A little more on Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku...

Note: this article has now moved to a-little-more-on-tadeas-hajek-z-hajku on Cipher Mysteries

A nice little thing just arrived in the post: I had contacted the Prague-based Society for the History of Sciences ("DVT" = dějiny věd a techniky) to ask how to get hold of a copy of its 2000 monograph on Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku. To my surprise, the DVT's Igor Janovský said - don't worry about paying, we'll just send you a copy (which they did).

It's a rather pleasant little blue-covered volume: though all in Czech, there is a contents page at the back in English. As this doesn't appear anywhere on the Internet, I thought I'd copy it here:-

5 … Introduction
7 … Zdenĕk Beneš: Lifetime of Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek – his personality, time and milieu
15 … Jaroslav Soumar: Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek and his time
25 … Michal Svatoš: Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek and Prague University
35 … Martin Šolc: Astronomy in activity of Tadeáš Hájek
41 … Alena Hadravová & Petr Hadrava: Observation devices in the time of Tadeáš Hájek
49 … Petr Hadrava: Tradition in Czech stellar astronomy (Conclusion to the astronomy of Tadeáš Hájek and foreward to S. Štefl’s article)
51 … Stanislav Štefl: Stelar studies of Be-stars with spectrograph Heros
55 … Voytĕch Hladký & Martin Šolc: Tadeáš Hájek and the calendary reform of Pope Gregorius
61 … Karel Krška: Tadeáš Hájek as meteorologist
67 … Zdenĕk Tempír: Cultivation of hop-plants up to 16th century and Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek
79 … Gabriela Basařová: Contribution of Tadeáš Hájek to Czech and world brewing
93 … Pavel Drábek: Aspects of medicine in Hájek’s treatise on beer
95 … Václav Vĕtvička: Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek as botanist
103 … Jaroslav Slípka: Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek and his “Methoposcopy”
109 … Milada Říhová: Treatise on methoposcopy of Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek
115 … Pavel Drábek: Antonius Mizaldus an interpreteur of Hájek’s Methoposcopy into French
117 … Bohdana Buršiková: “Actio medica”, or the professional dispute of Tadeáš Hájek
125 … Josef Smolka: Andreas Dudith (1533-1589) – penfriend of Tadeáš Hájek
169 … Josef Petráň: Tadeáš Hájek’s relation to practice
175 … On bibliography Hageciana
189 … Obsah [i.e. “Contents” in Czech]
190 … Contents

By far the biggest (44-page long) piece is Josef Smolka's article (pp.125-168) on Hájek's correspendence from Andreas Dudith: the table on p.137 lists 47 extant letters dating from 1572 to 1589. Dudith's correspondence is currently being edited by L. Szczucki a T. Szepessy: parts I to IV were published in 1992, 1995, 2000, and 1998, with the last two corresponding just to 1574 and 1575 (which must have been busy years). Note that Smolka has examined the letters to Hájek past 1575, not just the ones that have been edited & published.

I must admit that all this changes what I thought about the 16th century. I had previously got the impression that there was a huge explosion in scientific letter writing only in the mid-17th century, triggered by the Royal Society and Kircher's encyclopedic output. My impression of the preceding century had been that its letters had been more literary and political. But here we can see a 16th century group corresponding intensely: this pushes the boundary right back in time.

Was this an "invisible college"? Owen Gingerich received light flak for using the phrase ("The Book Nobody Read", p.82), which he defines (pp.178-179) as "tutorial and mentor relationships that transcended institutional boundaries": though in modern sociological usage, it is usually a rather more hand-waving way of expressing undocumented (but implicitly present) loose connections between members of an extended community through which ideas flow. For once, the Wikipedia entry is mostly helpful (well, up until its final summary, anyway).

I'd point out that 'mentoring' is a somewhat inexact term (as well as being a modern back-projection onto history, with "mentor" dating only from 1699, and becoming trendy in the 1990s): and that the whole "invisible college" notion comes with extensive occult, Rosicrucian, and secret society baggage which perhaps we would be better off not carrying on our journey forwards. Basically, I fail to see how using "invisible" to denote "non-academic" is helpful to anyone: I've met plenty of essentially invisible academics, haven't you?

For the most part, I think that what is meant by "invisible college" is no more than a geographically- extended community of letter-writers, trading ideas rather than goods. Others might prefer to call this a "community of letters" (though I'm not sure if this is helpful either).

And so we come to Rene Zandbergen's comment on my earlier post on Tadeáš Hájek. He writes that "According to Dr.Smolka, if Hajek had had access to the MS now known as the Voynich MS, it should be expected that he would have mentioned it to Duditius, but this is not the case." [Smolka's article on Duditius and Hájek is the one discussed above].

Actually, I do buy into this: if the VMs did get bought by Rudolph II (who, let's say, then gave it to Horcicky), we may be able to rule out the pre-1590 (and indeed the pre-1600) period. In fact, I'd say the best place to look would probably be in the community of scientific letter-writers around Europe circa 1600-1612, and particularly before 1606-1609 when Rudolph II's grip on the court started to yield to his brother Matthias. So rather than Duditius and Hájek themselves, we ought to be hunting down their successors' letters. But who would that be?

It would need someone with a better grasp of 'unpublished Bohemian scientific correspondence 1600-1610' than me to know where best to look next. All the same, I have some ideas... ;-)

Pietro Andrea Mattioli...

Note: this article has now moved to pietro-andrea-mattioli on Cipher Mysteries

Google only finds about ten pages where Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) is linked with the Voynich Manuscript. Here's a short research note to fill that gap...

If you look at Mattioli's CV, you'll see plenty of echoes with other people linked to the VMs. Though a renowned herbal compiler & writer in his spare time, he was also a physician to the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand II and to Emperor Maximilian II (who was, of course, Rudolph II's father), which is broadly similar to both Hajek and Sinapius.

Brumbaugh once compared Mattioli's famous 1544 herbal (the one that Hajek and Handsch translated in 1562/1563) with the VMs' herbal drawings, and concluded that the two had (I think) at most one half of one plant in common. And so it seems relatively certain there is no connection: neither one is derived from the other, nor do both emanate from a common source.

Yet even though Rene Zandbergen avers demurs in this, I am quite certain (from closely examining it at the Beinecke) that the first word of the faded marginalia at the top of f17r has been emended from "melhor" to read "mattioli". That is, a later owner (who was probably unable to read Occitan and French) misinterpreted the word as a garbled reference to Mattioli, and decided to correct it on the page.

Marcelo Dos Santos' page on f17r (in Spanish) mentions much of this. He also mentions Sean Palmer's assertion that the waterstain on f17r must have happened after the f17r marginalia were added, but before the f116v 'michitonese' marginalia: but no, sorry, I don't accept that idea at all. If you look at the following pages, you can see where the waterstain fades away: it's a localised piece of damage.

Marcelo also pulls down my suggested link with fennel for the picture on f17r (the one with a pair of "eyes" in the roots): yet he seems not to grasp that there the herbal literature of the late Middle Ages / Renaissance repeatedly connects fennel with eyes - finnochio / occhio in Italian, but similarly in Occitan and other languages. Oh well.

Voynich Documentary (for 2010)...

Note: this article has now moved to voynich-documentary-for-2010 on Cipher Mysteries

Well, you can't say I'm not looking ahead. News reaches my ears of a lavish Voynich documentary being made by the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) "Universum" Natural History Unit and Pro Omnia Film & Video Promotion GmbH, in association with "ARTE, ZDF and the Smithsonian Network".

Now we've got past the broadcasting acronym jungle, what is its angle? It's still early days, but its producers Klaus Steindl and Andreas Sulzer seem already to have focused on the VMs' Bohemian history as being worthy of study: we'll just have to wait and see what their research harvests...

Well-known Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen is helping out in some way (hopefully they'll remember to listen to him, particularly as Voynich research is more about avoiding problems than solving them), and they promise:

"Now analysing the illustrations will give a new angle to decoding the manuscript. Wrapped around the text on almost every page there are drawings of plants, star constellations of the zodiac, bathing female figrues and structures remniscent of piping systems and microscopic views. Do these patterns hold the key? For this documentary a team of scientists takes a new interdisciplinary approach to crack the Voynich code - including the first forensic examination of the book itself."

Somehow, I get the feeling that they haven't yet read my book - oh, well. :-( But let them continue...

"A recently discovered signature is a new lead: It identifies the early 17th century scholar Jakub de Tepenec - an alchemist in attendance on Habsburg emperor Rudolph II. How was he connected to the unknown author? Did he possess some kind of secret knowledge about alchemy, magic plants and the fabled fountain of youth he tried to hide from the inquisition?"

OK, OK, even though these are supposed to be rhetorical questions, you'd have to say that "only through ownership" and "no" are both pretty good answers. And "recently" isn't usually used to mean "85 years ago", but I guess they're looking at the big picture here. Regardless, there is an incredible wealth of information from this fascinating period in the numerous Czech archives, so I wish them all the best in their search for whatever it is they're looking for.

Yet as Charles Hope cautions, archival research is best approached more as an exercise in hopeful serendipity than in one of historical problem-solving: as my friend Sergio Toresella said, "In my life I went twice in an Archivio and I haven't got a spider in a hole (as we say in Italian)." You get the idea.

Me, I think I'll stick to the Quattrocento. ;-)

Did any Voynich pages go missing?

Note: this article has now moved to did-any-voynich-pages-go-missing on Cipher Mysteries

When the Voynich Manuscript misdecipherer William Romaine Newbold died, his friend & colleague Roland Grubb Kent decided to bring all his late friend's notes together into a book: this was published in 1928 by the University of Philadelphia Press under the title "The Cipher of Roger Bacon". If you'd like your own copy, Kessinger sell a modern print-on-demand reproduction of it, with quite reasonable quality pictures (apart from the awful picture of Newbold right at the start).

And it was from Newbold's and Kent's book that the story of the modern missing pages sprang.

You see, there's an innocuous-looking table in page 45's footnote 2 that describes the physical make-up of the manuscript: in particular, it lists the first (what we would now call the "Herbal") section ("Part I. Botanical, ff. 1-11, 13-66") as having 65 folios ("leaves"), with 125 drawings and 5 text-only pages.

However, the manuscript as now owned by the Beinecke only has 59 leaves: Rene Zandbergen's page on this lists folios 12, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, and 64 as missing. Might folios 59 to 64 (at the centre of a quire) have gone missing in the 20th century, sometime between Newbold examining them and being given to the Beinecke by Hans Kraus? If so, might Newbold have had any reproductions of them?

While researching my book, en route to New Haven I stayed with some old friends near Philadelphia: and so used the opportunity to drop by the University of Pennsylvania's archives, which I happened to know held several boxes of Newbold's records. At last, I thought, I would be able to see if these missing pages might be there.

The good news was that the set of photostats Wilfrid Voynich had given Newbold were still there: yet the reproduction of the Herbal section contained precisely the same pages as we see nowadays - the same pages that are missing now were missing then.

So what actually happened? Simply, I'm reasonably sure that the table on page 45 was miscopied from an intermediate handwritten count, and that Newbold or Kent (whichever of the two) just got it wrong. The missing folios were long gone, decades (probably centuries) before Wilfrid Voynich bought it in 1912.

I suspect that the folio numbers were added between 1580 and 1600, around the time that the manuscript was rebound into its current order and repainted (probably to gain a higher price): and that many (if not all) of the missing pages-as-numbered were sent by George Baresch to Athanasius Kircher, as per the correspondence.

Perhaps Kircher's collection of cipher notes will turn up one day (which would be very nice), and will turn out to contain many/all of these missing pages: but perhaps it is safer to assume that somewhere along the way, some well-meaning Jesuit administrator destroyed them - after all, something you can't read surely has no value?

The Open Directory Project...

I've just been accepted as an editor of the Open Directory Project: for several years, its Voynich Manuscript category has been fairly moribund (if not actually dead), and I thought it would be a positive thing to try to update and restructure it, so that it could provide a set of links to Voynich-related things that was actually useful - image galleries, research, theories, etc.

I made a good start at doing this: but then I ran into a heap of problems...

Firstly, it turns out that nearly every interesting Voynich-related site I've looked at over the past six years has stopped working: Voynich dead links significantly outnumber the live links. Furthermore, many dead links (even recent ones such as ms408.com) don't appear to have made it into the Wayback Machine. And "deeplinking" (linking to sites inside a website) into the Wayback Machine is a no-no in the ODP.

Secondly, while the intention of the Open Directory Project is that it should provide a categorized directory of useful resources on a subject, Voynich Manuscript research only rarely works like that. For example, some ODP editors wouldn't even link to the Wikipedia page on their subject because it is a deeplink within another resource (i.e. within Wikipedia itself), as opposed to a user's subsite. So only a tiny handful of sites (such as Rene Zandbergen's exemplary pages on the subject, my Voynich News blog, etc) would satisfy a hardcore ODP editor's criteria for inclusion.

In other words, though I hoped that the ODP section might be the right place to bring some kind of order to the disjointed heap of fragments we call Voynich knowledge, many inside the ODP actively argue that that's not what it's for.

But if the ODP is the wrong answer, what is the right answer?

Having just spent a few days tracking down a long succession of dead links, I think there are two main types of webpage that should somehow be actively preserved: research pages (analyses of features, mainly of Voynichese) and theory/hypothesis pages ("my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine").

And so I've just started up Voynich Research and Voynich Theories (as subsites on GC's Voynich Central website), each of which I plan to maintain as a single index page giving links to (and brief summaries of) all the research papers and webpages placed there. Though the ODP won't allow links to the Wayback Machine, I can put them in here: though my plan (longer term) is to contact the people involved asking for their permission to put an actual copy on the site, which would be a somewhat better answer.

OK, it's not a perfect answer... but it's a start.

How many Voynichologists does it take to change a light bulb?

It's a sad (but true) observation that most webpages (and particularly blog posts) on the VMs are serious, dull, dry, high-minded, conceptual guff, at best offering up a semi-quirky restatement of either the Wikipedia page, Rene Zandbergen's page, or of Gordon Rugg's hypothesis-of-possibility. You would scarce believe, dear reader, what oceans of cack I have to swim through to reach the occasional archipelago of Voynich-related interest... *sigh*

And so it is with great pleasure that I landed upon the shore of this gently satirical review of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Read it and enjoy!

As for the rest of the Voynichian web, it is (sadly) pretty much uniformly humourless, with the joyous exception of the excellent Uncyclopedia Voynich Manuscript entry, which has been heavily updated since I mentioned it last year (though I'm pleased to see the "medieval VCR manual" gag is still there). Recommended!

PS: the answer to the question is (of course) "None, they like being in the dark."

Adam McLean and Voynich baths...

On 12th April 2008, artist and well-respected alchemy expert Adam McLean posted up a fascinating picture of the baths of Pozzuoli he had found from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and commented on its many strong similarities with the Voynich Manuscript's water section. Excellent research, I thought... but how come I hadn't seen it before?

Though Adam didn't mention his source, a little detective work revealed that the image is entitled "Balneum Sulphatara", folio 4 of Valencia Bibl. Universitaria MS 860 (formerly 138). And I had seen it before: an extremely over-exposed black-and-white version appears as plate 62 of C. M. Kauffmann's classic 1959 "The Baths of Pozzuoli: A Study of the Medieval Illuminations of Peter of Eboli's Poems". But really, you'd barely recognize them as the same.

Unusually, Valencia MS 860 has good date and provenance information for it. Kauffman (p.82) says that De Marinis dates it between 1455 and 1458: and that it stayed in the "Aragonese royal library in Naples until the Franco-Spanish conquest of 1501", when it moved to Spain until the present day. Kauffman also asserts that it was derived from the Bodmer (Geneva, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana) De Balneis MS, which he dates to the "third quarter of the fourteenth century", and placed as "Southern Italian".

If you compare the Bodmer Balneum Sulphatara drawing (f.3, Kauffman plate 21) with the Valencia one (f.4, Kauffman plate 62), you can see the reasons why the former was very probably the source of the latter: every figure is reproduced between the two MSS, each with extremely similar size and orientation. Their differences are merely ornamental: the wooden bath sides got upgraded with a fancy fish-like motif in the Valencia MS, while the top edge of the cave has taken on a stone-like 'wolkenband' appearance there.

But the big question: was either of these also a source for the Voynich Manuscript? I've gone through all the plates in Kauffman really closely, and I have to say that on that evidence I really don't think that the water section of the VMs is an enciphered De Balneis. However, I am quite sure that the VMs' author had definitely seen a copy of De Balneis and was influenced by it when constructing his pictures, in the same way that Rene Zandbergen persuasively argues that the author must have seen the manuscript now known as MS Vat. Gr. 1291 before drawing the zodiac section.

In fact, I interpret this in terms of steganography, in that I believe the style used for Vat. Gr. 1291 was appropriated as the cover cipher for the VMs' zodiac section, while the style used for the Bodmer MS and Valencia MS 860 formed the cover cipher for its water section. Whereas the particular drawing similarities between the VMs and Valencia MS 860 simply arose from having been drawn in the same general period: correlation, but not causation.

I should close by noting that Adam McLean made his own in-depth art history study of the Voynich Manuscript, posting his results on the set of pages here. One of the most compelling similarities comes from his comparison of the lozenge-shaped tiles in the picture here: but that's a discussion for another day...

Uptown top (Google) ranking...

Back in the early days of this blog (i.e. last Autumn), Voynich News ranked at about 150th if you did a Google search for "Voynich" - not bad out of 230,000 pages, but certainly with room for improvement. :-)

Earlier this year, it clawed its way up to about 20th, and then last month up to about 12th: it now it appears anywhere between 1st and 11th (!). I don't really have any sensible idea why Google's rankings move around so much: perhaps all the sites are close-to-equally ranked, and the fluctuations arise from a butterfly beating its wings beside an overheated Mountain View server. Yet it seems that this particular butterfly is working especially hard at the moment...

As for the pages that usually rank above Voynich News: well, the Wikipedia entry deserves its place (despite its unbearable focus on the massed ranks of the possible), while I have nothing but praise for Rene Zandbergen's majestic site. But most of the rest of them are starting to look a little bit old and unmaintained: for instance, John Baez's Voynich page dates back to January 2005, while the World Mysteries Voynich page seems essentially unchanged from 2003. Admittedly the Crystalinks VMs page has improved over time, but it is still fairly unhelpful.

I suppose this gets to the core of what annoys me most: there isn't a single Voynich page out there that I would comfortably call "helpful", apart perhaps from the "Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript" blog entry I put up here a while back (and even though this gets to the point and is reasonably brief, it is still twice as large as it really ought to be). To be honest, I'd write a whole book in that style if I could sustain it for more than three pages... but I suspect I probably couldn't. Oh well.

Google, of course, has no obligation to direct people either to helpful or to unhelpful sites: it is merely trying to "Do No Evil" ("Eidolon V"? "Devon Oil"?) in its quirky SMERSH-like way, and if its Byzantine page ranking algorithm somehow manages to get you a bit closer to where you want to go, so much the better. Maybe I should find a way of convincing Google's automated tools to put up some helpful sitelinks (the mini-list of links you sometimes see below search results) for Voynich News: but that's a mountain to climb another day...

Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript...

Every few days, I get asked to recommend a good introduction to the Voynich Manuscript (the 'VMs' for short). But each time this happens, my heart sinks a little: given the size and scope of historical research you'd need to have to properly grasp the subject, it's a bit like being asked to recommend a good 5-page encyclopaedia. Or rather, as none such exists, like being asked to write one.

However, you can describe it in a paragraph: it's a handwritten book that's 230+ pages long, very probably about 500 years old, and filled with strange words and obscure pictures no-one can understand. I call it "a Scooby Doo mystery for grownups", but one where everyone is trying to pin the blame on a different janitor: and so the story loops endlessly, as if on a lost satellite cartoon channel.

For once, the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript page falls well short of being genuinely useful: the VMs is so contested, so politicized, so intensely rubbish that the whole neutral tone Wiki-thing fails to please (I gently satirized this in my VQ questionnaire). Bucketfuls of worthlss opinions, and endless pussyfooting around: throw all that junk away, I say, and start from scratch. *sigh*

But if Wikipedia's faux-scientific neutrality can't get you started, what can? If (like me) you are a fan of Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary" (1911), your ideal introduction to the Voynich Manuscript might well be succinct, partial, and cynical (in fact, almost toxically so). In this vein, I heartily recommend "Folly Follows the Script", an article by Jacques Guy (AKA "Frogguy") in the Times Higher Education supplement from 2004. While ostensibly reviewing Kennedy and Churchill's recent book on the VMs, Guy rips apart a lot of the pretension and falsity that now surrounds the manuscript, in particular Gordon Rugg's much-vaunted (but actually resoundingly hollow) hoax papers. Which is, errrm, nice.

If you prefer lots and lots (and did I say lots?) of data, the best introductory site by miles is Rene Zandbergen's excellent voynich.nu, in particular his "short tour", and the even shorter tour. But frankly, it's hard for most people to care about Newbold, Petersen, Friedman, Strong, Brumbaugh, O'Neill, Feely, Manly, and even John "The Brig" Tiltman unless you've already lurched over the line into Voynich-obsessive mania: none of them could read a word of the VMs, and they're all long dead.

Alternatively, if you prefer a kind of gentle postmodern defeatism, I could happily recommend a very readable article by Lev Grossman called "When Words Fail", which first appeared in Lingua Franca magazine way back in April 1999: sadly, nothing much of substance has changed in the intervening decade (or, indeed, over several preceding decades too).

This might seem a horrible thing to say, given that so much ink has been spilled (and, more recently, so many HTML tags wasted) on the VMs over the last century in the honest pursuit of this wonderful (yet devastatingly cruel) enigma. But we still know next to nothing of any real use: the kind of intensely Warburgian art-historical research I've been slaving over for the last six years seems totally alien to most 'Voynichologists', a title that perpetually hovers too close to David Kahn's Baconian "enigmatologists" (see "The Codebreakers" (1967), pp.878-9), with their "deliriums, the hallucinations of a sick cryptology".

All of which is to say that both cynicism and nihilism are probably good starting points for reading up on the VMs: a century of careless credulity has got us all nowhere. But this is not to say that I am pessimistic about any advances being made. In fact, I would say that "the Devil's in the details" or the alternative "God is in the details" (both of which are sometimes attributed to Aby Warburg!) to flag that, beyond the superficial flurry of foolish and wishful opinions out there, I think there are things we can (and eventually will!) know about the Voynich Manuscript; but that for the moment these remain hidden in its vellum margins.

All of which is another story entirely...

Voynich Manuscript & 42...

I just stumbled upon a French Yahoo Answers page that asks why 42 is the answer. Of course, it's because Douglas Adams (I once met him, he went to the same school as me) thought it was the number with the greatest comedic potential: and possibly even because he half-remembered that John Cleese once thought it was a funny number.

But I digress.

One of the Yahoo answers suggested was that 42 was the number of missing pages in the Voynich Manuscript. Well... according to Rene Zandbergen's splendiferous site, there are probably at least 14 folios missing, which would account for 28 or so missing pages (depending on how wide the folios were): but sorry to say, this is still a fair bit short of 42.

Nice try, though! :-)