Corrections and updates...

A few errata and notes on the virtual pinboard, tacks don't have to be taxing...

(1) Warburg librarian Francois Quiviger kindly points out that my description of the layout of the Warburg Institute (in the Day Two blog entry) wasn't totally precise: though the overall layout matches Warburg's arbitrary Mnemosyne plan, books within a section are arranged chronologically (or rather, by date of author's death). Hmmm... hopefully it'll be 60+ years before his successors will be able to place my book in its final order... :-o

Re-reading my blog entry with Francois' other comments in mind, I think its emphasis (on madness) somewhat diverged from what I originally planned to say. In computer programming, you can "over-optimize" your solution by tailoring it too exactly to the problem: and this is how I felt about the Warburg. One tiny architectural detail at the Institute tells this story: the oddly hinged doors in the men's toilets, that appeared to have been mathematically designed to yield the most effective use of floor space. For me, this is no different to the filing cabinets full of deities, all laid out in alphabetical order: and so the Institute is like a iconological Swiss Army Knife, optimally hand-crafted for Aby Warburg and the keepers of his meme. But the cost of keeping it functioning in broadly the same way goes up each year: programming managers would call it a "brittle" or "fragile" solution, one with a high hidden cost of maintenance.

But am I still a fan of the Warburg? Yes, definitely: it's a fabulous treasure-house that only a particularly hard-hearted historian could even dream of bracketing. And in those terms, I think I'm actually a bit of a softy.

Finally, Francois very kindly offered to put in a reference for me (thank you very much indeed!!): so there should be a happy ending to the whole rollercoaster story after all. I will, of course, post updates and developments here as they happen. :-)

(2) Thanks to a flood of HASTRO-L subscribers dropping by to read my review of Eileen Reeves' "Galileo's Glassworks", Voynich News has just broken through the 1000 visitor mark (and well past the 2000 page-view mark). Admittedly, it's not a huge milestone... but it's a start, right? And though Google seems to like it, only Elias Schwerdtfeger and Early Modern Notes link to it: and nobody has yet rated it on Technorati etc, bah!

(3) Though in the end I was unable to get to the recent CRASSH mini-conference on books of secrets (which was a huge shame), I'm still up for the Treadwell's evening on Magic Circles at 7.15pm on 19th March 2008 (which I mentioned here about ten Internet years ago). Should be fascinating, perhaps see you there! ;-)

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! :-(

"Das Voynich Blog" (reading German can be easy sometimes)

Here's a link to Elias Schwerdtfeger's very interesting "Das Voynich Blog".

Elias has worked really hard behind the scenes to find ways of visualising the statistics expressing what "old hand" Voynichologists (such as, say, Philip Neal & I) see when we look at the Voynich - you know, the highly bonded, multi-level internal structure that exists at the stroke, character, glyph, digraph, word, line, paragraph, page and section levels.

As an aside, I've long disagreed with Renaissance encipherment hypotheses for the VMs based on moving alphabets, specifically because they fundamentally destroy these kinds of internal structure: the only way to keep such hypotheses alive is then to argue (as, for example, my old friend GC does) that these structures are part of the "surface language", i.e. that the encipherer is dynamically stretching his plaintext to mimic these structures in the ciphertext. Yes, it's possible, but... put all the pieces together and it's a bit too much of a stretch for me.

Incidentally, I've been looking at f2v recently, specifically because of the "fa" marginalia there (one of the very few marginalia I didn't really cover in my book, "The Curse of the Voynich"). Elias discusses f2v at some length, proposing the eminently sensible (and testable) hypothesis that the same pe(rso)n that/who made the dubious (o)ish(i) emendation to the last line of f2v also added the "fa" marking above the second paragraph. They're both in similar darker ink (which is a good start): but I think that the Beinecke's scans - though fantastic for most purposes - fall just short of being able to resolve this kind of question definitively.

Actually, I've got a list of about 50 similar/related cross-indexing questions like that I'd like to address (say, by multispectral imaging or Raman imaging) in the future. But for now, that project is stalled (because the Beinecke turned my proposals down). Oh well: maybe next year...