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!

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...

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?

Very cool Warburg/Warwick course...

I've booked myself onto what promises to be a fascinating three-day workshop run between University of Warwick (in Coventry) and the Warburg Institute (in London), on "Resources and Techniques for the Study of Renaissance and Early Modern Culture". It aims to give post-grads the kind of in-depth specialist research training they need to look at Renaissance / early modern artefacts in a very cross-disciplinary way, by grasping many of the different ways and methodologies available for researching them.

It is almost a top-end DIY course for Voynichologists, as it seems to cover every one of the areas of Voynichological interest (apart from herbal mss, which basically forms a medieval genre)... which is of course why I've signed up for it. Oh, and the lecturers are fantastic too (don't get me started on yet another Charles Burnett panegyric).

But the match between the two is perhaps not as coincidental as you might at first think. What is not widely known is that the Warburg has a deep affinity with all things Voynichian, thanks to its long association with hidden/occult histories and medieval astrology. Its library has a number of books on the VMs (all on the same open shelf, so much friendlier than the British Library), and so it would be highly unsurprising if breakthroughs in our understanding of the VMs came from someone schooled in this Saxl / Panofsky / Yates / Burnett tradition.

Still, the Voynich's academic "kiss-of-death" reputation lingers: and perhaps rightly so, for it is painfully easy to misread its layers and signs, and glimpse in them a story written only on the not-so-blank slate of your own overfertile psyche. All the same, we are now in an era which tolerates multiple academic [hi]stories, even things like Liane Lefaivre's re-reading (of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as having been written by Leon Battista Alberti), which seems at odds with the (basically Venetian) object itself (it's signed, for goodness' sake!): so perhaps the penalty for daring to try is not as high as it formerly was?

Besicles...?!

Just mooching around the web looking for Trithemius-related stuff (as you do), I saw a reference to Renaissance "telescopes, microscopes and bezicles" in the first (free) page of Polygraphia and the Renaissance sign: The case of Trithemius, from the Springer journal Neophilologus. I had never heard of "bezicles", so decided to have a sniff around, see what I was missing.

It turns out that the author meant the (more modern French) "besicles", meaning 'spectacles' (though people usually say lunettes): there's a glossary of spectacles terms here. Now: besicles was originally bericles, where the 'r' somehow transformed into 's' over the centuries (but you'd have to ask a linguist about this subtle shift). And bericles was in turn from beryl, a "smoke-coloured stone" (according to this fun page on spectacles history) used to grind the lenses from - although pure beryl is colourless, & it is the impurities in it which give it colour.

There's a bigger article on spectacles in the American Journal of Gastroenterology (yes, really!), though you'd need to pay to read it (boo, hiss).