Thursday 31 January 2008

Radio 4 "In Our Time" Rudolph II documentary...

A nice edition of "In Our Time" on Radio 4 this morning (a tip of the blogging hat to Chris R and Paul C, who both wished the morning Guildford traffic jam had been slightly worse so that they could have heard it all), all about our old Holy Roman Emperor pal, Rudolph II. You can also download the mp3 (20MB, 42 minutes) and listen to it off-line. Which is nice (genuinely).

Discussing the Rudolphine court with Melvyn Bragg were Peter Forshaw (always good value for money - Voynichians may remember him from the Mentorn Voynich documentary on BBC4), Howard Hotson, and Adam Mosley: the topics ranged across alchemy, the occult, Hussite heresy, astronomy, Cabinet of Wonders (including a dodo!), botanical collections, automata, natural magic, paintings, Cornelius Drebbel, Tycho Brahe, Charles University, astrology, John Dee, Kepler, etc etc... oh yes, and the Voynich Manuscript as well (about 5 minutes in), which Melvyn Bragg seemed particularly fascinated by. Maybe he's seen the Big Fat List of forthcoming Voynich novels? :-o

The programme-makers thoughtfully included a Rudolph-centred bibliography here, which you may find useful (though with Hugh Trevor-Roper listed, I have to say it's not particularly contemporary).

Wednesday 30 January 2008

Italian novel featuring the VMs...

Today's addition to The Big Fat List is "L'UOMO NELLA LUCE" by Walter Martinelli (2007), published on-demand by Lulu. Though I'm not quite sure whether bundling the Voynich Manuscript in with the Templars, the Masons, the Pyramids, Hitler, JFK, Christopher Columbus and the Bermuda Triangle is a brilliantly sensible idea: it sounds more like a kind of obsessive trainspotter take on conspiracies (why include one when you can include them all?)... but maybe they are all out to get us, so who knows? 346 pages, 6" x 9", $22.96.

However, you can buy the ebook version of it for a measly $4.66. Which is nice.

Monday 28 January 2008

Ludus and paidia, VMs-style...

I just stumbled upon a January 2008 paper on translating nonsense texts in Translation Studies journal, written by Jean-Jacques Lecercle from the University of Nanterre, for the simple reason that it happened to discuss the (apparently nonsensical) Voynich Manuscript.

Plainly, Gordon Rugg's hoax-theory fan-club (which I guess used to be Terence McKenna's hoax-theory fan-club) has been all too successful in its drive for new members: but really, 'tis pity she's no hoax.

Though I wasn't quite intrigued enough by the article's abstract to pay Informaworld the required £15 + VAT to download it, its mention of Callois' ludus and paidia did get me thinking, particularly considering my background as a computer games programmer: Callois tries to categorise games along a continuum between fully structured games (ludus) and totally unstructured ones (paidia).

In the context of the Voynich, this has an additional resonance for me. The main VMs mailing list used to be a church broad enough to encompass both structured and unstructured contributions, broadly corresponding to people playing the Voynich research game as a ludus or as a paidia. But in recent years, it seems to me that this tolerance slowly disintegrated: as art historical and forensic evidence has started to encroach on the whole game, a number of the unstructured game-players have started to feel threatened. In fact, the idea that they might have to play by rules (even if those rules were laid down by the Voynich Manuscript's own author/authors!) was so unappealing to them that they began to fight against the whole notion of evidence.

The whole hoax theory is in many ways symptomatic of this trend: roughly speaking, it says "every piece of VMs evidence might have been faked, and so the hoax hypothesis provides a complete explanation for every scenario that can be imagined... regardless of the evidence." Such an acutely anti-evidential stance is perilously close to a kind of 'creationist'-style take on the VMs, where the VMs sprung as a convincing, fully-rounded entity from the hoaxer's imagination [like Athena from Zeus' head?], in all its multi-layered forensic glory.

I simply don't buy into this kind of armchair intellectual fantasy: there's deception and misdirection at the heart of the VMs, for sure - but there's also an overriding rationality behind it too, one that has structured it as a complex ludus to frustrate us (but which has become scrambled over time), not as a Rorschachian paidia, where every interpretation is equally true.

However unpopular it may sound, my judgment is that the anti-evidentialism on the main Voynich mailing list has now become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Just because we can glimpse the VMs' rules does not mean that the game is over: instead, I think it signals that the game is moving from paidia to ludus... whether that suits you or not.

Sunday 27 January 2008

A monstrance is born...

The best academic stories normally begin something like "I was chatting with [name-drop] in the bar/taxi/plane/train after the conference when...": so I'll do my best to shoehorn the following into that template...

After Day One of the Warwick/Warburg "Resources and Techniques" seminars in Warwick, I ended up standing in the aisle of a packed Virgin Pendolino train all the way to London, in the company of two fellow course participants (Zoe Willis and Charlotte Bolland) and Francois Quiviger, one of the course lecturers from the Warburg Institute. Francois knew little about the Voynich Manuscript, but was interested enough to take a look at the pictures in Jean-Claude Gawsewitch's "Le Code Voynich", the (how can I put it any other way?) French coffee-table edition of the VMs. (And yes, I was carrying a copy in my bag: as with all things Voynichian, you make your own luck.)

Francois very kindly suggested a number of things I might consider: for example, when looking at the pharma section, he immediately asked if the idea that the ornate "jars" might be optical instruments (such as unknown kinds of telescopes) had been considered (it has, of course). He also wondered about the apparent resemblance between some of the (apparently) fantastical glass objects in the VMs' pharmacological section and the monstrance, a word so beautifully obscure I simply had to look up on my return...

From the dawn of Christianity onwards, many churches owned (or claimed to own) holy relics: bones or teeth of saints, ephemera linked with miracles, nails or fragments from the One True Cross, Christ's baby teeth, even the Holy Foreskin (yes, really: there's a fascinating 2006 article from Slate here about its modern history), and so on. (Coincidentally, Michael Cordy's novel "The Messiah Code" which I mentioned here name-checks many of these still-existent objects of veneration.)

Quite reasonably, many historians now wonder whether many of these were simply medieval money-making scams for attracting pilgrims and parting them from their money: Internet hype, circa 1250. But the pilgrim had to be able to see the relics whose claimed powers they had travelled so far to have contact with (in some cases literally - the blind could allegedly be cured by rubbing the Holy Foreskin on their eyelids, it says here): and therein lay the problem.

Right from the start, boxes or caskets containing relics needed to both protect the relic and to help make it accessible to pilgrims, as well as allowing the relic to be carried around on particular saint's days: and so these reliquaries evolved into gaudy carrying-cases, sometimes fashioned in part from transparent rock crystal, thus solving all the problems. Technically, the precise term for a partly-transparent reliquary is a a philatory, but this is such an incredibly rare term that it is unlikely to help you much in your Googling: indeed, philatory will get you nowhere.

A monstrance, then, is a very specific kind of philatory, not for an ancient relic but for a special kind of relic that is recreated all the time - the consecrated Eucharistic Host. In Catholicism, the wafer and wine are believed quite literally to turn into Christ's Body and Blood (the whole process is "transsubstantiation"), a real mini-miracle. Churches needed some affordable way of displaying the Host, of demonstrating the Real Presence of Christ to the assembled faithful: but how?

To solve this problem, someone invented circa 1475 the "monstrance": a portable golden object, typically with a central "luna", a circular glass area (for the transformed wafer to slip into for display) not unlike a pair of oversized glass specimen slides (modern monstrances are sometimes categorized by the diameter of the luna). And these remain in use today, with only cosmetic changes from this basic design.

Etymologically, monstrance comes from the same Latin roots from which we get "demonstrate", and so retains its meaning of 'showing something': another obscure word (though one probably even less useful for Scrabble players) for the same object is ostensorium, which is presumably somehow linked with ostentatious.

What I find interesting in all this is that, just beneath the surface history, I can catch a glimpse of the kind of properly Warburgian history Francois Quiviger was talking about when he looked at the pharma section. From 1450 onwards, the invention and manufacture of beautifully-clear cristallo glass in Murano transformed the whole way objects such as philatories and monstrances were conceived: by breaking the need for (what was ludicrously expensive) rock crystal, cristallo made visibility an affordable design feature.

Could it be, then, that what we are seeing in this part of the VMs is not a set of purely fantasy glass objects, but possibly a kind of mangled brochure for a range of designs for cristallo-based philatories or monstrances, in the period at the end of the Quattrocento when the former was somehow seguing into the latter? 1475 is the earliest date I've seen quoted for a monstrance, but I would be unsurprised if the actual date of origination were to be found to be a little closer to 1450.

I couldn't claim (by any stretch of the imagination) to be an expert on early modern reliquaries, philatories and monstrances (and how many such experts are there in the world, anyway?): but it's an intriguing suggestion, one on which I'd be interested to hear any comments...

Saturday 26 January 2008

Warwick/Warburg course 2008, Day One...

The first one-day session of the Warburg/Warwick Early Modern Research Techniques course was yesterday: though it was pretty good, I think I'm breaking no great confidences if I say that this felt likely to be the, errrrrmmmm, least strongest of the three days... despite Warwick's strong Renaissance department, everyone was just itching to get on to the Warburg text and image days. But as with most post-grad things, you learn just as much from the other students as from the lecturers: so Day One was no hardship.

It became quickly apparent that all the participants were both properly web-savvy (it's nice to see people surfing at the speed of thought) and Excel-smart (for fun, I tried Access instead, but unfortunately it was just as clunky as I remembered), and had already drained all the loose juice from JSTOR, EEBO, and their low-hanging ilk. But still, everyone falls short of 100% coverage in these things, and so there were plenty of webby windfalls for us all to put into our baskets. Here are a few highlights I thought I'd share...

Richard Parker from the University of Warwick (who co-presented two of the sessions with the pleasantly dry Francois Quiviger from the Warburg Institute) has brought together a large number of art history web resources on the Warwick website here. Though Richard somewhat deprecatingly refers to his efforts as "pre-Web 2.0", his general pages page is just about as good a high-level starting point for online art history web research as any I've seen - and within the subject pages, his images link page is a bit of a gem too (and within that, check out the iconography and emblems page). His personal favourite is the TASI advice page on finding and using online images: if you're at all unsure about this kind of thing, it's an excellent link.

Bibliographical searching was another key topic. Of late, I've managed to get my research done without having to resort to Inter-Library Loans: so while I was cool with WorldCat, COPAC and (my favourite, despite its uber-dull name) the M25 consortium, I hadn't noticed the (frankly rather amazing) KVK creep up on us all... a simple way of searching a staggering number of world libraries without any significant danger of mouse-related RSI. Recommended!

Incidentally, I didn't realise that this course runs every year: I wish I'd known about it 3/4 years ago. But my guess is that as, not so many years ago, the web and historians were only just starting to 'get it on', Day One would originally have been the most eye-opening for those attending. But we're now all so wise to that stuff, it all seemed slightly, well, 'rusty', if not slightly antiquated.

Yet the world is changing blazingly fast: in a year's time, I'd hope that Day One is based instead on such amazing new Programming Historian tools as Zotero (which I found through the Early Modern Notes blog). And it would be the most amazing day once more! :-)

Friday 25 January 2008

Mona Lisa overkill...

Why is it that so many people wonder whether Leonardo da Vinci created the Voynich Manuscript? Even well-informed, thoughtful people like Edith Sherwood (whose Adwords ad frequently pops up if you happen to Google for "Voynich") manage to succumb to this notion.

There's only one little problem: the VMs' pen-strokes predominantly go from top-left to bottom-right, clearly indicating that it was written by someone who was right-handed. (Or left-handed, writing from right-to-left with the pages upside-down: but that just seems a bit stupid). In terms of identifying the author, that's about 10% of the population eliminated: but, sadly, this is the tranche containing our Florentine chum Leonardo.

It's probably symptomatic of what I call "join-the-dots history", where you start with a set of evocative pieces and then work out the minimum amount of evidence you need to appropriate / use / abuse to link them together in a way that suggests some kind of correlation. For example, if you started with the (fake) Priory of Sion, Leonardo da Vinci, and Opus Dei... errrrrm... no, that would never work...

Anyway, here's the latest real news on Leonardo: apparently, the Mona Lisa was indeed a picture of Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and was being painted in October 1503. We have a "Heidelberg library expert" called Armin Schlechter to thank for finding this: and thankful I am.

What, *another* Voynich novel?

Another Voynich-inspired (I'm yet sure whether or not "Voynich-themed" might be putting it a bit strongly) novel to add to the ever-fattening Big Fat List. Australian writer Matt Rubinstein's novel was called "A Little Rain on Thursday" (the picture is from f75r) when it was published last June in Oz by Text Publishing: it appeared here last July (published by Quercus) under the title "Vellum". Amazon Marketplace has copies for £1.98 + £2.75 UK p&p: I've ordered one & will post a review here ASAP. It doesn't appear to have any evil Jesuit priests in it, which has to be A Very Good Thing Indeed.

What's sort of appealing (well - to me, at least) is the way he casually slips the words "marginalia" and "forensic" into the cover blurb. However, this may well be a weakness, given that to keep him fed and watered in writerland, his book has to sell to a large number of non-Voynicheros, to whom such things are usually fairly alien (even if they do watch CSI).

Oh, and the stuff in the story about the manuscript decipherer being obsessive may also have alienated him from passing VMs-ologists. We're not obsessive, I tell you: we count the number of stars on each section of each page for scientific reasons, damnit! Errrrrrrrrrm...

...maybe he's got a point. Oh well... :-((((

Thursday 24 January 2008

CRASSH Secrets Conference...

How did I manage not to notice this conference before now? "Secrets and Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Commerce 1500-1800" runs from 15th-16th February 2008 at CRASSH at Cambridge University, featuring such stars as William Eamon (whose epic "Science and the Secrets of Nature" sits by my right shoulder) and Lauren Kassell (with whom I briefly corresponded about the Book of Dunstan back in 2001).

It sounds like a fascinating, fantastic mini-event, and I just can't wait... even though I'll probably be the only Voynichologist there. Does anyone else see the VMs as a mid-Quattrocento example of the "books of secrets" genre too? Apparently not... *sigh*

Tuesday 22 January 2008

The (original) castle of the stars...

A quick digression on the title of Enrique Joven's forthcoming Voynich book, "The Castle of the Stars" (originally published as El Castillo de las Estrellas): and it's all tied up with Tyco Brahe...

Once upon a time in 1572 (according to the article here), a supernova appeared in the constellation of Cassiopeia (you know, the big W-shaped one). Watching this in Denmark, Brahe realised that this was not a near-Earth object, but was in fact as far away as all the other stars, at a time when it was generally thought that this was impossible. Revolutionary stuff, and the book he wrote on the subject dramatically launched Brahe's career into orbit.

Frederick II was so desperate to make sure his brand new star astronomer did not leave Denmark that he gave Brahe the island of Hven, the huge financial backing to build Uraniborg ("the castle of Urania", named after the Greek Muse who was the patron saint of astronomy) to house his instruments, and then an observatory called Stjerneborg ("the castle of the stars")... from which (I guess) Enrique Joven took the name for his novel.

Brahe also used the grounds of Uraniborg to grow herbs for his "medicinal chemistry experiments" (according to Wikipedia): Voynichologically, this seems somehow right, doesn't it?

Incidentally, there was a short story in French by Al Nath called "Le chateau des etoiles" from Ciel in 1986: this was about Tyco Brahe.

Alternatively, there's a place in Teba in Andalucia called "El castillo de estrella" (it says here) that commemorates a battle fought in 1330, with a confused (and mythological-sounding) linked story about Robert the Bruce's heart in a silver casket being taken to the Holy Land. Errrrm... you had to be there, I guess. But I think I'll stick with the Brahe version, if that's OK with you?

Monday 21 January 2008

"The Messiah Code"...

I'll admit it: I spend so much time (and money) servicing my 100-a-year non-fiction book habit, it's been a while since I've strayed into the world of fiction. I did read Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" and "Digital Fortress" (yuk), just in case there was anything I should flag in my book (I mentioned his "O Draconian Devil!" and "Oh, lame saint" anagrams in chapter 6). Actually, the last novel I read was Susanna Clarke's epic "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell".

But with the 2008 Voynichian novel tsunami fast approaching us all, I thought I'd warm up for Michael Cordy's forthcoming VMs book by reading his first book, "The Messiah Code" (1997): this follows the generic blockbuster template, mixing together fat themes (religion, gene therapy, gene paranoia) with thin characters.

Unfortunately... though the writing is pacy and spare throughout, Cordy's plotting inexperience shows through everywhere. The book ends up like an argument between two kids playing cliche Top Trumps - who would win, the genius Nobel laureate geneticist fighting for his child's life, or the ruthless, conflicted, 2000-year old super-rich Templaresque secret society? The perky female black genius Nobel laureate computer scientist from the 'hood, or the shape- and gender-shifting unfeeling uber-killer with a surprising childhood secret? You feel like asking: yeah, and would Mechagodzilla kick the Transformers' hollow butts?

In the end, for all its page-turning readability "The Messiah Code" is a book about ciphers, for that is what all its characters are - nulls, blanks, voids, zeroes. But maybe that's the whole point: perhaps all that blockbuster readers want is a satisfying mental knot to untangle on the beach, and aren't really interested in much beyond that.

At least Michael Cordy did his research properly, so the "science bit" largely holds up: and for that I was grateful (though a "terrabyte" did sneak in somewhere, *sigh*). But I hope he's come a long way in the ten years since...

Sunday 20 January 2008

The Digges telescope...

The story of how an Englishman apparently invented the telescope in the mid-sixteenth century is not as well-known as perhaps it ought to be. Its outline was first proposed in 1991 by Colin Ronan, the then president of the British Astronomical Association (and so a credible source): a very readable set of articles (though sadly without matching illustrations) is here, from which I quote below.

Essentially, it boils down to this: that an English Renaissance surveyor and author called Leonard Digges (ca. 1520 - ca. 1559) constructed what was called at the time "perspective glasses" (the term 'telescope' did not appear until the 17th century), quite probably for surveying purposes. However, it seems likely that his son Thomas Digges pointed them to the heavens, several decades prior to Galileo.

From a Voynichological perspective, one of the nice features of the story is that one of our old friends features centrally: when Leonard Digges died, his 13-year old son Thomas was placed under the guardianship of none other than John Dee. Dee, in his preface to Billingsley's 1570 translation of Euclid had this to say:


  • 'He may wonderfully helpe him selfe, by Perspective glasses. In which (I trust) our posterity will prove more skillfull and expert, and to greater purposes, than in these days, can (almost) be credited to be possible.'
This, when taken with Thomas Digges' own books and a 1583 report by William Bourne ("an expert in navigation and gunnery"), does all seem to comprise a 'smoking gun' proof that the two Digges in many significant ways predated Galileo by several decades. Which is not, of course, to diminish Galileo's historical importance per se: but rather, to show that the history of inventions is rarely as simple and linear as one might think.

One last thing: in the Netherlands patent uproar over the first 'official' telescopes, "the son of Sacharias Jansen [a better Wikipedia page is here], another of the claimants, later stated that his father [Hans Jannsen, the probable inventor of the microscope in 1590] already had a telescope of Italian manufacture, dated 1590". So the full story behind the invention of the telescope most likely remains obscure and tangled...

Friday 18 January 2008

New telescope history book...

To mark the four hundredth anniversary next year of Galileo's first astronomical use of the telescope in 1609, the IAU has designated 2009 "The International Year of Astronomy" (IYA2009): which is likely to be the trigger for a glut of telescope history-themed books (probably no bad thing, in my opinion). But what happened before 1609?

I recently mentioned here "the lost 150 years", that awkward pause between the widespread availability of both convex and concave lenses (circa 1450) and the appearance of microscopes (circa 1590) and telescopes (circa 1600). Such compound optical devices could have been invented by anyone during that period, and the best-documented pre-1600 telescopic claim so far seems to be from Thomas Digges (John Gribbin discusses this in one of his books). But could yet other inventors (such as possibly the author of the Voynich Manuscript) have pre-dated Digges, Janssen and co?

There were plenty of alchemical-style claims to that effect, most notably from H. C. Agrippa, who wrote in his "Occult Philosophy" that "And I knew how to make by them wonderful things, in which any one might see whatsoever he pleased at a long distance" (Book II, Chapter 23) . However, there was (in this case) apparently nothing of real substance behind his bluster.

All the same, I asked on the HASTRO-L mailing list if there were any up-to-the-minute books on this far-too-quiet period, and was delighted to learn (via Peter Abrahams) of a book that is just coming out from Harvard University Press: "Galileo's Glassworks, The Telescope and the Mirror" (2008), by Eileen Reeves, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, who specialises in the study of early modern scientific literature. Though the publisher's blurb seems to make her book sound over-focused on the minutiae of Galileo's rhetoric, I'm assured that its first half does actually take in the wider pre-1609 field of view (which is precisely what I was most interested in).

The release date for Glassworks is either January 2008 or 28th February 2008 (depending on who you ask): there are already some copies for sale in the US, but it's only pre-ordering in the UK at the moment. I'll review it here when my copy arrives (counting the days)...

Wednesday 16 January 2008

Voynich Manuscript in existing novels...?

From the apparent tsunami of Voynich fiction about to crash down on our literary shores over the next year, it might seem that the VMs had never previously appeared in a novel. Yet this is not exactly true...

For example, "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone" (Max McCoy, Bantam Books, 1995) is based entirely around the Voynich Manuscript: set in March 1933, a mad scholar called Sarducci has stolen the VMs (which is actually a map), and so Indy chases him through Mussolini's fascist Italy all the way to an amazing alchemical crypt in the desert... From what I've read of this book, it actually seems to be a pleasantly pulpy read, very much in tune with the actual VMs, and with a refreshing lack of power-mad Jesuit priests. However, I should warn you that it will be re-released on 29th April 2008, presumably to try to ride the whole 2008 Voy-niche publishing wave. *sigh*

Another pair of VMs-themed books came to my attention via the Bellairsia blog, which is devoted to books by the writer John Anthony Bellairs. His most famous novel was "The Face in the Frost" (1969), a fantasy novel in which Prospero and Roger Bacon fight against a mysterious grimoire that sounds not at all dissimilar to the VMs. After Bellairs' death in 1991, his estate commissioned author Brad Strickland to complete and continue Bellairs' various series: and it is in one of these that protagonist Johnny Dixon faces "The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost" (1999), which features the VMs in a starring role.

Connections between J.R.R.Tolkien and the VMs have been suggested in the past. According to Voynich mailing list member Anthony, Tolkien did indeed own a copy of at least one page of the VMs, which may have played a small part in influencing his choice of the fantasy scripts in his books. As I recall, there were a number of people in Tolkien's Oxford circle that had an interest in early modern scientific manuscripts, so this does seem a perfectly sensible idea.

Many people have also wondered about the relationship between H.P.Lovecraft's Necronomicon and the Voynich Manuscript: Colin Wilson based a short story called "The Return of the Lloigor" around this, and returned to the theme at the end of his novel "The Philosopher's Stone".

All the same, this modest pile of Voynich fiction looks set to triple in height this year... interesting times!

Tuesday 15 January 2008

Pigpen cipher gravestone...


Here's a nice piece of historical cryptography I hope you'll appreciate: a piece of "pigpen ciphertext" engraved on a 1792 New York gravestone, on Flickr. There's another (not quite so good) image of the same thing most of the way down on this page on forgotten New York sights. But before you click anywhere, try and decode it for yourself from the transcription I've put above!

Hint: the single-dot box appears four times, and is (just as you'd expect) a vowel. :-)

If you want to know more, the article mentioned on the page was from the Meyer Berger column on page 24 of the New York Times, January 2nd 1957, and is in the paper's online archive: they charge non-subscribers $3.95 for a PDF, if you happen to be reaaaaaaally interested. But maybe this is a sensible place to stop...

Monday 14 January 2008

Nazi ciphers and Voynich novels...

Two big news stories today, both of them far more amazing than fiction...

Firstly, a story about a Nazi cipher, allegedly by Martin Bormann detailing the location of a cache of gold and diamonds hidden in 1945. Dutch journalist Karl Hammer has written a book called De tranen van de wolf (The Tears of the Wolf), published by Elmar, which is basically a dossier of his notes. Much copied in the blogs, but here's the source page (with pictures of the so-called "runic" cipher hidden in the rests in a piece of sheet music, as well as a series of numerals at the bottom which is doubtless discussed in the book). 224 pages, 17.50 euros here.

And secondly, a fascinating Wall Street Journal story about a cache of microfilms of early copies of the Qur'an being unearthed. For decades it was thought that they had been destroyed in the bombing of the Bavarian Academy of Science (which was housed in a former Jesuit college in Munich) in 1944, but the truth turns out to be much more subtle and complex.

It's one of those strange things: if a novelist had used either of these two stories for their plots, he/she would probably be ridiculed for over-egging their cake, for going too far. I mean, Nazis treasure and a cipher hidden in music, or Nazis and the lost origins of Islam, really?

Incidentally, I've mentioned how my stomach turns when I see the word "Jesuit" pop up in Voynich-themed novels, and - as a historical literary commentary on the penny dreadful Jesuit cliche - that's perfectly OK. But as with every rule of thumb, there is bound to be an exception, and perhaps Enrique Joven's book is that: now that I found a better description of it, I can see that the Jesuit connection he appropriates is probably based on real history (I'm guessing the movement around Europe of the various Jesuit trunks containing the VMs), and so for a surprising change his Jesuit plot connection there actually makes good sense.

But this is really not to endorse every other Jesuit/VMs so-called plot "twist" out there: repeat after me, "it almost certainly predates the Jesuit Order, which was founded in 1534"... *sigh*

Saturday 12 January 2008

Comets in Quire 20...?

After my recent (and unexpectedly extended) foray into Voynich-themed novels, I thought it would be a good idea to get back to proper manuscript research.

One small feature I've been mulling over is the "starred paragraphs" in Quire 20, the final gathering in the VMs (the one which famously ends with the "michiton oladabas" page). I posted about this section not long ago, discussing Vladimir Sazonov's suggestion that it might originally have formed some kind of 365-paragraph calender. But what I'm thinking about here is the possibility that the "tailed stars" used to mark the start of each paragraph here were actually comets, chosen on the basis of a Latin pun.
Back circa 1500, the named structures used for written works were often slightly different from now. What we moderns would call a chapter or part, would typically have been called a book: while a modern subsection (a block of continuous text with a descriptive header) would typically have been called a chapter, or capitulum (literally "diminutive caput", "little head"). Ironically, the short punchy chapters in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" are closer in spirit to this medieval world of text than most other modern books.

What we therefore see in Quire 20 is what I think would have been understood in context to be not so much a series of paragraphs, but a series of "chapters" within a "book". With this in mind, might those little shapes that have usually been called the "stars" or "tailed stars" be instead iconic comets?

Our word "comet" originally came from the Latin cometes, which itself was a loan-word from the Greek kometes, "wearing long hair" (it's in Aristotle). Similarly, the Latin term crinis means hair, or tail of a comet, or rays of sun: and so a comet may be called a stella crinita, a 'hairy star' (yes, really!)

So, when I now look at the starred paragraphs, I do think that the "stars" there are very probably comets comprised of a little head (capitulum) and a deliberately hair-like tail. This kind of punning visual / Latin iconographic word-play would be consistent with the view of the VMs as a high-culture cipher: but perhaps seems a little too ornate or too conceptually 'fancy' for a mere hoax.

Modern astrologers (even such mainstream ones as Jonathan Cainer) are still sent into a tailspin (if you'll forgive the pun) by comets, seeing in them omens for, well, all sorts of things, such as the death of Benazir Bhutto, etc: which is, of course, no different to ancient, medieval and Renaissance astrologers alike, for whom comets had the power to invite speculation, wonder, and fear.

But for the VMs, where should this research thread go next? As far as art history goes, Giotto famously depicted the 1301 appearance of Halley's Comet in his Adoration of the Magi: and if you subscribe to a likely Quattrocento origin for the manuscript (as I do), I would guess that there is a lot more to find in Roberta Olson's (2000) "The Florentine Tondo" (ISBN10: 019817425X, ISBN13: 9780198174257, £85) - pricy (but supposedly fascinating). I would also suggest "Cometary theory in Fifteenth Century Europe" (Kluwer, 1985, also £80 or so) by Jane L. Jervis, and Lynn Thorndike's (1958) "Some tracts on Comets 1456-1500" (in Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences 11 (1958) pp.225-260), none of which I've seen myself but perhaps will one day soon (if I spend a day at the BL, or win the lottery). I've also read that Galileo discussed (in his "Il Saggiatore") the three comets that were seen in 1417: and so there was presumably much debate on this at the time.

I don't know: it seems possibly too lightweight an issue to devote a great deal of time to. And yet there is much in the VMs that points to astronomical and astrological thinking - enough that I can empathize with Enrique Joven's novel "Castle in the Stars", where the VMs is imagined as being part of that general tradition (No! Enough with the novels, already!). Maybe there is enough there after all...

Friday 11 January 2008

"The Curse of the Voynich" gets cited!

Sorry for posting like an overexcited puppy, but my Voynich book's first citation is surely worthy to me of a minor celebration: less than a backflip, but more than a raised eyebrow.

The just-published (January 2008) Cryptologia article where it is mentioned is "Cicco Simonetta's Cipher-Breaking Rules", by Augusto Buonafalce, who so generously reviewed my book in the same journal last year. It's a nice little piece to introduce cryptologers and cryptography historians to Cicco Simonetta [there's a nice Italian page on him here], with the added bonus of a good translation of his "regulae" (rules): it even has a black and white reproduction of a painting of Cicco I was not previously aware of.

Augusto rightly dismisses the thought of a powerful Milanese statesman "engaging in the encryption of the Voynich manuscript": but that's not really a summary of my book's argument. What I actually argue is that the presence of the "4o" token in a good number of mid-Quattrocento Northern Italian cipher alphabets (including the Voynich Manuscript) points to a continuity of cipher thinking, one which seemed to travel around with the Sforza miltary caravan... just as Cicco Simonetta did from an early age.

To be precise, I don't claim that Cicco wrote the VMs, or even designed its cipher alphabet. Far from it: rather, that its "4o" token points to a deep-rooted connection between its cipher-system and the ciphers constructed and used by the Milanese Chancellery. My book conjectures that this "4o" 'verbose cipher' trick may have been disclosed in the 1465 meeting between Antonio Averlino and Cicco Simonetta, at which the former placed his outstanding Milanese affairs in the hands of the latter before leaving Milan forever. But in the world of tenuous Voynichological hypotheses, this is one at least that did actually happen! :-)

For all its merits, it would be wrong to characterize Augusto's Cryptologia article as being the final word in the cryptographic history debate over Cicco Simonetta's Regulae: the conclusions I (and others) draw from the available data are quite different, and (in the absence of more conclusive evidence) we can politely agree to differ - and that's OK.

As a side-note here, when I cited (on my p.182) a 1970 article on Cicco's Regulae, I contacted its very-much-still-alive author (Walter Hoeflechner) to see if anyone else in the intervening 36 years had shown an interest - and only the ubiquitous David Kahn had. From that, it's easy to see that the discussion of the intriguing intersection between cryptography and politics offered by Simonetta is very much out of fashion: which is a bit of a shame.

And therefore, I think it would be very nice if Augusto's article proved instead to be the first word in a rather more modern debate over the Regulae: the new generation of historians and researchers who have taken an interest in seeing what the Sforza-era bureaucratic archives have to tell us would almost certainly be bound to find new angles and approaches, and might well carry us all forward in new and interesting directions.

Finally... for me, what is nicest about Augusto's citation is that it is one of those rarest of hen's teeth: a Voynich-related book or paper getting cited outside of the Voynich literature. It is far too early to say that this marks the point where the VMs goes fully mainstream... but it's a start, surely?

Thursday 10 January 2008

Too many Voynich novels!

The proliferation of Voynich Manuscript-themed novels has gone way beyond being merely a vague pattern in my peripheral vision: it's starting to become a bit of a plague.

Here's another book, this time from Bilbao-based first-time novelist Iñaki Uriarte: published by Verbigracia in 2007, it's called "La Piedra Filosofal" (The Philosopher's Stone, if you hadn't guessed), and weaves the Voynich Manuscript in with the Philosopher's Stone and quantum physics. It is 394 pages long, has the plant from f2v and the top-left nymph from f82v on the cover, and there's a sizeable (83-page!) extract here to whet your appetite. I can't see an ISBN for it, and none of the book sites I looked at had a copy (even Amazon!), but if you fancy it you can buy it for 18 euros directly from the publisher via PayPal. Which is nice.

And there is yet another Spanish book (mentioned in passing by Enrique Joven) called "El quinto mandamiento" (The Fifth Commandment, which is "thou shalt not kill" [of course]), by Eric Frattini, published by Espasa-Calpe, ISBN13 978-84-670-2442-5. It seems fairly standard mystery thriller fare, with an elderly professor uncovering the secrets of the VMs, while a conspiratorial circle of eight (led by a corrupt cardinal) tracks down and murders everyone who the professor has talked to. There's a bit of f67r1 Photoshopped onto the cover, along with the Florence Duomo, but unless I'm really badly mistaken it only seems to engage with the VMs in a very superficial way. 360 pages, 19.90 euros. You can read a machine translation of the first chapter here (click on the 2 3 4 5 .. numbers at the bottom). But Lord, spare me from having to read about any more evil Jesuit priests!

So... we have:-
  • Enrique Joven's forthcoming "Castle of the Stars"
  • Iñaki Uriarte's "La Piedra Filosofal"
  • Eric Frattini's "El quinto mandamiento"
  • Thierry Maugenest's "Manuscript MS408"
  • Michael Cordy's forthcoming "Garden of God"
  • Richard D. Weber's "The Voynich Covenant"
  • Andrea Peters' "I'm Sorry... Love Anne"
  • William Michael Campbell's "The Voynich Solution"
...and even as I type there are doubtless 10-20 more writers out there feverishly word-pureeing their Dan Brown-esque Voynich-based mystery capers, with nearly all of them struggling to find exciting new synonyms for the word "evil" to put before the word "Jesuit". :-o

In some ways, this is all very flattering, for it surely means that our overall Voynichological "research programme" (for want of a better phrase) over the last few years has blossomed in a broad cultural awareness of the manuscript, an inky sea of ideas into which novelists feel free to dip their fountain pens. However, I think it's also fair to say that most of these books do not engage with the VMs in a very substantial way, which - given all the work that we've done - is a bit sad. So on balance, I'm not sure whether to be happy or sad, which of the two emotions is the stronger... you'll have to make your own judgment on that, I'm afraid!

Wednesday 9 January 2008

Voynich & the non-English-speaking world...

The French Voynich mailing list I half-remembered and mentioned before turned out to be an online discussion forum on François Almaleh's website (his main Voynich site is here, which I guess is the skeleton of the Voynich book he was writing back in 2003). However, this died in 2004: you can see a copy in the Wayback Machine here. And therefore I don't think there is an active French Voynich mailing list at the moment, which is a shame after all the publicity gained there by the launch of the [near-]facsimile edition of the VMs "Le Code Voynich". You can even see this in the Google Trends curve for "Voynich": the big spike in the middle was the book release, and France remains at the top of the list of countries Googling for "Voynich".

Some people have posted bilingual Voynich websites: but even if your French is excellent (as Dennis Stallings' plainly is), this is a hard path to take and stick to, and one that removes a lot of the spontaneity of posting and updating web-pages.

Perhaps the simplest modern way to get ideas across to non-native-language readers would be to add a [Translate this page] button to your blog (as I've just done). Recently, I was even pleasantly surprised by the quality of Google's automatic translation from Chinese into English (though admittedly I was expecting it to come out like a mangled shopping list): and doubtless this will keep being improved. But given that quality issues remain, I'd really like to be able to embed translation hints in my text, particularly so that I can continue to post in my polyglot oral tongue stylee: but I somehow doubt that this is on Blogger's radar. I'm probably too early to this ball: but in 10 years' time, who knows...?

PS: I think a link to this blog was posted to the voynich.de Yahoo mailing list: a big Guten Tag to you all there!

Tuesday 8 January 2008

2008: Year of the Voynich!

Two interesting Voynich news stories...

Firstly, I've had a blog comment and some emails from a pleasantly surprised Enrique Joven, author of "El castello de las estrellas" (his blog is here): his big news is the book has been picked up by HarperCollins US, and is due for publication in September 2008 under the title "The castle of the stars". According to one Internet site, Enrique received a low six-figure advance ("$100,000 to $300,000). I'm very much looking forward to it! :-)

Secondly, another Voynich novel is on its way... and it could well be a big one.Its author is Michael Cordy, writer of the international bestsellers "The Messiah Code", "The Lucifer Code", "Crime Zero", and "The Venus Conspiracy". His next book (ISBN10 055215699X, ISBN13 9780552156998, AKA "Untitled Michael Cordy") is due for hardback release in "January 2008" from Transworld Publishers. The original title was "The Garden Of God", meaning Eden, though (curiously enough) it is also what "Baghdad" originally meant. What are the odds Transworld end up giving it the title "The Eden Code" instead?

The synopsis of the Michael Cordy book is here: basically, the main character's beautiful wife Lauren decodes the Voynich Manuscript, but ends up in a coma after someone tries to steal her translation, and so the main character ends up racing against a fanatical priest to reach the mythical "Jardin del Dios"...

I'm already getting a bit sick of these Jesuits and mysterious meddling priests (particularly as the Jesuit order didn't start up until many decades after the VMs was probably written), but hey - novelists have to start somewhere, right? [Also: I couldn't help but be reminded not a little of Thierry Maugenest's 2005 novel "Manuscrit MS 408", where two academics decoding the Voynich mysteriously fall into a coma, setting the story in motion...]

Whatever you think of Voynich novels, these are two potentially big novels with our favourite manuscript in a starring role, both due for release by Serie A mega-publishers this year. Perhaps I'm misreading the tea-leaves, but I do get the overwhelming feeling from this that 2008 is somehow destined to be the "Year of the Voynich" - not necessarily the year when it gets solved, but the year when it goes fully mainstream.

Sunday 6 January 2008

Some Voynich outsiders...

As a handy (but inevitably bad) generalization, there are two kinds of Voynich researchers out there: (a) social ones (who do it in a crowd) and (b) anti-social ones (who do it alone). Broadly speaking, I'm now a (b) having first done a six-year stretch as an (a): but some people (like my old friend GC, who's like my Voynichological twin brother, though without the goatee... hmmm...) manage to stay (b) with occasional flashes of (a), despite all the provocation they (inevitably?) receive online.

But when you add things like blogs to the mix, this cosy categorization starts to fall apart. Because I blog about what I'm thinking about, does that make me a kind of passive-aggressive (a), or perhaps a falsely socialized (b)? Are blogs actually social, or merely a kind of unconscious, self-aggrandizing auto-journalism? Answers on an e-postcard (to someone else), please.

Regardless, plenty of people put out their Voynich-related outsider viewpoints in varied ways: here are some you may have missed (but which my seine net picked up). Be grateful I only kept the good stuff! :-)

(1) Richard Santa Coloma has posted up a set of long-ish posts by GC here: intriguingly, GC (who for years has winced at the thought of anything apart from a 16th century origin, largely because of Leonell Strong's decryption / Askham attribution) is now mellowing towards the 15th century (though quite how the two centuries blend together is still a little wobbly).

Incidentally, the possibility (as proposed by Richard Santa Coloma) of Cornelius Drebbel-era (i.e. circa 1600) authorship for the Voynich remains interesting, though hard to square with the manuscript's 15th century art history. But perhaps the truth will turn out to be far more magnificent. Telescope histories (such as this excellent one from the Galileo Project) will tell you that the glass in Venice produced around 1450 was being ground by Florentines (and others) into both convex and concave lenses for spectacles / bericles, and so anyone with access to both could have made telescopes and microscopes. Yet the first properly documented examples of each instrument appear 140+ years later. What is curious is that, according to the Galileo Project:

  • "In the literature of white magic, so popular in the sixteenth century, there are several tantalizing references to devices that would allow one to see one's enemies or count coins from a great distance. But these allusions were cast in obscure language and were accompanied by fantastic claims; the telescope, when it came, was a very humble and simple device." (http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/instruments/telescope.html para 4)

Could it be that various individuals invented and reinvented the microscope and telescope multiple times in that century-and-a-half gap? If you view the Voynich Manuscript's quires 19 and 17 (in that order), you will see what looks for all the world like a lab notebook detailing the development of a sequence of microscopes (and possibly telescopes), seguing into speculative optical instruments. If only Richard Santa Coloma "dropped the Drebbel", he might find a far more amazing story waiting to be uncovered...

(2) Sean B. Palmer has posted some interesting pages here (on "Michitonese") and here (on the zodiac month names), though in both cases chasing behind work I had done six or so months previously. A nice resource he uses which I wasn't aware of: the Xerox XRCE Language Guesser. You feed it 5 sentences of text, and it compares them with 47 languages (though doubtless a longer list in the commercial version) to determine the closest match. Kewl! (i.e. 'fascinating technology but not actually very useful').

(3) One of the quintessential twentieth century outsiders was Terence McKenna: though I can't walk in his footsteps (largely because I'm allergic to mushrooms), it is hard not to feel some kind of admiration for his endless tilting against those powerful windmills who continue to blow us around. There's an audio archive of his work here, with a long (but often terribly wrong, I'm sorry to say) discussion of the Voynich Manuscript from 1983 here...

In it, he namechecks Mary D'Imperio's "Elegant Enigma" ("this is what your tax dollars are being used for"), and notes that the VMs' internal structuring probably indicates meaningful content However, McKenna understands that it's not a Trithemius-derived code or cipher and suggests it should be compared by computer with the work of John Dee (which Leonell Strong also flagged), even though he's very much into Dee-Kelley hoax hypotheses. Modern cryptographers may well be blind to the particular "weird quirky way" in which it was encoded/enciphered, he says: alternatively, "a chemical attack should be mounted" on the manuscript's plants. Oh, and it's "aaaaahbviously sixteenth century". Around 20 minutes in, lots of Yatesian stuff gets namechecked [if you like that kind of thing]. At the time, McKenna was "advising a group of people in Santa Cruz" (almost certainly via Ralph Abraham, I guess) in their research into the VMs, "one of the great oddities of human thought".

The problem with McKenna's Voynichological heritage is his subsequent endorsement of Leo Levitov's problematic 1987 Cathar decryption (about 24mins in, read from McKenna's "Archaic Revival"), which now looks rather foolish. Oh well! By the way, the mp3 ends with about 10 minutes of frog croaking, which may or may not be meaningful (you choose). :-)

Saturday 5 January 2008

Voynich plant commentary...

Elias Schwerdtfeger has blogged some speculations on the plant on f3r - essentially that, based on its lack of flowers and various other features, the plant depicted on f3r appears to be some kind of "Nacktsamen" (which I think is German for Gymnospermae, the plant group which includes conifers [fir, spruce, etc], cycads [the sago palm and others], and ginkgo biloba [a plant all on its own]). As normal with the VMs, this is good observation and inference, marred (as he indeed notes) only by the problem that no such plant actually exists.

In general, what's good about Elias' readings is that he tries hard not to be fooled by the layers of paint: but for any rationalist reading, even if you strip back all the later paints to reveal that-which-was-originally-drawn, the innate mystery of what-was-being-depicted still remains, and perhaps even intensifies. For f3r, as indeed for nearly all the VMs' "plant" pictures, we don't know what is going on: is it a trance drawing, a hallucinogenic conjuring from the depths of a proto-botanist's subconscious? Or were the two plants on facing pages originally "visually anagrammed", a tricky decoding situation turned into a cryptographic catastrophic by the subsequent shufflings of the bifolios?

As yet, we simply can't tell, which is why discussions of the herbal pictures can quickly descend into he-said-she-said bitchfests and yeah-but-no-but-yeah-but conflicted monologues. My contribution to the herbal debate (discussed at length elsewhere) concerns the structural differences I noticed between Herbal A pictures and Herbal B pictures, and my suspicion that the latter group "visually enciphers" certain types of machine contemporary to the mid-Quattrocento. Of course, you can argue with this (and if it would make you happy, go ahead, knock yourself out): but what would be the point?

Ultimately, we would like subtler types of information to resolve key unknowns in a more definitive way: for example, Raman imaging and/or multispectral imaging might help distinguish the materials used and layers of accretions, to the point that we might be able to reconstruct what the original raw "alpha" state of each page was. Furthermore, such kinds of imaging might well reveal non-visible (or non-obvious) contact transfers between pages: this might lead to being able to reconstruct many (if not all) of the original page ordering and gatherings. Being able to group vellum bifolios by individual animalskin might make it possible to reconstruct gatherings too. Then, being able to place individual pictures as part of an original sequence might reveal an informative pattern or sequence underlying them all...

But these are rational dreams, of using pure science for pure knowledge, and for now we don't have this level of smarts to build upon: and so our destiny is to build castles not in the air but on sand, cunning architecture destined not to soar but to sink. Oh well! :-(

Friday 4 January 2008

Voynich mailing lists...

For decades (at least!), groups of like-minded people have got together to discuss the VMs: even the various 17th century letters written to Athanasius Kircher (all apparently discussing the same manuscript) came from individuals within some kind of loose grouping - it's not all lone gunmen theorists in the VMs world, I assure you. :-)

Fast forward to the 20th century, and you find William Friedman forming and running the FSG (the "First Study Group") in 1944-1946, followed (unsurprisingly) by the Second Study Group in 1962-1963. Incidentally, I don't know if there is any connection between the Dr. Robert A. Caldwell who was part of the FSG and Ian Caldwell (co-author of the Rule of Four), but it would be elegant if so... just a thought! As always, there's more (OK: much more) on the modern history of the VMs on Rene Zandbergen's excellent VMs site.

In the Internet age, mailing lists have picked up this collaborative baton, and run with it in countless new directions. I couldn't see any page that described these lists in an accessible way, which is why I'm posting about them here...

(1) The Voynich Mailing List - the daddy (if not granddaddy) of all modern VMS lists - started life hosted at rand.org (Jim Gillogly's employer at the time) back in 1991, but has relatively recently moved to its own domain, voynich.net Lots of old-timers there, and its old list archives hold an amazing collection of ideas, observations and notions, from a diverse group of contributors: virtually everything you can think about the VMs has been posted there (I search them with grep, but you may prefer other tools). Of late, I think it's fair to say that the discourse there hasn't been quite so good (and it's far from obvious why this should be the case): but it can be an excellent place to start. Recommended.

(2) The Journal of Voynich Studies (2007 list archive here, cumulative file and HTML archive here) is a newish mailing list, run by Berj N. Ensanian and Greg Stachowski. This set out to be more openly academic than the main voynich.net mailing list, but it unfortunately (I think it's fair to say) still falls well short of the high academic ideals to which it initially aspired. The reason for this is obvious: there are, to my knowledge, no 'true' academics (in the 'scarily and unchallengeably erudite academic' sense, how I imagine Panofsky or Grafton) out there studying the VMs. Really, the basic art history still hasn't been done: Voynichology remains an amateur science at best.

(3) Quiet-ish groups, such as thevoynichmanuscript Yahoo Group may well be good in a different way. I'm not a member there, but it might be just right for you.

(4) Transient mailing lists (such as GC's Strong Solution group from 2006, or the Voynich Forum) come and go, ebb and flow: this is inevitable on the Internet.

(5) Non-English mailing lists have started to appear in recent years: I'm thinking in particular of the German Yahoo Group voynich.de. I have a vague memory of Jan Hurych starting up a Czech-language mailing list at one point, though I don't know if that is still going: his current Voynich blog is here. Similarly, there was a Spanish-language MS408 list back in 2003, and I half-remember a French-language mailing list flickering into existence too.

Doubtless there are/were/will be more: but that should be enough to get you started. ;-)

Spanish Voynich novel...

"El castillo de las estrellas" [Googled translation of the review here] by Enrique Joven is a science-y thriller, with the Voynich Manuscript placed right at the heart of the story. Once again, my heart sinks yet further towards my toes as I read that the plot revolves around a Jesuit scientist (*sigh*), as well as an astronomer (the same profession as the author's) and an English teacher working in Mexico, all three protagonists caught up in a action-packed fugue danced beneath the gaze of ancient spirits (or something along those lines).

However, the good thing about the book is that it apparently puts the VMs within the context of early modern astronomy, which - given the whole of the astro section and the sun/moon symmetries, which are especially apparent once you've fixed up the page order in Quire 9 - has to be a real possibility. Also, there seems to be a lot going on, which is normally a good thing in novels. :-)

Here's the publisher's (Flash-heavy) page on the book: there's a nice little quiz to do there, if your Spanish and knowledge of astrophysics are up for some fun (I kid you not). Here's a YouTube interview with the author; his UK literary agent's pitch for the book; and a 5-page Spanish PDF from the original publisher's site (though it only recites late-16th century astronomical history, don't struggle through it looking for any insight on the VMs on my account).

I don't know: it all sounds a lot like Enrique Jovan has had to labour long and hard to bring the reader up to scratch on the VMs (which probably accounts for the high page count) within its presumed historical context (I'm guessing the author has plumped for 16th century, but I could be wrong). Perhaps that prolix mix - of journalism and plot - is the novelistic curse of the Voynich from which novelists have to engineer an escape, lest the reader gets trapped with them? :-o

Yet another Voynich novel...

Literature and the Voynich Manuscript remain uneasy bedfellows: whereas things like the Knights Templar or even (spare me, oh Lord!) medieval precursors of speculative masonry have a body of archives and associated respectable academics, the Voynich Manuscript has Rene Zandbergen and not much else. It's all a bit empty in Voynichland, credential-wise. :-(

Yet Voynichologists rarely have much of an interest in novels: and anyway, they don't (as a group) exactly amount to anything that might sensibly be called "influential". So: novels making use of the Voynich Manuscript would have to be aimed at the mainstream, while simultaneously providing a mini-introduction to the (real) VMs to bring readers up to speed. I have to say that this seems a fairly awkward mix, which would only work under certain conditions.

By way of comparison, the joy of "The Rule of Four" to me was that its two authors were trying to bring art history to life - but really, they were non-typical novelists, weaving a very particular kind of novel around the fascinating Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. If their next novel turns out to be based on the Voynich Manuscript, I think they would probably be able to carry it off: but I have to sound the warning that most other novelists would probably fail.

(Another danger is that a tiny piece of evidence emerges about the VMs before your novel finally goes to press [there's usually a horribly long lead time in publishing] which causes one or more of the art historical assumptions you've used throughout the book to collapse abruptly. )

Anyway... "The Voynich Covenant" by "ex-special agent" Richard D. Weber is currently up for grabs for publishers: some foreign language rights have already been sold (good news for Bulgarian Voynich-novel-o-philes). There's more on the author's "dark protocols" website (if you can stand the visual clutter). Going through his book pitch, my heart inevitably sank just a little when an enigmatic stranger called "R. C. Christian" and a Jesuit priest (a hearty staple of Victorian penny dreadfuls: at least Dan Brown had the sense to upset Opus Dei instead) each pop up, but what can you do? To me, part of the thrill of the novel is seeing how its author takes a set of cliches and sets them on fire: but put too many of them in a row (like "beautiful forensic profiler Madison Chase") and will it ever catch ablaze?

What should we call all these novels? 'Voy-niche' publishing? As a publisher myself (albeit on a small scale), I find the whole idea quite awful: the Voynich Manuscript still falls short of being a cliche well-known enough for a novelist to be able to turn on its head with any dramatic effect. It's too marginal: the last big mainstream VMs view (Gordon Rugg's Cardan Grille fakery) punted out there was unhelpful at best, nonsensical at worst, and fell far short of setting the world alight - basically, Rugg's 'no-message message' is not really a great premise for a novel. Wired (bless them and their ex-NASA cotton socks) should do a piece on my book instead: Averlino's story is more amazing than fiction. But that's the beauty of the truth, isn't it? ;-p

Tuesday 1 January 2008

Not one of the Seven Fortean Wonders (*sigh*)

Much as I predicted, the Voynich Manuscript didn't quite make it into the final list of Seven Fortean Wonders of the World, which ended up being (in no particular order):
Bigfoot / Yeti, Turin Shroud, Piri Reis Map, UFOs, Oak Island, Crop Circles, Nazca.

But just because I happen to think that neither the Piri Reis Map nor Crop Circles are actually Fortean doesn't mean I think the Voynich Manuscript was somehow swindled (or Florida'ed, as I believe the modern technical term is). The underlying truth may well be that the cloud of ideas around the Voynich Manuscript is becoming (or is about to become) too mainstream for most connoisseurs of Forteana, making it just too sensible an object to be voted to the top.

And that's probably a good thing, wouldn't you say? [*]

[*] depending on your VQ score, in all probability. :-)