Wilfrid Voynich's papers...

Note: this article has now moved to wilfrid-voynichs-papers on Cipher Mysteries

Here's a quick research note: a list of Wilfrid Voynich's archives...

• The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library not only has the Voynich Manuscript itself ("Beinecke MS 408"), but also various other WMV- and VMs-related materials in accompanying boxes (marked A to N). This includes various photographs (in box D), which are also accessible on the Beinecke main site.
  
• The Grolier Club in New York has 8 boxes of WMV's personal and book-trade effects, 1916-1948 (this also contains correspondence carried on by Anne Nill after WMV's death in 1930, as well as some writing by Ethel Voynich).
  
• The London School of Economics has 15 boxes of WMV's "Pamphlets and treatises, concerning the Polish struggle for independence, 1846 - 1914", though these have now been withdrawn and are accessible only on microfilm. Ref: COLL MISC 0261.
  
• The Wellcome Institute Library has a box of correspondence with WMV (dated 1922-1924), (though I don't know how many letters this contains, probably not many). Ref: WA/HMM/CO/Chr/A.110 -- Box 89.

There may well be more, but that should be enough to keep any researcher going for a bit... :-)

"Voynich Manuscript": two words, two lies?

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While writing my MBA dissertation a few years ago, I spun off a short paper called "Justified True Belief: Three Words, Three Lies?", where the abstract explained its title:-

Cornelius Castoriadis once famously described the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as “four words, four lies”: here, I examine each of the three words of “justified true belief” in turn to see if that too might be based on a fatally flawed discourse. In fact, “three lies” turns out to be a little strong - but the evidence strongly points to “two-and-a-half lies”. We deserve better than this!

My guess is that Castoriadis, for all his pithiness, was ripping off Voltaire, who in 1756 wrote:

This agglomeration which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

So now, by applying the same pattern to the Voynich Manuscript, I'm extending the chain of ripping yet further. Just so you know!

What's in a name? Wilfrid Voynich never called it "The Voynich Manuscript": right from the start, he called it "The Roger Bacon Manuscript". Which was a bit of a shame, given that it originally almost certainly had nothing to do with Roger Bacon.

However, because Voynich desperately wanted it to contain Bacon's encrypted secrets, he was convinced it had to be medieval. It was in this context that he referred to it as a "manuscript", because manuscripts are technically defined as being handwritten documents that predate the start of printing, which means 1450 or so. And so you can see that the word "Manuscript" in "Voynich Manuscript" presupposes a medieval document, or else it would have to be called "an early modern handwritten document" (which, for all its precision, is not quite so punchy). And worse, the range of dates it could sensibly have been made goes over this 1450 mark, so we have no real certainty to work from here.

As for "Voynich": in one sense it should be "Wojnicz", the book dealer's surname before he ended up in London. But we sophisticated moderns should perhaps more sensibly name it after the Jesuit Villa Mondragone (where Wilfrid Voynich found it), or Johannes Marcus Marci (who inherited it and whose letter to Kircher travelled with it all the way to New Haven), or George Baresch (arguably the first obsessive Voynich researcher to be documented), or Sinapius / de Tepenecz (whose erased signature still faintly remains on the first page), or even Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (who was said to have paid well for it).

All of this still rather panders to an implied need for naming, as if by giving it a name it somehow helps us understand its origins (it doesn't, can't, and won't). It's an itch we don't actually need to scratch: we need to learn to be more comfortable about remaining in a state of uncertainty.

My dissertation was all about knowledge and uncertainty: the work I've done since then points to my own three-word definition for knowledge - "hopefully useful lies". Calling this enigmatic object the "Voynich Manuscript" is indeed "two words, two lies" - but as long as we never forget that they are both lies, its name is a most useful tool.

Become A Voynich Manuscript Expert In Just 5 Minutes...

Note: this article has now moved to become-a-voynich-manuscript-expert-in-just-5-minutes on Cipher Mysteries

Would having "Expert on the Voynich Manuscript" on your CV significantly raise your perceived intellectuality (i.e. an extra ten grand per year on your salary)? It would? Then read on, and I'll reveal the secret two-stage process that They don't want you to find out...

Stage One. You start out by pretending to be a Voynich expert. All you have to know is:

(a) That the two jargon terms for the Voynich Manuscript are "VMs" (because "Ms" or "MS" is short for "manuscript") and "Beinecke MS 408" (because it's 408th in the Beinecke Library's collection of manuscripts);
(b) That the VMs lives at Yale University in New Haven (because that's what the Beinecke Library is part of); and
(c) That the VMs is a mysterious old handwritten book that nobody can read. Not even me!

If you really want, you can also read the Wikipedia VMs page: but apart from the fact that the Voynich Manuscript was [re]discovered in Italy in 1912 by dodgy book dealer Wilfrid Voynich (hence its name), feel free to basically skip the rest.

Incidentally, if you're ever asked about anyone who has written about the VMs (Newbold, Brumbaugh, Terence McKenna, anyone really), any real Voynich expert would nod sympathetically and say "Poor old X - if only they had known what we know now". Of course, this is a big fat lie, because we still know basically sod all about the VMs.

Stage Two. You continue by actually becoming a Voynich expert. This is also easy, as long as you can get a working grasp of the following basic statements:-

• The VMs was probably made by a right-handed European between 1250 and 1640.
  If post-1622, explain how Jacob de Tepenec's signature got on the front
  If post-1500, explain how 15th century quire numbers got on it
  If pre-1450, explain how Leonardo-style hatching ended up in some of the drawings
  
• If the VMs is a language, note that its words don't function like those in real languages
  If the VMs is a cipher, note that it doesn't work like any known cipher
  If the VMs is nonsense, note that its letters appears to follow unknown rules
  If the VMs' plants are botanical, note that most don't resemble real plants

Now all you have to do is to devise your very own really, really lame signature theory. As long as it amuses you and doesn't trample on the above dull bullet-points too badly, congratulations - you're right up there with the big hitters! But how should you construct this new theory?

Actually, it's quite helpful here to project how you feel about your own work onto how you think the original author(s) felt about the VMs. For example, if you think that your own work is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written solely to convince your employers to pay your wages, then you might try devising your own variant of the basic hoax theory template (which argues that the VMs is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written by [insert name here] solely to convince Emperor Rudolph II to pay a rumoured 600 gold ducats).

But be bold in your theorising! Be creative! Perhaps think of some vaguely Renaissance figure you admire (though Leonardo's already taken, and he was left-handed anyway, d'oh!) or just happen to remember, preferably someone whose name you can consistently spell correctly. Wafer-thin historical connections to herbal medicine, astrology, astronomy, ciphers and mystery are probably bonuses here. So, Nostradamus would be a good 'un: Queen Elizabeth I not so good.

But remember, you're not trying to prove your theory is correct here (for what kind of an idiot would attempt that with such scanty evidence, 500-ish years after the event?) Rather, you're just staking your claim to the possibility that [random person X] might have been the author. And the level of proof required to achieve that is, frankly, negligible.

And hey, even if you choose the name with a pin and a biographical dictionary, if it eventually turns out that you are right, think how unbearably smug you'll be. Possibly for decades!

Finally: however bad projecting your own life onto the VMs' blank canvas may be as an historical approach (and believe me, it lies somewhere between 'rubbish' and 'pants'), it is guaranteed to give you plenty of interestingly ironical things to say about the VMs when you're asked about it at those hip higher-earner parties you'll be attending. Oh, and at your book-launch too, naturally. :-)

The Ninth Gate, revisited...

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Another day, another curiously contentful blog to set me thinking: this time it's Alterati, "The Inside Scoop on The Outside Culture", and specifically a two-part article there from October 2007 entitled "The Yellow Sign: Manuscripts, Codices, and Grimoires".

In Part 1, the discussion swoops from our old friend the Codex Seraphinianus (yet again), to Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, to Newbold's claimed microscopic writing in the VMs, and then on to a powerful idea: that "a void, the right void, will spontaneously generate a stop-gap if there’s enough market pressure", i.e. given sufficient market demand to scratch an itch, people will start selling backscratchers.

"Or perhaps ideas manifest themselves - the more real an idea is the quicker it pops into existence in library-space [...]. I still think of grimoires as notes from a journey rather than road maps but I’m now also starting to think of these books as emergent properties of a weird market pressure which demands sources for belief systems": i.e. given sufficient 'market demand' for a religion, books claiming to be the sources of those religions will spontaneously appear.

Here, I suspect the Alterati blogger is thinking about the legend surrounding the Codex Gigas (because that's what he goes on to discuss), but that seems a little dubious: just about all of the Codex Gigas is mundane, if not actually dull (there's a set of hi-res scans here, the famous devil picture is on p.290, but big deal, I say). However, it's actually far closer to the truth with The Grand Grimoire, which is supposed to date to 1522 but which seems to scratch a peculiarly 19th century itch.

In Part 2, the focus shifts to Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, a film I really enjoyed but thought no more than a piece of celluloid mythmaking, a seductive summoning-up of the taste of the Devil's sulphurous kiss to titillate and amuse. However, I had no idea at all that it was based upon a book - The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Fascinating stuff! (And yes, I've already ordered myself a copy). There's also a set of the engravings from the film online.

After various idle speculations on the Lovecraftian mythos, our Alterati blogger friend wonders whether the mysterious roving figure of Corso (the book dealer / detective in The Ninth Gate / Club Dumas) is actually based on Wilfrid Voynich. Hmmm... Wilfrid Voynich, as played by Johnny Depp? It's fairly sublime (I get more of a David Suchet vibe): but perhaps I'm wrong...



I think you'll have to decide for yourself. :-)

Thorndike on the Voynich Manuscript!

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

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

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

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

Of course, Thorndike - being Thorndike - then goes on to demonstrate precisely how the whole myth around Nicholas of Cusa arose: basically, German historians looking out for a German 'forerunner, predictor, or martyr' plucked three marginal fragments from Nicholas's work and wove them together to tell a story that was, frankly, not there to be told. Then you can almost feel the fever rising in Thorndike's genuinely angry brow when he continues:

"Could anything, even the most childish of medieval superstitions, be more unscientific, unhistorical, and lacking in common sense than this absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation, by modern investigators and historians of science?" (p.137)

Punchy (and grouchy) stuff: but he's far from finished yet. He has an example of something even more scandalous which he feels compelled to share with us:-

"When are we ever going to come out of it? To stop approaching the study of medieval science by such occult methods as the scrutiny of a manuscript supposed to have been written by Roger Bacon in cipher, instead of by reading the numerous scientific manuscripts that are expressed in straightforward and coherent, albeit somewhat abbreviated, Latin?" (p.137)

So there you have it. In 1929, while Wilfrid Voynich was still alive, Thorndike took a measured look at Voynich's and Newbold's "Roger Bacon Manuscript" nonsense, and placed it straight in the category of "absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation".

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

Boole / Voynich Manuscript painting...

Here's a nice Voynich-themed oddity from the much-frayed edge between C.P.Snow's "Two Cultures" of art and science.

A contemporary painter called Shardcore explores the history of science by painting famous scientists and historical scientific objects: and was so entertained by the notion that Ethel Lilian Boole - the daughter of the famous logician George Boole - came to own the Voynich Manuscript (she married Wilfrid Voynich, of course) that he decided to paint a picture celebrating it: and you can see the result here, together with a time-lapse recording of the painter as he painted it.

In Voynichological circles, this connection is old news: the website of my old Voynichian chum Jeff Haley is called The George Boole Fanclub, for precisely this reason. Incidentally, I have spent five years trying not to think of Julian Clary's former life as The Joan Collins' Fan Club (terrible, but surely better than "Gillian Pie-Face"?) whenever I see this, but as yet without success. Perhaps in another five years, when Julian Clary has become as horribly mainstream as Jim Davidson (sorry, but that's how showbiz works)...

The quotation which adorns the picture is from George Boole: "Language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought". Which is nice. But it this true of Voynichese?