Review of "The Book Nobody Read"...

Note: this article has now moved to review-of-the-book-nobody-read on Cipher Mysteries

In his 1959 book "The Sleepwalkers", Arthur Koestler painted a rather damning picture of Renaissance European astronomers and scientists, where the only person not sleepwalking was Kepler. As part of the process of tarring everyone else with the same soporific brush, Koestler derided Copernicus' famous "De Revolutionibus" as "The Book Nobody Read".

It's true that only a small proportion of "De Revolutionibus" is particularly interesting, with the remainder filled with bone-dry technical astronomical gubbins. But people manifestly did read it, often adding their comments (thoughts, possible errors in the text, etc) in the margins. And what might you learn about that community of readers by examining the marginalia in every extant copy?

More than 30 years ago, Owen Gingerich, one of the leading historians of astronomy, took up this challenge, and in so doing compiled an international census of all the first and second edition copies of Copernicus' book. "The Book Nobody Read" is Gingerich's personal memoir of his extraordinary (if obsessive) historiographical / bibliomanic quest to rebut Koestler's dismissive epithet. Oh: and of course, it turns out that lots of people did read De Revolutionibus.

Throughout the memoir, Gingerich's perpetually boyish enthusiasm for this prolonged pursuit shines through: yet even an ardent astro-aficionado with a codicological bent (such as, errrrm, me) must silently shudder at the extreme degree to which this sheer marginality was doggedly followed.

Probably the best sections of the book are the legal bits, where FBI personnel step into the frame, invariably on the trail (thanks to Gingerich's book measurements and lists of missing or altered pages) of various purloined copies of De Revolutionibus, along with the corresponding courtroom sequences. There are also some choice footnotes which connoisseurs of that genre will enjoy, particularly the one on p.187 about Kepler's apparent seven-and-a-half month gestation (he was sure he was conceived on his parents' wedding night!)

As a personal account, it's only superficially autobiographical: while the reader does build up an idea of the development of Copernican scholarship over the three decades covered, and a few hints at an ongoing academic spat with fellow historian Ed Rosen, Gingerich himself is largely backgrounded by the tidal wave of historiographical facts he feels compelled to share.

Yet at its heart, the book has an internal paradox: that while its structure is not unlike a polite, slightly clunky, pre-Cold War 1950s time-capsule, the thinking inside it has an tight, inclusive, late 1990s academic sensibility. Ultimately, I wanted to know whether this was a portrait of the Census, or a portrait of Gingerich himself: but it is never really clear which.

I really enjoyed "The Book Nobody Read" (and if you're a regular Voynich News reader, you'd probably enjoy its 'book detective' sleuthing just as much as I did): it reads well and is engaging throughout, so all credit to its author. Yet it takes a certain type of personality to bare not just your activities in a book, but your soul as well: and the former dominates the latter here. Ultimately, it's a biography of the Census, not of Gingerich: as a result, I think some readers may well come away from this bookish feast slightly hungry, which is a shame.

Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (& the Voynich Ms)...?

Note: this article has now moved to tadeas-hajek-z-hajku-the-voynich-ms on Cipher Mysteries

Here's a little piece of Voynichiana pinging on the edges of the VMs research radar, concerning Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who I thought had not to date been speculatively linked with the VMs. It came from the text accompanying the "Earth and Sky: Astronomy and Geography at the University between the 15th and the 18th centuries" exhibition at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2005, but also (mostly) reappears in the Wikipedia page. (Which came first? I don't know!)

Why flag Hájek at all? Jan Hurych once put up a page on him on his Hurontaria site, but (I thought) only as a piece of background research data. It's true that as personal physician to Maximilian I (in Vienna) and to Rudolph II (mainly in Prague), Hájek would have vetted or commented on anything alchemical, astronomical, astrological or medical entering the Imperial Court prior to 1600. But might there be more to it?

"In 1554 he studied medicine in Bologna and went to Milan the same year to listen to lectures by Girolamo Cardano, but he soon returned to Prague, where he became a professor of mathematics at the Charles University of Prague in 1555."

If (as I do) you see a Northern Italian art history link in the VMs' drawings, then Hájek's Prague-Bologna-Milan-Prague travels probably jumps out at you too: so, please go on...

"Hájek was in frequent scientific correspondence with the recognized astronomer Tycho and played an important role in persuading Rudolph II to invite Brahe (and later Kepler) to Prague. His voluminous writings in Latin were mostly concerned with astronomy and many regarded him as the greatest astronomer of his time."

In the words of the Joker, "I like him already". But, errrrm, what about the VMs, then?

"[...]Hájek eagerly collected manuscripts, especially those by Copernicus, and may have been the one to convince Rudolph II to procure the infamous Voynich manuscript. [...] Throughout his life he also published numerous astrological prognostics in Czech and that is why he was until recently viewed as an „occultist” rather than a great scientist."

I think we can safely say that, apart from the absence of any actual evidence, Hájek is a great candidate manuscript carrier to add to the Voynich story, far better than Dee and Kelley. And what would make it even more poignant is that the pair of them visited Hájek's house in Prague, which was (according to a fascinating 1999 post on levity.com by Michael Pober) "'by Bethlem', first mentioned in "A True and Faithful Relation' p. 212, Prague 1584, 15th August."

Might Hájek have owned the VMs, perhaps buying it during his time in Italy? It would be interesting to see his handwriting and marginalia commentary style, just in case there's some kind of unexpected link between that and what we see in the VMs. I've asked Jan Hurych, but he hasn't examined Hájek's handwriting: so I'll have to pursue this with the Czech libraries myself (more on that soon).

Given that Hájek translated Matthioli's famous herbal into Czech, it is certainly interesting that the marginalia at the top of f17r appears to have been miscorrected to read "mattior". I had always guessed that it was George Baresch who had done this - but perhaps it might have been Hájek instead? Something to think about, anyway...