The Voynich Manuscript for real people...

Note: this article has now moved to the-voynich-manuscript-for-real-people on Cipher Mysteries

It's a typical writer's puzzle: when something you read (or write) really sucks, but an even half-satisfactory alternative is nowhere to be found. That's basically how I feel about almost everything that's been written about the VMs: even though it's an amazing mystery, that also somehow highlights all the dangerous sides of knowledge, accounts always amble off in the same kind of leadenly pedestrian way. For example, I spent ages tweaking and polishing the first sentence of "The Curse":

"In 1912, when the ancient Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome was running short of funds, its managers decided to sell off some of its rare books."

Just like the (abysmal) VMs Wikipedia entry, the sterile factuality and precision here can't be faulted: but it's aiming for the head, not the heart. But mysteries have a certain kind of tactile, claustrophobic presence to them: they surround you, taunt you, tighten your chest as you sense an approaching breakthrough. You think you're hunting the target, when in fact all the clues are hunting you - the reader is the target.

In short, even though everything surrounding the Voynich Manuscript is a mystery, why do people persist in writing about it as if they are writing a description for a car auction - its size, shape, page-count, first historical mention, list of owners, number of pictures, valves, bhp, lalala? Capturing the raw factuality of a mystery in this way achieves little or nothing.

When I went to the Beinecke, I tried to read the texture of its pages with my fingers (to tell the hair side from the grain side): I smelt its cover and pages (just in case I could pick up any hint or note of the animal from which the vellum was made): I looked at its surface under a magnifying glass: I looked at special features through narrow-band optical filters, which I tilted to try to adjust the wavelength. I tried to stretch my range of perceptions of it to the point where something unusual might just pop out.

But most of all, I tried to imagine myself into the position of someone physically writing it: how the act of writing and state of mind mixed together, what was going on, what they were thinking of, how it all worked. And that was yet harder still.

At supper this evening, I told my son that the biggest mystery in the world is what other people are thinking: and really, that is perhaps at the heart of why the Voynich Manuscript is the biggest mystery ever - because we still cannot reconstruct what its author was thinking. It is this absence of rapport that opens up the possibility for mad, bad, and bizarre theories: because we can project onto the manuscript whatever feelings and thoughts we like.

Yet when authors write fiction, this empathy is typically where they start: working out how to create characters with whom the readers will be able to sustain some kind of reading relationship over the course of 200+ pages. Take that basic connection away, and you can end up with a writer's folly, an artificial construction to which the narrative or flow is awkwardly pegged.

So how would I start the book, if I were writing it right now? Perhaps with Averlino at his point of death - the moment when his strange book was finally set free.

"What master of Destiny was he, when the Fates had carried him back to this holy place he despised so: and what kind of master of Nature, when he could see his death fast approaching and yet could do nothing?"

You may not like it: but is that just because you've become too used to reading Wikipedia?

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! :-)

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.

More on Dan Burisch...

A month ago, I posted up a blog entry about Dan Burisch's claimed decryption of the Voynich Manuscript, which a surprisingly large number of people have since read (my blog entry, not the decryption). Burisch claimed that an alien called "#3-15" held by the secret organization known as "Majestic" (presumably an updated version of Majestic-12) had decrypted the VMs, and that its plaintext turned out to be a message from the far future placed in the hands of Roger Bacon 700 years ago about the amazing inventions Dan Burisch has yet to make in the near future: but that whole decryption has been placed in "File 21" somewhere in Europe, and you can't see it, sorry.

As odd arguments go, this is a thing of curious beauty. Let's see: an alien (who you'll never meet) held by the (alleged) modern inheritors of a secret organization (most of whose founding documents appear to have been forged) has decrypted a (probably 15th century) cipher document, revealing that it was written down in (a mangled & ciphered) Hebrew by Roger Bacon (in the 13th century), to whom the actual content was passed from the far future, and which concerned the (yet-to-happen-but-surely-must-be-soon) inventions and discoveries made by Dr Dan Burisch, except that you can't see the decryption apart from four (frankly rather wobbly) words. Fantastic or fantastical? You decide.

Putting on my historical hat... if (like me) you read papers on Antonio Averlino's libro architettonico, you often run into very similar problems trying to parse what is being said. Though Averlino's libro is on one level a kind of encrypted autobiography, it simultaneously functions both as an allegorical novel and as an historical-novel-within-a-novel. Which is to say that readers constantly have to decide what is real, what is imagined, and what is contructed. Would a modern librarian place such a book in fiction or non-fiction?

Of course, Averlino was not crossing those kind of artificial boundaries, because they had not yet been drawn up. Early Renaissance thought was very fluid, very undifferentiated: perhaps the humanistic conceit of trying to gain eternal fama (fame) through their works made sense because the rigid scientific constructions of time we now rely upon had not yet been put in place - perhaps the distant past and remote future somehow felt closer then than they do these days.

In those terms, maybe Dan Burisch's conception of time is so, errm, alien to us in that it is, rather like Averlino's, quite undifferentiated and continuous in a vaguely pre-scientific way: a kind of sci-fi reprise of the early Renaissance mind. Perhaps Burisch somehow experiences past and future events all overlapping and concertinaed together, like a kind of strange temporal synaesthesia. Or perhaps he's just mad, who knows?

Anyway, we have an update on the story. According to a message apparently from Dan Burisch forwarded yesterday to The Golden Thread BBS, "the policy of the Eagles Team [is now] not to comment on the contents of the Voynich Manuscript", because "it contains such dangerous information, going to prison or being executed would be preferable to disclosing it". Furthermore, "When I said to you [Fran?] the annotations to Folio 21 ["File 21"?] were not dangerous, I meant it in the context of you seeing it. I never intended you to post it. I apologize to you for the miscommunication, and to the public about the cryptic nature of this post. With this, that is the way it must FOREVER stand." Which presumably means he won't post anything more on the subject of the VMs: a shame, as I'd like to know what it said.

The Internet is a strange place: these days, you can tell people think something is interesting not when you find a hundred banal blog entries pointing to it, but rather when you discover that it has been appropriated as a plot element in several online alternate-reality role-playing games. In those terms, the whole Dan Burisch saga to me most resembles neither a conspiracy nor a pathology, but instead a kind of fat-rulebook sci-fi RPG played out between a small group of dungeon masters and the opposing team, "the public". Roll that octahedral die one more time, baby...

UPDATE: Yet more on Dan Burisch...

"Is this feeling an eternal flame?"

A quick pop-cultural aside: the song "Eternal Flame" was written by hugely successful American songwriter Billy Steinberg with Tom Kelly and Susanna Hoffs (of The Bangles). The inspiration for the song came from an eternal flame seen by Bangles' bass-player Michael Steele burning at Gracelands in Elvis Presley's memory, as well as from one at a Palm Springs synagague Steinberg had seen when very young. Though "Eternal Flame" was produced by Simon Cowell, I won't hold that against it. :-)

But historically, claims of actual eternal flames go back a very long way: in my book, I mentioned briefly that many in the Renaissance believed a "perpetual light" burned in the Temple of Vesta in Ancient Rome. Leon Battista Alberti's 1450 book "Momus" mentions (though admittedly in a fictional context) a "perpetual flame, tending itself even though no material is laid under it and no liquid poured over it", Giovanni Battista Della Porta documented many attempts at reproducing eternal flames in his Natural Magic in XX Books, while in his libro architettonico Antonio Averlino described a continuously-burning candle he saw in Sant Maria in Bagno. Another related story concerns Abbot Trithemius, who allegedly sold two "unquenchable eternall lights" to Emperor Maximilian I for 6000 crowns.

I thought this was one of those things for which there was unlikely to be any significant literature: I'd collected all the pieces together from scattered footnotes. However, recently I was inspired by Archer Quinn's, ummm, perpetual ranting to properly read through Kevin Kilty's well-known page on perpetual motion. All good stuff: and he even mentions eternal flames!

Kilty, who seems to have derived his information on this subject from Arthur Ord-Hume's 1977 book "Perpetual Motion: history of an obsession", mentions that:-

"Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657) made a lifelong study of these lamps, so many of which were supposedly found in old tombs, vaults and temples. Ord-Hume spends several pages examining ways to explain the observation of perpetual lamps. This is giving too much serious attention to a fantasy. It is likely that no one ever observed any such lamp."

(Though I should of course point out that Averlino claimed to have observed an eternal flame). Fascinating! I was not aware of Fortunio Liceti's connection with eternal flames, and so rushed to buy Ord-Hume's book as quickly as I could. I shall continue this thread when it arrives...

The Florentine Renaissance & evolution...

OK, I'll admit it: people who talk about the Renaissance as a coherent historical phenomenon get on my nerves. There were numerous strands of thought at the time, all vying for the oxygen of attention, all trying to supplant medieval scholasticism: but arguably the two biggest new kids on the block circa 1400 were Renaissance humanism (think of Petrarch, etc) and Renaissance inventorship (think of Brunelleschi). While the former grew out of philology and a theoretical reverence for Classical texts, the latter emerged from the empirical world of clock-making.

Lynn Thorndike was happy enough (in his "Science & Thought in the XVth Century") to point out that these two major strands were very often at odds with each other: but it should also be noted that the intersection between the two was far from empty. In fact, you might well look at the architects Leon Battista Alberti and Antonio Averlino - both born near Florence near to 1400 - as examples of "Renaissance Men" in the purest sense, in that they exemplified both strands at the same time.

The mystery of the Italian Renaissance (as described by Burckhardt and the generation of gung-ho pro-humanistic historians that followed him) is this: why did it emerge at such a narrow time (circa 1400) and place (Florence)?

For a long time, the dominant view has basically been that this was a random event, just one of those things that happen from time to time. However, some modern writers have begun to speculate whether a particular freak event or a subtle change in diet or eating habits might perhaps been the real "cause" of the Italian Renaissance.

For me, I would be unsurprised if insomnia turned out to be a key: Alberti writes, in his 1441 "On the Tranquillity of the Soul", of "the agitation of his soul"at night, and how he can relieve this by trying to devise amazing machines for lifting and carrying weights. I wonder if an entire generation of Florentines suffered from a kind of intellectual insomnia, perhaps as a result of effectively becoming hyperthyroid from ingesting a particularly iodine-rich salt being brought into the city?

Or might the Florentines have simply become addicted to the sugar confections that had not long before suddenly filled the city's apothecaries and markets? Might the Renaissance have simply been a metabolic balancing act as people tried to compensate for a giant communal sugar rush?

But there's another possibility. If you were looking for a statistical explanation why a particular population produced more geniuses (while the overall bell-curve distribution probably remained intact), there would be two obvious candidates to consider - either (a) the mean IQ got shifted up (i.e. everyone somehow got smarter) , or (b) the variance increased dramatically (i.e. more extreme cases appeared at both ends of the scale).

This set me wondering: as I understand it, one of the problems often put forward with Darwinian evolution is that the natural rate of mutations is too low to support the amount of random change needed. So could it be that stable contexts inhibit mutations (i.e. encourage low adaptation rates), while troubled contexts somehow encourage mutations (i.e. encourage high adaptation rates)?

Interestingly, one medieval obsession presents itself here: that of whether "monsters" (freaks of nature) were signs (de-monstr-ations) of something greater happening in the world. Perhaps "monsters" in the human population were (and possibly still are?) literally a sign that the variance of the population is high.

Thinking about all this, it suddenly then became clear to me why low sperm counts make evolutionary sense: if a body is in significant physical difficulties, it makes no sense for it to try to reproduce offspring that are the same as it, as they would likely experience the same difficulties in the next generation. Instead, perhaps the body deliberately produces crippled, damaged sperm to try to encourage mutations that might be better adapted to the changing physical context. Otherwise, why would the body ever want to deliberately produce poor sperm or eggs? Perhaps the current medical view of "healthy" sperm is somehow clouded by an anti-mutation bias of some sort.

My prediction here is that that there will turn out to be reproductive mechanisms by which (a) healthy eggs repel damaged sperm and (b) damaged eggs discourage healthy sperm: leaving the two pivotal cases of (healthy eggs + healthy sperm) => low mutation rate (low variance, well-adapted to environment), and (damaged eggs + damaged sperm) => high mutation rate (high variance, poorly-adapted to environment).

But there's a timing issue. Whereas sperm production is essentially a "just-in-time" process, women's eggs are produced all in one go, and so form a lagging indicator to environmental adaptation (i.e. egg health in reproduction gives an indication of environmental fit 15-25 years earlier). So, could it be that, when looking for the source of the Renaissance circa 1400, we should instead look for a traumatic event in Florence circa 1380 that significantly affected women's reproductive health, causing a change in the population's IQ variance?

I really don't know (this is a blog, not an article in Nature): but it is tempting to speculate whether it was simply coincidence that the Florentine Renaissance began two generations after the plague had ravaged Florence in 1348 (Boccaccio famously wrote about it). Might children born after the plague have stirred the Florentine gene-pool up in just the right way to set the Renaissance in motion a generation later?

Research breakthrough...

Not long ago, I mentioned here that I had made a fist-punching-in-the-air breakthrough in my research, and promised to describe it more fully at a later date. Well, that later date has (thanks to a torrent of two gently chiding emails chivvying me along) now arrived: here's what I found.

Regular Voynich News readers will by now be aware that I've spent a long time this year slowly trawling through various volumes of Lynn Thorndike's vast "History of Magic & Experimental Science". Given that I believe the Voynich Manuscript is an enciphered book of proto-scientific secrets rooted in Italian Quattrocento culture, Thorndike's general focus on Italian scientific documents of the 14th (Volume III) and 15th (Volume IV) centuries is pretty much spot on. This approach has turned up a whole set of research leads to follow up over the next few weeks and months... so far so good.

But I also (sad completist I sometimes tend to be) picked up a copy of Thorndike's rather less-well-known "Science & Thought In The Fifteenth Century" (1929, Columbia University Press): in which I found something pleasantly unexpected. But I'll fill in all the background first...

Once upon a time (oh, in 2006), I wrote & published a book called "The Curse of the Voynich", which described how I concluded from my meticulous codicological study that Quattrocento Florentine architect Antonio Averlino (better known as "Filarete") was probably both the author and the encipherer of the Voynich Manuscript. Part of the textual evidence revolved around a set of "small works" to which Averlino alluded in his larger libro architettonico, and which I suspected were at least in part enciphered in the VMs. However, art historians have long disagreed about whether these other works actually existed, or whether they were just added in for spice to amuse Averlino's (hoped-for) ducal audience: as far as anyone, there has long been no external evidence either way.

But then on p.219 of Thorndike's "Science & Thought", in chapter XII which is largely devoted to Giovanni Michele Alberto of Carrara's "De constitutione mundi", I found the following:

Antonio Averlino Filarete (1410-1470), who is commonly thought of as an architect and sculptor, is listed by John Michael Albert [i.e. Giovanni Michele Alberto da Carrara] among writers on plants as having treated that subject "elegantly in the vernacular tongue". [94]

Thorndike's footnote 94 then says:

Ibid. [MS Ashburnham 198], fol.78r: "Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter." The work of Filarete on architecture was first printed only in 1890 (W. von Oettingen). In it he alludes to his work on agriculture, which is probably what John Michael Albert has in mind. See M. Lazzaroni and A Munoz, "Filarete, scultore e architetto del sec. XV", 1908, p.281.

Somehow this whole mention appears to have gone unnoticed by all recent writers on Filarete: yet its existence would seem to strongly tip the balance of probability towards the likelihood that he did actually write his "other little works". Hence why finding it was so rewarding (for me, at least).

Incidentally, MS Ashburnham 198 (one of the 11,000 manuscripts held by the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence) was dedicated to Boniface, marquis of Montferrat: and so was probably written between 1483 (when Bonifazio Palaeologo became marquis) and 1488 (when Alberto was given the title Count Palatine by Frederick III) or 1490 (when Alberto is thought to have died).

I then wondered where Alberto might have seen Filarete's herbal manuscript. Alberto was born in Bergamo, trained in Padua, returned to Bergamo, and practised medicine at Rovato, Brescia, Chiari: and for a time was private physician to Roberto di Sanseverino, as well as Prior of the College of Physicians in Bergamo. I'd therefore guess that Alberto probably saw Filarete's work (and perhaps even had a copy made of it) while in Bergamo, where he spent most of his life, only 50km or so from Milan where Filarete was working: or he may even have met Filarete, who is believed to have designed the plans for Bergamo Cathedral circa 1459, and who doubtless visited Bergamo on several occasions.

It would be amazing if Filarete's elegant vernacular work on plants (or even just its incipit) could be identified: and so I started, emboldened by the archival research content of Day Three of the Warwick/Warburg Course, to think about where I might search (and for what, and for how long).

Identifying herbals from purely written descriptions is not unprecedented. In Thorndike's "History of Magic & Experimental Science" Vol.IV (p.599), he describes Pandolphus Collenucius of Pesaro learning about herbs in Venice: "There in the street of the spice-dealers in a shop having as its sign the head of an Ethiopian he had consulted an herbal in which the plants were represented so carefully and artfully that you would have thought they grew on its pages." In a footnote, Thorndike notes that Valentinelli (1872) "has shown that this was the De Simplicibus of Benedetto Rinio, with pictures of the plants by the Venetian painter, Andrea Amadio. The MS is now S. Marco VI, 59 (Valentinelli, XIII, 10)." All the same, we really don't yet have enough to work with in the present case.

Where did Alberto's belongings go after his death? Sergio Toresella tells me that Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) wrote: "I understand that this Alberti was an humanist that wrote a lot of comedies and poetry but I do not know were his belongings went after his death." So at least I'm not the first to ask!

But all is not lost: the Biblioteca Angelo Mai in Bergamo has a good collection of his letters and notes, and many manuscripts from his personal library (and so with his initials and coat of arms added to them). The library's bibliographical description of its various humanistic documents taken from Kristeller's Iter Italicum and Iter Supplementum is here. But, as Sergio points out, none looks particularly promising, with the possibly exception of MA 184-186 folio 8v "Ex experimentis et secretis magistri Guelmi" (though this too seems fairly unlikely).

There are some books on Alberto's work. For instance, a 20th century academic called Giovanni Giraldi seems to have spent his life editing and publishing papers on him in obscure journals, many of which are reproduced in his 1967 book "Opera poetica, philosophica, rhetorica, theologica" (Novara: Istituto Geografico de Agostini): although none appears to be for sale online (boo), WorldCat lists 5 or 6 copies, one in the Warburg Institute (hooray!)

For Alberto's life, there is "Giovanni Michele Alberto Carrara" by Ercole Vittorio Ferrario and Gian Camillo Donadi (1964), for which WorldCat lists just one copy (boo)... in the Wellcome Institute Library in London, just around the corner from the British Library (phew!). I've been meaning to go there for a while, partly to take a picture of its necromantic painting depicting John Dee (but that's another story).

Interestingly, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana makes a log of everyone who examines each of its manuscripts available on its website. Of the ten people listed for MS Ashburnham 198, there is someone from the Warburg Institute (in Hamburg!) in 1930, Patrick McGurk from the Warburg (in London) in 1953, Federici Vescalini Graziella in 1987, John Monfasani in 1995, and Ulrich Pfisterer in 1998, though I don't yet know if Ulrich (who has written papers on Filarete) was or is aware of the mention on f78r: I'll ask him, see what he says...

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, there's always the tiny possibility that multispectral imaging of its very first page might just (if Alberto just happened to end up owning it) reveal a faint contact transfer from Alberto's coat of arms and initials. But I'm more interested in seeing if the incipit is anywhere to be found: that would be far more useful for trying to break its cipher.

All of which may not seem like much to get hugely excited about, but it is a step forward (though admittedly only at the glacial pace normal for Voynich research). *sigh*

"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?