Once again, it’s time to roll out and dust off the Cipher Mysteries crystal skull crystal ball (no, I didn’t buy it on eBay, nor did I nick it from the British Museum) to peer dimly ahead to 2010. What will it bring us all?
Of course, 2009’s big news was the radiocarbon dating of four slivers of the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum for the recent Austrian TV documentary, which yielded an oddly early date (1405-1438 at 95% confidence). We’re still waiting for the actual data to get a better feel for the historical reasoning: doubtless there will be more announcements to come during this year (some from the Beinecke Library itself), perhaps as the English version of the documentary edges closer to broadcast. Hence…
Prediction #1: by mid-2010, carefully combining the raw data from the documentary with what we already know about the Voynich Manuscript will move us to an entirely new and unexpected (though no less paradoxical or awkward) mainstream position.
Of course, hard evidence is doubly hard for some to swallow: while behind the scenes, quite a few people are silently beavering away with their own VMs-related stuff. For example, I can’t help but notice Jorge Stolfi pa-/de-trolling the Wikipedia Voynich:Talk page, which rather makes me wonder what he’s up to. Hence…
Prediction #2: throughout 2010, a whole bunch of Voynicheros will exit stage right, the arrival of hard evidence having spoiled their long-running soft evidence gig. At the same time, a whole scrum of other researchers will join in the VMs pool party. The Voynich research landscape will become more overtly historical, less wildly speculative (and about time too).
In 2009, we’ve seen quite a few academics looking at the VMs: but I think it’s fair to say that none to date has fully engaged with the breadth and heterogeneity of the evidence that plagues & intrigues us all. If Lynn Thorndike were alive, I’d be camping outside his office 🙂 but circa 2010 what kind of historian has the breadth and daring to take on the risk of rising to this challenge? Anthony Grafton? Charles Burnett [in 2010]?
Prediction #3: I suspect that late in 2010, we’ll see the arrival of perhaps the first truly heavyweight academic Voynich Manuscript paper for decades. I just can’t shake the intuition that something big is coming this way…
Combine all of the above with the conservative set of analyses carried out by Andreas Sulzer’s team, and I think you get:-
Prediction #4: throughout 2010, the Beinecke Library’s curators will receive many requests for specific art historical forensic tests to be carried out on the VMs, such as multispectral imaging on the marginalia / paints / inks (to try to separate out the different authorial and/or construction layers) and/or vellum DNA analysis (to try to reconstruct the original bifolio grouping). However, they will probably say ‘no’ to all of them (a shame, but there you go).
Ummm… here’s looking forward to 2011, then! 😉
Hello Nick.
Perhaps what we need is not just any crystal ball — but one of the crystals used by John Dee.
Anyways —
With reference to “Prediction #2”: I’d be interested to see what Michelle P. Brown had to say about the Voynich. Her books — “A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600” and “Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts” demonstrate the type of knowledge/background I’d like to see brought to bear on our favorite puzzle.
As to #3 — I don’t think any analysis ( academic or otherwise ) will get much further than those we’ve already seen . . . unless they can either come up with an obvious parallel set of drawings or a consistent method of turning Voynichese into a sensible text.
Cheers!
Ernest: Or a method for turning sensible text into Voynichese!
Hello Nick! As to 3), I repeat my hope that a real, honest-to-goodness expert in Latin paleography will study the VMs! I think someone like that could give us a lot of insight into the true grapheme set and which characteristics are significant and which are not – which would be a huge step forward!
Cheers and Happy New Year to all Voynicheros!
Dennis
What sort of academic would be most qualified to address Voynich?
Dennis: I suspect that even a very good palaeographer may well be unable to help us to a significant degree. Marginalia aside (a puzzle that is largely separate from the mystery of the Voynichese text itself), we already know that the answer is likely to be either (a) a Carolingian minuscule [800-1200, far too early] or (b) the humanist Carolingian revivalist minuscule [1450-1550, a little earlier if Florence], neither of which really square comfortably with the dating [unless it’s from Florence].
Dan: a widely read, insightful, brave one. 🙂
Diane: the reason I stripped the preamble out from the page is because I wanted to restrist the post to your discussion of what the evidence is, rather than encompassing your working hypothesis as well. Part 1b will be posted here soon (plenty of images to HTMLify), have no fear… 🙂 Thanks for the link to the Princeton Islamic herbal, I had a good look though it: Item 10 is a bit reminiscent of f22r (the loop in the roots), Item 55 of f51r (the twist in the roots), while Items 62 and 156 have a slightly Voynichese feel to them. However, I think there’s nothing really substantive that suggests any kind of direct connection between the two: the Islamic herbal has over 500 herbal drawings, so a certain amount of random overlap (shape-wise) is probably inevitable.
Cheers, …Nick Pelling…
Happy New Year, Nick! I don’t have time to dig back through old posts, but I remember significant questions about the very existence of the “humanist hand,” and possibilities that Voynichese might be based on littera batarda, some sort of mixture between the Renaissance revival of Carolingian miniscule (littera antiqua) and medieval “Gothic” (littera moderna.) I know those terms are the reverse of what one would expect, since to us “Gothic” script looks old.
Cheers,
Dennis
Dennis: I’m pretty sure that I’ve got this right, that the ductus etc points to one of two scripts: Carolingian minuscule or humanist minuscule. Medieval Gothic script is a different kind of beasty. 🙂
So many old scripts and dialects to choose from!!
I keep getting drawn to the idea of some kind of langue d’oil, and rummaging thru the web I took a look at this particular one :
http://gmarchal.free.fr/PatoisO1.htm
( Lorrain ) and the words often have double letters and lots of vowels!! ‘Offant’ for example means enfant the ‘offant’ looks a lot like a word in Voynichese that crops up ( eg quire 10 f70V2 from voynichcentral photos). could the ‘capitals’ be a number of letters joined together ( superimposed) to create ‘elle’ ‘il’ ‘les’?Just a thought, you never know.
Another consideration, Nick, you talk about ‘renaissance costume’, what I notice on the nymphs though is how the medieval canons of beauty show up, they aren’t drawn well yet care has been taken to show pink cheeks and lips a lot of fair hair (medieval woman bleached their hair), hair down was only acceptable on ‘maidens’, married women wore their hair up and didn’t show cleavage.
There can’t be a lot of married nymphs in the VMs, then. 🙂
Just to buck the trend, I’m more interested in the ones with clothes on! 😉
Can you point me to an example of ‘humanist miniscule’ on the Net? From the discussion I remember, involving Maurizio Gavioli and others, ‘humanist hand’ existed very briefly. Are we talking about the same thing, eg. Toresella’s ‘humanist hand’?