According to Stephen Christomalis (who actually features in it), US-based Voynich Manuscript devotees could consider tuning in to the Discovery Channel tonight (5th May 2010 8pm and 11pm) to see the VMs segment on “Weird or What?”, a show which features a smorgasbord of semi-Forteana and rhetorical historical questions, though sadly sans William Shatner (for now):-
Were Ancient Pharaohs Cocaine party animals? Can sea lions sense disaster? A mysterious coded book that has never been cracked. A Mexican tribe who can run hundreds of miles per day – and no one knows how they do it!
So… that would be “(1) no, (2) no, (3) hello, (4) amphetamine quesadillas?” respectively, then. 🙂 However, I wouldn’t worry too much if you miss this “Cocaine Mummies” episode: for one, it’ll be repeated at 2pm on May 16th 2010 – and for two, Googling for it points you to a whole bunch of torrent trackers, so presumably it’ll be fairly easy for non-Americans to catch a glance.
I think that this will probably provide sufficient proof that the VMs has indeed become one of the lowest-hanging fruits on the historical mystery tree: I’ll just be interested to see what the VMs looks like from the programme’s researchers’ point of view. Will they regurgitate a slab of blandly unhelpful Wikipedia nonsense? Will they hype the VMs up into a Terence McKenna hoax conspiracy? Or will they spin their account towards Kennedy & Churchill’s glossolaliac madness? It doesn’t really matter, but it’s always fun to have a bit of a sweepstake going, don’t you think? 🙂
I was generally impressed with the production team (ask me again once I’ve seen the episode and my on-screen time, though). My role was largely to talk about the VM in terms of language, writing systems, and linguistics – I certainly didn’t claim to be an expert on the VM.
Stephen: not long to wait now, but my guess is that the show will try to spin the VMs as some kind of weirdly irrational, von Daniken-y, out-of-place artefact, simply because positing it as a rationally constructed object from the start of the Renaissance isn’t half as much fun. But we shall see! Thanks for commenting! 🙂
I’ve been working on a list of manuscripts for which large prices were paid in the 15th-16th century.
“rationally constructed” (?!) books from the beginning of the Renaissance haven’t rated a mention so far. What we get are “antique” books, or ones purportedly so… but list still in progress, so we shall see.
I mentioned this incident a while ago: here are the details:
son, who inherited it, that Hebrew names were also added” (Blunt & Raphael, op. cit., 15).
Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I to the Ottoman court of Süleyman, attempted to purchase the Anicia codex in 1562 but could not afford the asking price. As he relates at the end of his Turkish Letters (IV, p.243),
“One treasure I left behind in Constantinople, a manuscript of Dioscorides, extremely ancient and written in majuscules, with drawings of the plants and containing also, if I am not mistaken, some fragments of Crateuas and a small treatise on birds. It belongs to a Jew, the son of Hamon, who, while he was still alive, was physician to Soleiman. I should like to have bought it, but the price frightened me; for a hundred ducats was named, a sum which would suit the Emperor’s purse better than mine. I shall not cease to urge the Emperor to ransom so noble an author from such slavery. The manuscript, owing to its age, is in a bad state, being externally so worm-eaten that scarcely any one, if he saw if lying in the road, would bother to pick it up”.
Diane: thanks for passing that on, a nice find! I’d heard the story related third hand elsewhere, but seeing it directly in Busbecq’s (translated) words is still many times better. 🙂
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These 100 ducats for the Juliana Anicia Codex have in the past already been compared to the supposed 600 ducats for the Voynich MS, where the modern values of these two books would be in a rather opposite direction. (I know it’s a matter of taste, but still…)
Anyway, if one reads the Marci letter correctly, it doesn’t really say that the 600 ducats was for the Voynich MS alone. I consider it far more likely taht this was for a bunch of books, of which the Voynich MS was one.
But to get back to the original topic: has anyone seen the programme, and how was it?
Rene: I’ve now seen the programme, and it seemed to focus mainly on Gordon Rugg using “three world-class calligraphers” to prove definitively that people could have faked their own simulation of the VMs some 150 years after it was actually written. For all his cleverness, why he continues to engage in such a full-on exercise in futility escapes me. I’ll probably blog about it later when the nausea has subsided… =:-o
I saw it as well. Was that the actual manuscript they were showing on-screen? Even though I have the images, it was interesting to see how it actually looked. Also: for some reason, I had always pronounced it as Voy-nick, rather than Voy-nitch. Hmm.
But yes, they seemed to be saying that Rugg’s theory explained it all. The Nostradamus and Garden of Eden mentions were odd and seemed out of place as well.
infinitii: I also just saw the show. That was not the actual MS, but they also seem to have made a dummy for the programme. It’s quite a bit too thin, and the wrong pages are next to each other.