"The Alchemy Guild"...

Note: this article has now moved to the-alchemy-guild on Cipher Mysteries

Alchemy arguably dates back to Alexandria, and there are many alchemical manuscripts dating through to the 13th and 14th century (though Lynn Thorndike noted that the 15th century was something of a fallow period). However, the modern organization The International Alchemy Guild traces its practical roots back to what was going in 16th century Bohemia, specifically with the work of Wilhelm von Rosenberg (their spelling) in Cesky Krumlov.

The Guild has put together a nice little historical piece on their website linking a lot of the famous alchemical names of the time to this specific milieu (though doubtless Voynich historian Rafal Prinke would view it as a somewhat simplistic rendering): so you'll see Rudolph II, Hajek, Dee, Kelly, Horcicky, etc all passing by in quick succession... Enjoy!

Review of "Inventing The Flat Earth"...

Note: this article has now moved to review-of-inventing-the-flat-earth on Cipher Mysteries

It's a mystery: when there is abundant evidence that people in the Middle Ages knew for sure that the earth was basically spherical, why has the myth persisted until the late 20th century that Columbus had to argue against Flat Earth proponents to gain backing for his voyage? And where did this whole mythology come from?

In his fascinating (if all too brief) "Inventing The Flat Earth" (1991), medieval historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traces the faulty arguments and ideologies across the centuries that contributed to this nonsense. As an immediate cause, he points to a small coterie of 19th century writers (specifically William Whewell (1794-1866) and John W. Draper (1811-1882)) who decided to start an agitprop war between "religion" and "science", essentially by building opposing false idols of both "sides" and getting people angry enough about it to join in the fight.

For "religion", the caricature they constructed was one of superstition and medieval backwardness: and what (thanks to multiple careful misreadings of the sources) could be more retrogressive than the notion of the flat earth? Disregarding the fact that just about everyone at that time believed in a spherical earth, Church or not. *sigh*

Yet for retrogressivity to be of interest as something to avoid, someone had (logically) to be promoting progressivity: Russell traces this back to Hegel, Auguste Comte, and to Jules Michelet, the last of which dubbed medieval scholastics "valiant athletes of stupidity" (hugely unfairly, of course).

But Jeffrey Burton Russell goes back further still: calling the Middle Ages "the Middle Ages" is a way of implicitly saying that it sat inbetween the (glorious) Classical Era and the (glorious) Renaissance - that it was a Tweenie era, that was more than just a bit disappointing and dull. And similarly with the Dark Ages, which would appear to have been so hugely disappointing that some extreme revisionist historians are trying to excise it completely!

Ultimately, Russell points the finger at Renaissance myth-makers: it was they who essentially invented the whole "medieval = rubbish" mythology which used to annoy Lynn Thorndike so much (though perhaps he should have been angrier with Alberti & his chums than with Jacob Burckhardt), in order to justify their own glory, as if fama was a zero-sum game. What did those Renaissance brainiacs ever do for us, eh?

Rewind to 1492, and the basic history is that Columbus never had to argue against a flat earth. His main point of disagreement was with those scientifically-minded people of the time who argued (completely correctly!) that his estimate of the distance East West to the Orient was far too low, and that he and his crew would die of starvation before they reached there. And they would have done, had another continent not happened to be in the way... but that's another story.

Some may have heard of this book via the recent short article by Mano Singham (Phi Delta Kappan, 1st April 2007, available online) that was built almost entirely around a high-speed precis of Russell's book: on HASTRO-L (2nd December 2007), Michael Meo criticized Singham's presentation, but I think the inaccuracies there were in the summarizing, not in the original.

As far as the intellectual history goes, the seed of the myth/error seems to have been specifically sown by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus preface (not the one Osiander added!). There, he says:-

For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the earth's shape, when he mocks those who declared that the earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me.

Copernicus was trying to play to the Church audience here, as the spherical earth was so well-believed as to be a point of faith. Yet because Lactantius' opposing view (of a flat earth) had been deemed heretical, the papacy ordered in 1616 that this passage be censored from Copernicus' book - but this order came too late for the 3rd edition of 1617, and the subsequent edition came along only in 1854.

And so the final irony here is that if De Revolutionibus had indeed (as Koestler asserted) been "The Book Nobody Read", the flat-earth myth/error might never have flowered.

Lynn Thorndike's papers...

Note: this article has now moved to lynn-thorndikes-papers on Cipher Mysteries

Somehow, I think it was inevitable that a determinedly analytical mind like Lynn Thorndike's would have left a well-organized archival record: and so it was that he and his successors left his extensive collection of papers to the University of Columbia, the last place he worked as a History Professor. The archival finding aid went online here only in 2004, so it seems likely that few historians have thought of using it.

All the same, it still comes as a bit of a surprise to find out that there are 60 linear feet of records in this archive ("ca. 30,000 items in 124 boxes and 1 Flatbox; some in Mapcase"). As well as containing the obvious stuff such as correspondence and numerous card files, this also includes "76 volumes of personal diaries, 1902-1963".

Thorndike's epic quest to examine, read and understand medieval scientific texts was on a scale few have attempted before or since: his multi-volume "History of Magic & Experimental Science" provides a richly textured background that I think anyone seriously looking at early modern proto-scientific mysteries (such as the Voynich Manuscript, naturally) should have gone through. And even so, how much more might there be languishing in his papers - unseen, unread, unknown to us all?

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!

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*

Thorndike has the answer...

For me, Voynich research is one of those things that grind slowly onwards for long periods of time, punctuated by occasional testosteronal fist-clenching-in-the-air moments of elation, a bit like a prisoner being unexpectedly set free. OK, I know it's a bit cliched: but I do it anyway.

For "The Curse of the Voynich", I forensically examined the manuscript itself, travelled to all the places, critically read all the secondary sources, and from all that reconstructed the story as best I could. In short, I'd done an OK job: but though readers told me they liked it, it hadn't set the world on fire. Though it ticked all the right boxes, it was obvious I had to go away and try harder. But what could I do better?

At first, I bought a pile of books on the history of cryptography, such as David Kahn's "The Codebreakers": all fascinating, but the question I'm trying to answer - "at the Quattrocento birth of mathematical cryptography, what kind of cryptography died?" - only features marginally (if at all) in the generally rather positivistic accounts presented there.

And then I realised what I had been missing. Sure, I had read plenty on Quattrocento individuals such as Filarete, Alberti, Brunelleschi, Taccola: but there was one gigantic motherlode of information which most historians seem to pay lip service to (rather than have to set aside several months to read): Lynn Thorndike's epic multi-volume "History of Magic and Experimental Science".

I therefore bought volumes III and IV (for the 14th and 15th centuries) and have now reached halfway through the latter. What continually amazes me is the amount of ground Thorndike covered that has apparently not been touched by anyone since: though there is a large literature tree cascading off it, it is very deep in places and non-existent in others.

From what I have read, I am now quite sure that virtually all of the Voynich Manuscript's roots will turn out to be directly traceable from the late 14th and early 15th century: which means that we might in time be able to reconstruct or predict plaintexts for some sections. But these are still very early days in this ultra-long-term research programme. *sigh*

However, the good news is that I also bought a copy of "Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century" by Lynn Thorndike: and one obscure page from that gave me precisely the clenching-both-fists-in-the-air-YESSSSS-moment I mentioned at the start. The details are too convoluted to go through here, but trust me, it's a peach.

Mini-milestone, quick update...

Voynich News just raced past the 2000 visitor mark (not counting mails sent to email/blog subscribers), which is nice: time to take stock and aim for a million visitors now, surely?

Over the last few days, I've been trying to do too many things at once, particularly with the arrival of a truly fabulous book from the American Philosophical Society (Vincent Ilardi's "Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes"), which has somehow even been able to displace Thorndike Volume IV from the top of my reading list. I've also been writing an article, writing up more of the Treadwell's Magic Circles evening, reviewing both Evelyn Welch's "Shopping in the Renaissance" and an incredible web-based "booklet" that has to be seen to be believed... but I'm getting ahead of myself. You'll see soon enough!

Review of "Vellum"...

Having just worked my way through Vol III of Lynn Thorndike's "History of Magic & Experimental Science", I thought I'd give my reading eyes a rest with some fiction: and so turned to "Vellum" by Australian writer Matt Rubinstein, a 2007-vintage Voynich-themed novel I mentioned here before.

The story revolves around Jack, a translator/subtitler who, while working on a near-untranslatable Russian film, stumbles upon an unreadable (and unapologetically Voynich-like) manuscript. Many of the other characters are librarians or collectors of obscure aphorisms, who seem to share his delight not so much in etymology, but in the living texture of language, its flow. However, the book's central irony is that though Jack can read many languages, he cannot read the people around him: while their lives are complex and conflicted, his is empty - and so he allows the strange manuscript to fill his void.

Of course, while at first he can make no sense of it, under UV light its margins yield many clues to its provenance and history: and as Jack becomes progressively more attuned to its nuances and strange ur-language, it begins to reveal details to him of a fantastical machine to build, not entirely unlike a medieval version of the one in Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" (you know, the one filmed with Jodie Foster).

I have to say that at one point while reading Vellum, I did find myself completely immersed: this was when Jack's growing obsession for his pet manuscript (and his disconnection from the world) suddenly lurched and exceeded my own. I felt the urge to try to pull him back from going over the brink: perhaps this was Matt Rubinstein's focus for the book, to help readers find and explore the point where they felt uncomfortable with the change in Jack's downward arc.

Though it has a contemporary European vibe to its vocabulary, Vellum is firmly situated in the Australian geographical and historical landscapes (spinifex, First Fleet, etc): and is all the fresher and more engaging for it. The paradoxical idea of an inland desert lighthouse recurs through the book, and (surprisingly to me) one such does exist, at Point Malcolm: I think this nicely mirrors various Voynich-like conundrums, which I'm sure you can work out for yourself.

In short, I like Vellum: though not perfect (plot-wise, the explosion is a bit clumsy, for example: and half-quoting Foucault's quoting Borges don't really work), it does have a lot going for it. For the mass market, though, I think the issue is whether Rubinstein manages to find just the right balance between research and story, between exposition and narrative: even though a few times he does err a little too far towards the former, overall I think he earns enough goodwill from the latter to get away with it. Buy it, read it, enjoy it! :-)

Dots for vowels, revisited...

One very early cipher involved replacing the vowels with dots. In his "Codes and Ciphers" (1939/1949) p.15, Alexander d'Agapeyeff asserts that this was a "Benedictine tradition", in that the Benedictine order of monks (of which Trithemius was later an Abbot) had long used it as a cipher. The first direct mention we have of it was in a ninth century Benedictine "Treatise of Diplomacy", where it worked like this:-

• i = .
• a = :
• e = :.
• o = ::
• u = ::.

"R:.:lly", you might well say, "wh:t : l:::d ::f b::ll::cks" (and you'd be r.ght, ::f c::::.rs:.). But for all its uselessness, this was a very long-lived idea: David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" (1967) [the 1164-page version, of course!] mentions the earlier St Boniface taking a dots-for-vowels system from England over to Germany in the eighth century (p.89), a "faint political cryptography" in Venice circa 1226, where the vowels in a few documents were replaced by "dots or crosses" (p.106), as well as vowels being enciphered in 1363 by the Archbishop of Naples, Pietro di Grazie (p.106).

However, perhaps the best story on the dots-for-vowels cipher comes from Lynn Thorndike, in his "History of Magic & Experimental Science" Volume III, pp.24-26. In 1320, a Milanese cleric called Bartholomew Canholati told the papal court at Avignon that Matteo Visconti's underlings had asked him to suffumigate a silver human statuette engraved with "Jacobus Papa Johannes" (the name of the Pope), as well as the sigil for Saturn and "the name of the spirit Amaymom" (he refused). He was then asked for some zuccum de napello (aconite), the most common poison in the Middle Ages (he refused). He was then asked to decipher some "'experiments for love and hate, and discovering thefts and the like', which were written without vowels which had been replaced by points" (he again refused). The pope thought it unwise to rely on a single witness, and sent Bartholomew back to Milan; the Viscontis claimed it was all a misunderstanding (though they tortured the cleric for a while, just to be sure); all in all, nobody comes out of the whole farrago smelling of roses.

(Incidentally, the only citation I could find on this was from 1972, when William R. Jones wrote an article on "Political Uses of Sorcery in Medieval Europe" in The Historian: clearly, this has well and truly fallen out of historical fashion.)

All of which I perhaps should have included in Chapter 12 of "The Curse of the Voynich", where I predicted that various "c / cc / ccc / cccc" patterns in Voynichese are used to cipher the plaintext vowels. After all, this would be little more than a steganographically-obscured version of the same dots-for-vowels cipher that had been in use for more than half a millennium.

As another aside, I once mentioned Amaymon as one of the four possible compass spirits on the Voynich manuscript f57v (on p.124 of my book) magic circle: on p.169 of Richard Kieckhefer's "Magic in the Middle Ages", he mentions Cecco d'Ascoli as having used N = Paymon, E = Oriens, S = Egim, and W = Amaymen (which is often written Amaymon). May not be relevant, but I thought I'd mention it, especially seeing as there's the talk on magic circles at Treadwell's next month (which I'm still looking forward to).

Finally, here's a picture of Voynichese text with some annotations of how I think it is divided up into tokens. My predictions: vowels are red, verbose pairs (which encipher a single token) are green, numbers are blue, characters or marks which are unexpected or improvised (such as the arch over the '4o' pair at bottom left, which I guess denotes a contraction between two adjacent pairs) are purple. Make of it all what you will!

Books, books, books...

My copies of Eileen Reeves "Galileo's Glassworks" and Matt Rubinstein's "Vellum" have both arrived in the post: and so the inevitable book triage process sets in, whereby I work out which of the books I'm currently reading to put to one side to make time/space for the new arrivals.

Unfortunately, I'm so utterly captivated by Lynn Thorndike's "History of Magic & Experimental Science" Vol III (covering the 14th century), I'll probably have to finish that one first. Only a few hundred pages to go, then...

A Latin aside: I've been programming with a code library from 3Dlabs with a function that normally appears as "des.init()". However, desinit is a proper Latin word meaning "it ceases", and refers (as anyone who has read Thorndike will know) to the words at the end of manuscripts, just as incipit refers to the words at their start. What I didn't know until this week was that there is also a nice saying from Horace desinit in piscem (or in full "desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne"), which refers to a statue that starts beautiful at the top but ends up as a ugly fish at the bottom (it even gets quoted in Asterix and the Secret Weapon) - a handy metaphor for things which seem to start out well but end up badly. Nothing at all to do with 3Dlabs, then.

On the subject of books, I recently found a reference on WorldCat to a a real (ie non-fiction) Voynich book I'd never heard of, written by VMs mailing list member Jim Comegys in 2001, and with the catchy title "Keys for the voynich scholar : necessary clues for the decipherment and reading of the world's most mysterious manuscript which is a medical text in Nahuatl attributable to Francisco Hernández and his Aztec Ticiti collaborators." I'll see if I can get a copy from Jim (though I suspect he may not have properly published it per se).

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...

And the new Thorndike is... Thorndike!

Lynn Thorndike's vast, multi-volume "History of Magic and Experimental Science" stands as a gigantic monument to the huge amount of, well, stuff that is in the archives but which mainstream historians circa 1920 thought to be unworthy of discussion. Thankfully, things have now changed somewhat!

Kessinger Publishing has reprinted much of Thorndike's work: but (unless I've misinterpreted things) their modern print-on-demand reprints seem to be about £25 for 200-ish page segments, whereas copies of the original eight volumes (published in pairs in 1923, 1934, 1941, and 1958, and each volume of which is 600-700 pages) go second hand for £30 or so.

Even something like Thorndike's "History of Medieval Europe" can be picked up for £5 or less, while the Kessinger POD reprint is more than £20. Bizarre economics!

As with David Kahn, everyone namechecks Thorndike: but few have read all 6,000-odd pages of the HoMaES series. I'll admit it: though to date I've only ever read sections as required, one day I'll read the whole lot... I hope!

All in all, there really doesn't (unless you know better?) seem to be a Thorndike 2.0, a decent modern alternative to HoMaES in (say) only 1,500 pages or less. So even 50 years on from Vols VII and VIII, the new Thorndike is still Thorndike!