. Chris Devers sums it up nicely: a mysterious encrypted message got sent to Fermilab, which was then got (mostly) deciphered as:-

FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE
[...]
EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN

...though the middle section has yet to be cracked. Might I suggest: "all your basse are belong to us"...?

Saturday 14 June 2008

Voynich and PhD people...

I recently stumbled upon an active Voynich researcher I'd never heard of: Angela Catalina Ghionea (note that, even though Internet Explorer throws up lots of warnings for her website, it's basically OK), who is a teaching assistant and 3rd year PhD student in the History Department at Purdue University.

She's is "currently focused on the most mysterious manuscript in the world, The 'Voynich Manuscript' ", and is preparing an article called "Understanding the Voynich Manuscript. New Evidence for a Genuine Alphabet, Shamanic Imagery, and Magical Plants". Her recent presentations at various conferences include:-
  • "Voynich Manuscript and its Genuine Alphabet" (12 April, HGSA 2008 Conference, Purdue)
  • "Understanding the "Voynich", the Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World. American Shamanism and Exotic Plants" (29 March at the OAH 2008 Annual Meeting, New York, Hilton Hotel)
  • "Contributions to Voynich Manuscript's Mystery" (24 March 2008, MARS Conference, Purdue)
  • "Voynich Manuscript is not a Hoax. Uncovering New Evidence" (Purdue, 29 January 2008)
All of which I hope to see very soon (and to review here). But this set me wondering: how many other people with PhD's have looked at the Voynich? I drew up a quick list (let me know if there are more), but there are plenty of familiar faces...
  • William Romaine Newbold
  • John Manly (love the cigar story!)
  • Leonell Strong (love that facial hair / collar combination)
  • Derek de Solla Price
  • Jim Reeds
  • Jacques Guy
  • Gabriel Landini
  • Jorge Stolfi
  • Gordon Rugg
  • Edith Sherwood
Though according to Dr C. S. Lewis Barrie PhD, the Voynich Manuscript is a medieval blog, which is why it makes no sense. Ah, bless.

Friday 13 June 2008

20th Century Voynich Manuscript!?

Copies of a curious little apparently enciphered object were being given away in Dillons Arts bookshop about 12 years ago: I saw this last year mentioned on Cylob's blog (he's a musician now living in Berlin), but haven't found any further mention of it anywhere on the Internet.

To my eyes, it looks like a simple substitution cipher (you can see several of the shapes repeating, and you can probably guess at least some of the vowels), with a kind of vaguely pigpenesque quality to them (so there is probably some underlying rationale behind the alphabet). Maybe one day I'll ask Cylob for a copy & post a transcription here...

Thursday 12 June 2008

Navigating Voynich Manuscript f1r...

Seeing the Voynich Manuscript for the first time is quite an intimidating experience: you're looking at something which is so uncertain in so many different ways - how should you try to "read" it?

In general, when you look at a page of text, you do two different types of reading: (1) you work out how everything is laid out (you navigate the page) and (2) you read what is contained within it (you read the text). In computer science terms, you could describe the layout conventions and text conventions as having two quite separate 'grammars'.

For instance, if you picked up a Hungarian newspaper, I would predict that you would stand a good chance of being able to work out its structure, even though you may not be able to understand a single word. It's perfectly reasonable, then, to be able to navigate a page without being able to read it.

What's not widely known about the Voynich Manuscript is that researchers have identified many of the navigational elements that structure the text (even though they cannot actually read them). I thought it might be helpful to post about these (oh, and I'm getting emails mildly berated me for posting too much about the wrong 'v', i.e. that it's not "Vampire News").

As a practical example, let's look at the very first page of the manuscript proper: this has the name "f1r" (which means "the recto [front] side of folio [double-sided page] #1"). You may also see this referred to as "f001r" (some people use this naming style so that their image files get sorted nicely), or even as "1006076.sid" (this is the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library's internal database reference for the high-resolution scan of f1r, which they store as a kind of highly compressed image). This is what f1r looks like:-



Note that the green splodges aren't actually part of the page itself - they're green leaves painted onto the reverse side of the folio (that is, on f1v, "folio #1 verso [back]") that happen to be visible through the vellum. I'll leave the issue of whether this is because the paint is too thick or the vellum is too thin to another day...

If we use a tricky colour filter written by Jon Grove (more on it here), we can make a passable attempt at removing the green splodges: and if we then bump up the contrast to make everything a little clearer, we can get a revised image of f1r:-


Red areas: these form the first four paragraphs of the text. These often start with one of four large vertical characters (known as "gallows characters"), and appear to have been written from top-left down to bottom-right, as you would English, French, Latin etc.

Blue areas: these are known as "titles", and are typically right-aligned words or short phrases added to the end of paragraphs. It has been proposed that the text contained in these might actually be section titles (which seems fairly reasonable). There's a brief discussion on this by (a differently spelled!) John Grove here, who first suggested the term.

Yellow area: this is a cipher key arranged vertically down the right hand side of the page that someone has written in (and only partially filled before giving up) in a 16th century hand. Though a bit indistinct, you can still make out "a b c d e" at the top left and a few other letters besides.

Bright green areas: these odd shapes appear nowhere else, and are generally referred to as "weirdoes" (for want of a better name). Interestingly, these are picked out in bright red: f67r2 is the only other place with red text that I can think of (the page that was originally on the front of what is now Quire 9).

Dull green area: this is where the earliest proven owner wrote his signature (something like "Jacobus de Tepenecz, Prag", though it is very hard to make out), which a subsequent owner appears to have (quite literally) scrubbed off the page (if you look carefully, you can see what appears to be two or more watermarks at the edges of the area). The question of why someone would want to do this is a matter for another day...

Pink area: hidden in the top right corner next to some wormholes and the folio number ("1", in a sixteenth century hand) is a very faint picture, possibly of a bird. Surprisingly, this subtle piece of marginalia doesn't appear in GC's otherwise-very-good gallery of Voynich marginalia: so here's an enhanced picture of it so you can see what I'm talking about:-.

So, even if we can't yet read f1r's text, can we navigate its layout? I believe we can! From the presence of red text, I'm fairly certain it was the first page of a quire: and from the signature and weathering, I don't see any reason to think this was ever bound anywhere apart from at the front of the manuscript. This leads me to predict that the set of four paragraphs forms an index to the manuscript as a whole, and so very probably describe four separate "books" or "works", where the "title" (appended to the end of the paragraph) is indeed the title of that book.

If you were looking for cribs to crack the titles :-) , my best guess is that the first book (section) is a herbal, the second book is on the stars (astronomy and astrology), the third book is on water, while the fourth book comprises recipes and secrets. I also suspect that this index page was composed about three-quarters of the way through the project, and that the (really quite strange) Herbal-B pages were added in a subsequent phase. But, once again, that's another story entirely...

Wednesday 11 June 2008

Dee, Lovecraft, Voynich - An Eternal Triangle?

I've just started reading Colin Wilson's "The Philosopher's Stone", so I thought it might be a good idea to blog about an article from the Metromagick blog where he also plays a role.

The piece is called "Dr. John Dee, the Necronomicon & the Cleansing of the World", and was written by Colin Low in 1996-2000. It's basically an extended riff on H.P.Lovecraft, John Dee, the Voynich Manuscript, Aleister Crowley and the Necronomicon, and how much they do (or don't) relate to each other.

The problem with Lovecraft fans is that they often enjoy emulating what their gloomy hero liked to do: mix fantasy with history until they both blur together into one great big glob of either historicised fiction or fictionalised history (whichever you prefer, it doesn't matter much).

And so it was that in 1978, a book called "Necronomicon" appeared edited by George Hay (reprinted in 1995), containing a claim by David Langford and Robert Turner that Lovecraft's fabled Necronomicon was not only real but "had been preserved by Alkindi in his treatise The Book of the Essence of the Soul", parts of which had in turn been enciphered by John Dee in his Liber Loagaeth. With an introduction by Colin Wilson, it looked convincingly like real historical research... but (as you've probably guessed by now) it was merely faux Lovecraftian nonsense.

Colin Low's article then goes on to collect together various strands apparently connecting Dee (via Enochian and Choronzon) to Crowley and his well-documented adventures with demon summoning. It's all entertaining stuff, but the possible presence at the ball of a Lovecraftian mischief-making poltergeist tends to rather reduce its reliability for the reader. So in the end, does Low's account amount to something special or to something of nothing? Basically, I think you'll have to make your own call.

However, I do find Low's summing-up of the Necronomicon fiercely attuned to much that has been said about the Voynich Manuscript: "The Necronomicon is a hollow vessel - it booms resoundingly, but has nothing in it but the projections of our own fantasies." Which is a shame.

Tuesday 10 June 2008

Voynich linguistic disproof!

Possibly as a byproduct of all the philosophy of science lectures I once endured, I've got a bit of a soft spot for Karl Popper. Basically, a Popperian approach to science involves constructing cunning weapons of disproof to chop down falsifiable hypotheses, where the "last man standing" is your current best bet at the truth. This is not unlike a somewhat formalized version of Conan Doyle's "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

To be honest, Conan Doyle's version is a tad sucky, as it assumes (to allow Sherlock Holmes to ever solve anything) that you are able to generate all possible explanations, in order that your process of elimination-by-disproof can ultimately iterate to the One True Truth. In the real world, however, an imaginative scientist should be able to conjure up candidate explanations at a faster rate than they could ever practically be tested.

Another very significant problem is the economic cost of constructing cunning weapons of disproof that will demonstrate that hypothesis X cannot be true. Doing this for even a single case can be very hard, let alone for situations where there are hundreds of possibilities.

Yet the scientific method typically works to an abysmally lower level of proof, looking merely for persuasive mental models and correlative statistics to back it up. Basically, the scientific method makes Bad Science easy to do because you haven't got Karl Popper peering over your shoulder saying there are no proofs, only disproofs, you haven't disproved anything.

All of which is simply to help paint a picture of the lamentable situation in which studies of the Voynich Manuscript have been for so long, where there are not only countless imaginative hypotheses to deal with, but also few if any Popperian tools of disproof. This has meant that people can (and do) make pretty much any pseudo-scientific assertion about the VMs they like and nobody can (without invoking particularly arcane statistical arguments which only a tiny minority can easily understand) tell them they're definitively wrong.

Until now.

Voynich researcher Marke Fincher has long been fascinated by Voynichese words' strange behaviour, and how it differs from the behaviour of words in real languages (such as Latin, French, Swahili, etc). Yet nobody had devised a way of making this difference visible.

But recently Marke developed a programme called WPPA which allows a lot of this structure to be made visible. In particular, Marke showed that real languages have an implicit word association structure whereby recurring pairs of words can be found not only next to each other, but at a certain distance from each other as well. Word pairs also largely prefer a particular order: Marke points out that "and the" is very much frequent in English than "the and".

His paper shows plots taken from a number of languages, which (when taken together) show what you might call a meta-linguistic curve, a statistical behaviour shape that is followed by basically all the real languages he had tried - an expression of languageness, in terms of the patterns of behaviour you'd fully expect to see in texts written in real-world languages.

But Voynichese does not display these curves: and so isn't a simple language.

Any, errrm, cunning linguist who thinks they have a sample of a little-known language which somehow bucks this trend is free to email Marke Fincher for a copy of his WPPA program (or you can just send him a copy of the text). But you know, I think he's not going to be dreadfully surprised by his inbox any day soon.

And not only is Voynichese not a simple language, it also is not a simple language written right-to-left, nor a simple substitution cipher of any sort (including simple verbose ciphers), nor a consistent intra-word transposition cipher (like a reverse anagram cipher), because none of these would alter Voynichese's basic linguistic curve.

For years, people have endlessly debated whether the nature of Voynichese is that of a cipher or that of a unknown language - cryptology vs linguistics. Well, Marke Fincher has now given us all his cunning Popperian machinery of disproof to rule out basically all simple language conjectures and a lot of simple cipher theories too.

This is great, because if someone now tries to convince you (for whatever reason) that the VMs is in High Middle German, Hebrew, Celtic, Shelta Thari or whatever but written in a funny way, you can wholeheartedly say - sorry, but no. Voynichese words don't work like any known language in several key ways, and that's that.

Moving ever forward, there is one thing I suspect that Marke should perhaps now consider: whether the fact that Voynichese word pairs appear pretty much as often forward as reversed (which isn't true of languages at all) is part of the "specification" (as it were) of Voynichese, or whether some lines (say, even-numbered lines within paragraphs?) might be word-ordered from right-to-left (i.e. some kind of boustrophedon word-ordering). That is, whether Voynichese's symmetrical reversibility might actually have a word-transpositional explanation.

Some people may think that being able to disprove things is no big deal: but I think it's actually a very big deal indeed. Karl Popper would be proud!

Monday 9 June 2008

Voynich-related novel reviews...

In much the same way that the Voynich Manuscript has provided a blank screen for generations of amateur cryptologists to project their code-breaking desires onto, it has in recent years provided a rich loam for writers to plant their novelistic seeds into.

In the bad old days of novel-writing, the VMs would simply have been treated as an interchangeable cipher-based Macguffin, a time capsule mechanically carrying [powerful / occult / heretical] ideas forward from the [insert bygone era name here] to satisfy the present-tense needs of the plot. Plenty of old-fashioned writers continue to hammer out such formulaic Victorian penny-dreadful tat even now: what kind of barrier could ever hold back such a tide?

Thankfully, contemporary writers have begun to engage with other ideas in the cloud of ideas surrounding the VMs. Though I personally don't think it will turn out to be delusional nonsense, channelled writing, off-world DNA-creation technology, or even a deliberate hoax, I think these are interesting angles far more worthy of being explored in fiction.

With this in mind, here's a list of the novel reviews on my site:-

(1) It's brutally old-fashioned, but Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone [review] by Max McCoy presses all the right buttons. It knows it's a piece of junk but simply doesn't care: it's having too much fun. Recommended!

(2) I had high hopes for "PopCo" [review] by Scarlett Thomas, but it just ended up like a creative writing collage. If you can cope with the crypto-geeky Gen-X No-Logo buzzwordiness of the whole concept, you'll probably enjoy it: but for me it fails to work on most levels.

(3) Rather than engage with the VMs directly, "Vellum" [review] by Matt Rubinstein creates an Australian doppelganger of it, and has a lot of fun exploring a would-be decipherer's descent into madness and/or confusion. Recommended!

(4) "Enoch's Portal" [review] by A.W.Hill boils up a heady stew of alchemy, cultishness and quantum pretension, where Leo Levitov's Cathar hypothesis about the Voynich Manuscript is merely one of many spices sloshed into the mixing bowl. No Michelin stars, sorry.

Sunday 8 June 2008

Warwick/Warburg course 2008, Day Three...

Day One of the Early Modern Research Techniques course was easy to write about, as was Day Two: but Day Three? Tricky...

If I close my eyes, the single image from it burnt into my retinas is of Charles Hope sardonically half-warning participants about the historical Class A drug that is archival research. Yes, he personally had partaken of it, and indeed fully inhaled; yes, truth be told he'd actually quite enjoyed it, and even become quite good at it; but being realistic, the chances that you'll find anything surprising in any archives anywhere range from Slim Jim McThin to zero.

As to the other speakers, Charles Burnett was (as always) excellent value: I could happily listen to him all day. Ingrid de Smet was good, and... look, every lecturer was good, so that's not the problem at all.

I'll try to explain what's been bugging me for a month - and why. You see, about halfway through my Master's, a particular kind of critical faculty awoke in me that takes the form of an active intuition that (in effect) 'listens in'. And so I get a parallel commentary on the subtext of what I'm reading: not "do I believe this (y/n)?", but "to what degree am I comfortable accepting this account is psychologically representative?" In a way, this added non-binary dimension gives me a sort of novelistic insight into non-fiction, and helps me smell not a rat, but the degree of rattiness. You can see this same kind of thing at play in Carlo Ginzburg's wonderful history books (which is probably why I've got so many of them).

And the funny smell I sensed here wasn't from the academics (who were all hardworking, insightful, pragmatic and great), but from the Warburg Institute itself. You see, for all the Renaissance pictures of obscure Greco-Roman deities filed upstairs, the biggest mythology stored there is about the usefulness of the Warburg.

What you have to understand about the Warburg Institute's collections is that they were constructed as a kind of mad iconological machine by Aby Warburg for Aby Warburg to decode the secrets hidden in Renaissance art... but which were never there to decode. The Warburg Institute is therefore a kind of bizarre 1930s steampunk Internet, where every sub-page is devoted to the art history semantic conspiracy behind a different artefact (and the whole indexing is 50 years behind schedule).

As an analogy, David Kahn, with perhaps more than a hint of a sneer, calls the study of Baconian ciphers "enigmatology": the study of an enigma that was never there. And "Voynichology" as often practised seems little different to Kahn's "enigmatology"? (Which is why I don't call myself a "Voynichologist" any more: rather, I'm just an historian working on the Quattrocento mystery that just happens to be the Voynich Manuscript).

In my opinion, "Renaissance iconology" (which Dan Brown fictionalized as Robert Langdon's "symbology" in the Da Vinci Code, bless him) or indeed what one might call "Warburgology" is no less a failed thought-experiment than "enigmatology", or indeed "Voynichology": all share the same faulty methodology of requiring an hypothetical solution in order to make sense of something else uncertain.

But what of the man himself? For me, I see Aby Warburg's quest as being driven by the desire to move (through his research) ever closer to touch Renaissance gods on earth, through the clues about their Neoplatonic Heaven they left hidden in their works. But now we see that they were instead just jobbing artisans with books of emblems tucked into their work smocks: life is disappointing.

Look, I feel an immense amount of goodwill towards the Warburg Institute and all the people who sail in her: but a large part of me wishes for the mythology that shaped it to fall into the sea. Perhaps the sincere search for a God or Goddess is simply a kind of displaced search for dead, absent or idolized parents in the noise of the world, not unlike Mark Romanek's film "Static": if so, I think it's time we called off the search for Warburg's parents.

Saturday 7 June 2008

Yet more on Dan Burisch...

As ever, the Dan Burisch story (which I blogged about here and then here) continues: in an earlier round of the RPG, Burisch apparently (according to Arizona-based "7Vials" in this post) revealed that the secret held by the Voynich Manuscript "detailed the spontaneous creation of DNA through the use of sound." OK... though I have to admit this makes me think of the Spitting Image Roy Hattersley puppet, and his spontaneous creation of spittle when talking.

Meanwhile on yet another "Eagles Disobey" forum, "Caspa" wondered whether there might be a link between Dan Burisch and George Baresch (yes: neither of them can read the VMs). And there was me thinking that it was only Jacques Derrida and his ilk who did that kind of punning stuff. *sigh*

But wait - Caspa has also posted up some explanatory Voynich pictures in the middle of a list of "Document Links". These are from "Dr Marcia McDowell" (another recurring player in the whole Dan Burisch saga) and dated 2006. As always, make of them what you will...

First up: the EVA fragment "oteos" by the curious box at the top of f102v2 (above, with and without blue paint) is claimed to represent "The Orion Cube (Yellow Book)", though I have to say it looks a bit like a pop-up toaster to me. The claim is that, if you look really carefully (the hypnotic trick phrase used by all secret visual histories), the two tiny dots above the "c"-shaped letter ~kind of~ turn the gallows character into a "R", which ~if you squint a bit~ makes the word look like "Orion". (And, of course, there is that whole modern Hancock / Bauval mythology about Orion and the pyramids to tap into). Probably nonsense, but all the same, hurray! Someone is bothering to look really closely at the VMs! :-)

Next: a picture that supposedly details "Lotus Research" in the Voynich Manuscript. According to Caspa here, "the inset is a photograph taken through Dan's microscope of a DNA swirl from Lotus. The background is from the Voynich manuscript." (Actually, it's f16v with red muted). Errrm... is this saying that Roger Bacon had a microscope? Wasn't that refuted 75 years ago?

Finally: another picture picking out the EVA word "taror" from f107r, which apparently encodes (reading right-to-left) to the word-pattern "[s/z].[o].[q/r].[a].[p/t/h]", i.e. perm any 1 of 2x2x3=12 to find the word you want (sorap? zoqah? etc). Well... Dan Burisch posted just now that the right answer is neither Sorat (as per this page, scroll-down to "Sorat" and "Sorat-Science"), nor Sorah, nor Zorah: but instead "none of them". Apparently, this is because "this book should never have been written, as its writer supposed the future was to be 'as such' before it happened. " And that, Burisch says, is "a no, no!" Of course it is - bless his tangled little tenses.

If you still want to read more (which is possible, but perhaps a little unlikely), there's an additional post here which may or may not answer all your Voynich-related questions about Burisch, J-Rods etc etc.

UPDATE: More Dan Burisch Voynichification...

Friday 6 June 2008

"Verifying" the Verifier Method...

John Sweat's "The Anthropogene" is a nice 'lost history' blog I recently stumbled upon: what caught my eye was a post of his that mentioned the Voynich Manuscript and tried out Gordon Rugg's seven-step "Verifier Method". As this is what Rugg allegedly used when he made his famous "VMS is a hoax" claims in 2003/2004, I thought it perhaps should be examined in more detail. Sweat summarises Rugg's 7 steps as:-
  1. "Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.
  2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.
  3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.
  4. Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.
  5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.
  6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.
  7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six."
All of which can, I think, be summarised even more brutally:-

  1. Engage with so-called "experts" and their writings
  2. Decide if those "experts" are indeed actually experts
  3. Do those experts have a particular agenda?
  4. Do the words they use get in the way?
  5. Are their theories basically built on sand?
  6. See how their errors beget other errors
  7. Work out the biggest issues, and continue until you've had enough
This seems to be describing intellectual history, which I would characterise as a thinky, "Florentine humanist"-style knowledge-critiquing methodology based around herding all the arguers in a field together, logically dismantling their arguments, and then using whatever is left standing to construct tentative explanations. Technically, the difference between intellectual history and the history of ideas is that the former tends to see ideas as actively shaped by agendas and as flowing between cultural frames of reference, while the latter tends to try to engage with ideas-in-themselves. (Having said that, the Wikipedia entry for history of ideas cites Michel Foucault as a sympathetic practitioner, yet he sees everything as a product of the agendas implicit in cultural frames of reference. But I digress!)

At its best, intellectual history throws up dazzling insights: in the hands of a master (such as the extraordinary Anthony Grafton), it can be a virtuoso performance of brain over matter, not unlike a QC's persuasive mastery of his or her brief. Yet at its worst, it can be a sterile exercise in intellectual futility, divorced from the world by its shallow insistence on examining only the participants and their claims, not the validity of the evidence expressed in the ideas, and so ending up in a kind of over-finessed, intricate superficiality.

As an example, even though Grafton's generally excellent book on Leon Battista Alberti shows precisely how Alberti's form and ideas flowed from classical topoi, I think Grafton perhaps takes the whole humanist conceit (that if we all wrote as well as Cicero the world would be a better place) a little bit too literally - whereas humanism was by and large more like a courtly Latinistic game of patronage - and as a result his book never really engages with Alberti the person.

If we bear this kind of thing in mind, it should be reasonably clear that Rugg's "Verifier Method" looks to verify not evidence qua contents but instead expert opinions qua methodology: a kind of faux legalistic framework, with the investigator as self-appointed armchair judge in his/her own kangaroo court, and with no power or desire to step outside into the real world.

In the case of the Voynich Manuscript (in case you were wondering when I'd ever mention it), I think the Verifier Method falls right at steps (1) and (2). Because Rugg's conceptual framework had no mechanism to critique evidence (in particular the various transcriptions of the text), and what separates experts in such an uncertain field is by and large their conception of what constitutes relevant evidence, Rugg has no intrinsic way of deciding who is (and who is not) an expert, let alone trying to infer their agendas (3) or to diagnose any linguistic/semantic difficulties (4)

Essentially, it seems to me that the Verifier Method relies so heavily on the underlying field being regular that it fails to be a satisfactory tool to apply to such irregular areas of study as the Voynich Manuscript. But the problem then is that regular fields of study tend not to need exploratory methods such as the Verifier Method to help traverse them.

Finally, I think that "Verifying" is such a weak aim of any knowledge methodology as to be virtually useless: as a strategy, all it really tries to elicit is some kind of limp correlation. The "Cardan Grille" nonsense that Rugg concocted to "verify" that the Dee/Kelly hoax hypothesis was "possible" is precisely such a thing: of course the hypothesis was possible, that's why it was a hypothesis, duh. Come on: when dealing with an uncertain field, when would the Verifier Method ever be preferable to Popper's Falsificationism, where you collect together plausible hypotheses and actively design experiments to try to kill them? Now that's what I call proper Popper science...

Thursday 5 June 2008

Thorndike on the Voynich Manuscript!

I've often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich's cipher manuscript mania/hype was at its peak. As a well-known writer on alchemy, magic and science, my guess is that Thorndike would surely have been one of those distinguished American academics and historians whom Voynich tried so hard to court after his move from Europe to New York.

One of my ongoing projects is to work my way through all of Thorndike's works, as it seems to me that his science/magic research programme carved a trail through the jungle of mostly-unread proto-scientific manuscripts that probably falls close to where the Voynich Manuscript is situated: and few historians since him have felt any pressing need to build on his work except in generally quite specific ways. All of which is why I happened to be reading Chapter VII "Nicholas of Cusa and the Triple Motion of the Earth" in Thorndike's "Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century" (1929).

Firstly, you need to understand that Thorndike thought that the whole Burckhardtian notion of the (supposedly fabulous and extraordinary) Renaissance was plain ridiculous: there were countless examples of ingenuity, invention, and insight throughout the Middle Ages (and, indeed, throughout all history) to be found, if you just bothered to take the time and effort to place events and writings within their own context.

Furthermore, Thorndike believed that lazy historians, having set up this false opposition between (high) Renaissance culture and (low) medieval scholasticism, then went looking for exceptional individuals who somehow bucked that trend, "forerunners, predictors, or martyrs of the glorious age of modern science that was to come." (p.133) The list of usual suspects Thorndike suggests - "Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Peurbach and Regiomontanus, Leonardo da Vinci" - appears to me not far from how the fake table of Priory of Sion Grand Masters would have looked, if Pierre Plantard been a tad more receptive to non-French history.

Of course, Thorndike - being Thorndike - then goes on to demonstrate precisely how the whole myth around Nicholas of Cusa arose: basically, German historians looking out for a German 'forerunner, predictor, or martyr' plucked three marginal fragments from Nicholas's work and wove them together to tell a story that was, frankly, not there to be told. Then you can almost feel the fever rising in Thorndike's genuinely angry brow when he continues:
"Could anything, even the most childish of medieval superstitions, be more unscientific, unhistorical, and lacking in common sense than this absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation, by modern investigators and historians of science?" (p.137)
Punchy (and grouchy) stuff: but he's far from finished yet. He has an example of something even more scandalous which he feels compelled to share with us:-
"When are we ever going to come out of it? To stop approaching the study of medieval science by such occult methods as the scrutiny of a manuscript supposed to have been written by Roger Bacon in cipher, instead of by reading the numerous scientific manuscripts that are expressed in straightforward and coherent, albeit somewhat abbreviated, Latin?" (p.137)
So there you have it. In 1929, while Wilfrid Voynich was still alive, Thorndike took a measured look at Voynich's and Newbold's "Roger Bacon Manuscript" nonsense, and placed it straight in the category of "absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation".

John Manly may have been more dismissive of Newboldian cryptography in his article in Speculum 6 (July 1931), but Thorndike was no less dismissive of Newboldian history in print in 1929. Just so you know!

Wednesday 4 June 2008

Voynich Vampire novel...

Blogger "Frog Princess" spent a Sunday in Oxford taking randomesque pictures of flowers, muffins, shoes and cherry beer (sounds like an OK day to me), while thinking about vampires: her blog entry received a comment by "seraphim_grace" mentioning yet another Voynich book I hadn't heard previously heard of...

"Deliver Us From Evil" (2000) by Brit author Tom Holland (there's an SFSite review by Victoria Strauss here) does indeed have vampires and the Voynich Manuscript, along with Prague, America, John Milton, the Earl of Rochester, and doubtless much more (it's part of Holland's Byron-was-actually-a-vampire secret history series of books). At 1p + p&p from Amazon Marketplace sellers, buying it probably won't bankrupt most people: I've ordered a copy and will report back when it arrives...

Tuesday 3 June 2008

Adam McLean and Voynich baths...

On 12th April 2008, artist and well-respected alchemy expert Adam McLean posted up a fascinating picture of the baths of Pozzuoli he had found from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and commented on its many strong similarities with the Voynich Manuscript's water section. Excellent research, I thought... but how come I hadn't seen it before?

Though Adam didn't mention his source, a little detective work revealed that the image is entitled "Balneum Sulphatara", folio 4 of Valencia Bibl. Universitaria MS 860 (formerly 138). And I had seen it before: an extremely over-exposed black-and-white version appears as plate 62 of C. M. Kauffmann's classic 1959 "The Baths of Pozzuoli: A Study of the Medieval Illuminations of Peter of Eboli's Poems". But really, you'd barely recognize them as the same.

Unusually, Valencia MS 860 has good date and provenance information for it. Kauffman (p.82) says that De Marinis dates it between 1455 and 1458: and that it stayed in the "Aragonese royal library in Naples until the Franco-Spanish conquest of 1501", when it moved to Spain until the present day. Kauffman also asserts that it was derived from the Bodmer (Geneva, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana) De Balneis MS, which he dates to the "third quarter of the fourteenth century", and placed as "Southern Italian".

If you compare the Bodmer Balneum Sulphatara drawing (f.3, Kauffman plate 21) with the Valencia one (f.4, Kauffman plate 62), you can see the reasons why the former was very probably the source of the latter: every figure is reproduced between the two MSS, each with extremely similar size and orientation. Their differences are merely ornamental: the wooden bath sides got upgraded with a fancy fish-like motif in the Valencia MS, while the top edge of the cave has taken on a stone-like 'wolkenband' appearance there.

But the big question: was either of these also a source for the Voynich Manuscript? I've gone through all the plates in Kauffman really closely, and I have to say that on that evidence I really don't think that the water section of the VMs is an enciphered De Balneis. However, I am quite sure that the VMs' author had definitely seen a copy of De Balneis and was influenced by it when constructing his pictures, in the same way that Rene Zandbergen persuasively argues that the author must have seen the manuscript now known as MS Vat. Gr. 1291 before drawing the zodiac section.

In fact, I interpret this in terms of steganography, in that I believe the style used for Vat. Gr. 1291 was appropriated as the cover cipher for the VMs' zodiac section, while the style used for the Bodmer MS and Valencia MS 860 formed the cover cipher for its water section. Whereas the particular drawing similarities between the VMs and Valencia MS 860 simply arose from having been drawn in the same general period: correlation, but not causation.

I should close by noting that Adam McLean made his own in-depth art history study of the Voynich Manuscript, posting his results on the set of pages here. One of the most compelling similarities comes from his comparison of the lozenge-shaped tiles in the picture here: but that's a discussion for another day...

Monday 2 June 2008

Secret Histories and "The Lie Agreed Upon"...

Here's a nice two-page article (here and here) by Timothy Doyle from the BookThink site on the role 'Secret History' plays in SciFi fantasy literature: it's titled "The Lie Agreed Upon" because that was how Napoleon famously characterised history. (Though he actually used the words "A fable agreed upon", which [according to Wikipedia] he probably took from Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Mélanges de Littérature (1804), while the basic phrase is also widely attributed to Voltaire).

Anyway... Doyle's theme is that in a secret history novel, all the surface details of historical fact remain basically the same, but the reader is invited to peek behind the curtain at all the political and technical machinations and intrigue that keep that lie propped up. As opposed to an 'alternate history' novel, where both surface and undercurrents diverge from the historical record.

It's a nice piece, which leaps deftly from SF to The X-Files, to the Da Vinci Code, to the many parallels with the Voynich Manuscript (basically because most VMs theories seem to start from a secret history or a similar novelistic premise), to Neal Stephenson's wonderful Cryptonomicon, to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (and a couple of works of his I didn't know), to Tim Powers, and so forth: Lev Grossman's Codex even gets a honourable mention in the also-rans list at the end. All of which are riffs probably familiar to most Voynich News readers.

My favourite sentence from the article is this:-

"What is really interesting about Secret Histories is the shifts in historical meaning that occur, much like the optical illusion where a slight shift in perspective suddenly changes the beautiful girl into an ugly witch."

I think Doyle comes splendidly close here to capturing the essence of Voynich theories: each seek to violate and redirect the currents beneath the historical record, with the theorist all the while using the keen magicry of the illusionist to silently cover up the implicit shift in meaning. Naturally, theory proponents see themselves as 'unliars', truth-tellers: but all (possibly bar one) are closer to novelists than they would like to admit. Ultimately, shouldn't we agree with Napoleon/de Fontenelle/Voltaire that history is little more than a story we agree to accept? (...or is that a story in itself?)

Sunday 1 June 2008

"Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages"...

I happened upon the following post a few days ago here, and thought I ought to reproduce it here for anyone that's interested (the cryptography history lane tends to be filled with caravans, and as a result is somewhat slow-moving). When the volume finally appears (in 2009?), I'll be just as interested in the paper on the Voynich Manuscript as the rest of it. Having said that, I'm a bit concerned that Kahn is not only misspelt but a little bit misrepresented (for instance, Kahn discusses medieval Arabic cryptology on pp.89-99) in the blurb.

Oh, and they're not interested in publishing two papers on the VMs in the same volume. Just so you know not to offer them one (like I did, *sigh*).

* * * * * * * *

Call for contributions for a volume of collected essays:

Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages

This call is designed to expand and enhance an essay collection that is based on two panels entitled “Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages,” which took place at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo MI, in 2006 and 2007.
It seeks to fill a major gap in the study of codes and ciphers in the medieval world. The codes and ciphers of the Middle Ages have received little or no modern scholarly attention. David Khan’s 1181-page volume _The Code-Breakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet_, for example, devotes a mere thirty-four pages to the ancient and classical world, and little more than one sentence to the Middle Ages, claiming that “ciphers, of course, had been used by monks throughout the Middle Ages for scribal amusement” (106). But the construction and use of codes, ciphers, secret languages and mathematical secrets in the Middle Ages were much more than amusement: they were central to intellectual culture as modes of concealing dangerous, magical or secret information, and as a means of connecting oneself to the divine. As such, they appear in the writings of major figures ranging from Isidore of Seville to Hrabanus Maurus, Alcuin and Hildegard of Bingen. They also figure in the manuscripts of lesser known students of magic in Heidelberg, and numerous anonymous texts and manuscripts including Anglo-Saxon riddles, Old Norse literature and runes, and the computus. Clearly, codes and ciphers were a multilingual, cross-period, inter-cultural phenomenon in the Middle Ages; they warrant more scholarly attention. Given current emphases on “security,” and the proliferation of forms of encryption on the internet, fostering scholarly discussion of history of cryptography seems especially relevant to the 21st century. Current contributions address the uses of codes, ciphers, secret languages and mathematics in the writings of Hildegard, the Voynich Manuscript, Anglo-Saxon riddles, Hrabanus Maurus’ _In honorem sanctae crucis_, the Pseudo-Bedan _Propositiones_ and the _Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes_ attributed to Alcuin. While we welcome contributions on any aspect of codes and ciphers in any period of the Middle Ages, we are especially interested in essays that will widen the scope and increase the depth of the collection.

Please submit detailed abstracts or drafts of essays (style: CMS 14th edition) by 1 July 2008 to: Sharon M. Rowley at srowley@cnu.edu or rowley_sharon@hotmail.com