Klaus Schmeh, a German encryption professional who over the last couple of years has become increasingly fascinated by the cipher mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, has just been interviewed by the sparky skeptics at Righteous Indignation for their Episode #76 – Klaus’ VMs section runs from 25:50 to 45:45, and gives a fairly pragmatic introduction to the Voynich Manuscript. This was prompted by his Voynich talk at the 14th European Skeptics Conference in Budapest earlier this year (2010).
In fact, it’s quite revealing to see how far he has come from a 2008 German skeptic conference he also talked at (discussed here) [where he fell in behind the mainstream 16th century hoax position] and a 2008 article he wrote (which I reviewed here): it’s nice to see that he’s moved from seeing pretty much everything Voynichese as a combination of pseudoscience and pseudohistory to a rather more nuanced (and realistic) position.
But all the same, looking forward, to where should Voynich skepticism go from here? From what we now know, I’d say there are no obvious grounds for a hardcore skeptical position any more – the vellum seems genuinely old, with the ink freshly written on it, and the radiocarbon dating broadly meshing with the kind of evidence I’ve been working on for the last 5+ years, vis-à-vis:
- The ‘4o’ verbose pair’s brief appearance in various Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1456 (see The Curse Of The Voynich pp.175-179)
- The parallel hatching which I suspect pretty much forces a post-1440 date if it was made in Italy, or post-1410 if Germany
- The two 15th century hands in the marginalia which pretty much force a pre-1500 date for the VMs
- Sergio Toresella’s very specific dating claim, based on his lifetime with herbal manuscripts – that it was made in Northern Italy (probably Milan or the Venice region) around 1460
The swallow-tail merlons on the two castle walls (on the nine-rosette page) that Klaus mentioned in the podcast have actually been debated for at least a decade: although these don’t prove that the Voynich Manuscript was constructed in Northern Italy (where they were an unmissable feature of many castles), they clearly do help to shift the balance of probability that way away from Germany (the #2 candidate region).
And I suppose this is where all this is going: by carefully combining all these pieces together, we can now try to think about the Voynich in terms of probabilities. Even if you discount my Antonio Averlino hypothesis, I don’t honestly mind being what I call “the right kind of wrong” – i.e. looking in the right culture, place, and time, but perhaps finding a false positive to match a very specific forensic profile. Just so you know, I’d currently rate the likelihood of the VMs’s origin’s being Northern Italy at ~80%, Savoy ~10%, Germany ~5%, and anywhere else ~5%.
Hence, if someone were to tell me tomorrow that they’d just uncovered a fifteenth century letter clearly describing the Voynich Manuscript as having been written by Giovanni Fontana, Cicco Simonetta, Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, or any one of the hundreds of other desperately clever Northern Italian polymaths who were right there at the birth of the Renaissance, I’d be utterly delighted: for I think that is the cultural milieu linking pretty much all the strands of tangible (as opposed to merely suggestive) evidence to date.
The notions that we know nothing about the VMs and/or that it is somehow destined to be proven a meaningless hoax are not ‘skeptical’ in the true sense of the word: rather, they are postmodernist non-positions, uncritical ‘meh‘s in the face of the interconnected mass of subtle – but nonetheless tangible – historical evidence VMs researchers have carefully accumulated. In the case of the Voynich Manuscript, I think the real “beliefs that are taken for granted by most of the population” at which skeptics should be pointing their weapons of mass deconstruction are not this kind of painstakingly-assembled gear-train, but the widely-disseminated (and utterly fallacious) claim that the VMs is a 16th century hoax for financial gain.
In a way, this would turn Klaus’ own skeptical research chain back on itself – and in so doing would hopefully set him free. “More Schmeh, less meh“, eh? 🙂
I think the VM, far from being a hoax, is a proto-asemic text, and quite possibly the first of its kind. I like to think of it as a test of the relativity of language; it’s an artistic exploration of the limits of written verbal communication. I think that a “hoax” and a “work-of-art” are nebulous terms that are often overlapped and confused. The VM is too strong of a text to be a hoax, and too detailed to be a cipher. It’s art I say!
Michael: though you’ve basically reached a wrong conclusion 🙂 , I think most of the things you in particular see when you look at the VMs are true. Rather, what we are looking at is a cipher system which has been artistically engineered such that its covertext falsely resembles language – and this is the particular quality that it shares with asemic writing. Hence, if you finessed your position to say that ‘the Voynich covertext has all the qualities of modern asemic writing‘, I would find it extraordinarily hard to disagree. If I said that the key quality linking the two is ‘artistically engineered’, would you disagree? 🙂
* A mi parecer las posibilidades de que el texto sea germánico, son bastante nulas. Pues creo que la dificultad de interpretar el manuscrito es debido a las diferencias culturales entre los criptógrafos y el escritos del Voynich. Todos ellos en general, de cultura anglosajona y germánica.
Además de ello, las culturas del mediterráneo disponían de mayor conocimiento matemático y criptográfico, en especial las zonas que convergían diferentes religiones y formas de vida. Como por ejemplo en el sur de Italia, gran parte de la península ibérica, mar egeo, los balcanes…
Algunos de estos lugares se mezclaban la cultura cristiana, musulmana y hebrea, de forma pacifica y fusionándose. Creando fenómenos sociales que no podemos entender con claridad, que generan nuevos conceptos de pensamiento imposible de comprender en nuestro tiempo (salvo raras excepciones).
Ejemplos de ellos, son la sociedad en la Corona de Aragón, los sefardíes, el mozárabe…
* In my opinion the chances that the text is Germanic, are pretty nil. Well, I think the difficulty of interpreting the manuscript is due to cultural differences between cryptographers and the writings of the Voynich. All in general, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic culture.
Moreover, the Mediterranean cultures possessed more knowledge of mathematics and cryptography, especially areas converging different religions and lifestyles. As for example in southern Italy, much of the Iberian Peninsula, Aegean Sea, the Balkans …
Some of these places were mixed Christian culture, Muslim and Jewish, so peaceful and merging. Creating social phenomena can not be clearly understood that generate new concepts of thought impossible to understand in our time (with rare exceptions).
Examples of them are the public in the Crown of Aragon, the Sephardim, the Mozarabic …
I agree. It is definitely artistically engineered writing system of some kind. Do you think the VM could have been written by a woman?
Michael: yes, as long as she was right-handed. 🙂
Thanks for mentioning my interview. Of course, I don’t agree with all your comments.
First of all, I still believe that many theories surrounding the VM are pseudoscientific. Surely, my opinion is now a little more nuanced than years ago, but it hasn’t changed fundamentally.
>I’d say there are no obvious grounds
>for a hardcore skeptical position any more
Sorry, but this is nonsense. In my view there is always grounds for a skeptical position in any question. As it seems you misunderstand the word “skeptic”. Being skeptic (in the sense the skeptic community understands it) means using scientific methods, requiring proofs, and applying Occam’s law. Being a skeptic does NOT necessarily mean that one considers the VM a hoax or a forgery. Although I am a skeptic I have accepted that the VM is not a forgery created in Voynich’s time. I used to consider this a plausible hypothesis (not a fact), but I changed my mind because there is evidence that the VM is several centuries old. My favourite hypothesis (I don’t say it’s a fact) is and has been for a long time that the VM was produced 500 years ago as a meaningless fake to sell it for much money to a rich person. Using Occam’s law and looking on what is proved this hypothesis looks much more plausible to me than any other. Of course, I will immediately change my mind, if there is reason to do so. However, speculation and wishful thinking are no reasons for me.
I don’t think it’s a meaningless fake. It is too much work to create a book like it for it to be a fake. It’s art, and art is the spirit of existence. One plausible meaning, when looking back into history, is the possibility that the VM could be connected to the European witch hysteria ,either as an artifact to contain information for the survival of a culture that was being stamped out very violently, or conversely as a document that may have aided in witch persecution. Granted it would probably have become more well known earlier if the latter were true. Now I just need the evidence!
Klaus: thanks for dropping by, well done on the interview! In reply to your comments…
Firstly, there is no doubt that many (if not most) theories surrounding the VMs are indeed pseudoscientific/pseudohistoric, if not outright wishful nonsense: but I argue that what I call the ‘hardcore skeptical position’ – that, specifically because of the lack of proper evidence, all Voynich theories are necessarily pseudoscientific / pseudohistoric – is not really tenable any more, because we do now have some reasonably solid data to work with. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I got the strong impression that over the last two years your position has arced from [16th century hoax advocate] –> [hardcore skeptic] –> [nuanced skeptic], and this is what informed my post.
Furthermore, there are several key points about skepticism vis-a-vis the Voynich that you seem not to be grasping:
* You can’t be using Occam’s Razor, because only one current Voynich hypothesis comes even remotely close to fitting the evidence parsimoniously, and you seem happy to write Averlino off. 🙂
* Seriously, though, your favourite Voynich hypothesis (the 500-year-old hoax) is an elegant, parsimonious explanation that has been widely promoted and believed – but in light of the scientific and historical data available to us, it just stinks. When will you be ready to apply your skeptical machinery to that mainstream nonsense? 🙁
* I’m a great fan of scientific methods, but as applied to the VMs to date these have yet to produce anything beyond widening the circle of confusion around it. Surely this is a skeptical paradox that should be exercising your mind more?
* Basically, I can’t help but think that skepticism without a matching constructive research programme – i.e. how you propose to determine the veridicality of the competing hypotheses – is just vague semantic posturing. The VMs mailing list has long foundered because some recent list members insist on fighting to the death for the right of elegant (but only faintly possible) hypotheses to be kept alive: kill them all, I say (the wobbly theories, that is, not the list members). Unless skeptics can contribute positively to the debate by suggesting ways in which competing (but bad) hypotheses can be actively killed, a stony Wittgensteinian silence would probably be a more appropriate level of engagement.
The other side of all this is that skepticism sees itself as a way of pitting hypotheses against each other, in a kind of parsimonious (and hopefully genuinely scientific) beauty contest. But this is uninformed by the whole process of intellectual history, which instead seeks to find intellectually sympathetic syntheses of hypotheses that continue to meet the constraints of the evidence. In the case of the Averlino hypothesis vs the hoax hypothesis, I’ve gone to vast lengths to argue how I think (from codicological evidence) that the ‘alpha’ [original] state of the VMs was particularly plain, if not downright ugly, and how someone (Jorge Stolfi’s heavy painter) inexpertly daubed paint to it late in its existence – probably not far from 1600 or so – with the likely idea of dressing it up for a sale (ultimately to Rudolf II). So there you have an idea of how extraordinarily similar two different hypotheses can be with respect to the same part of the evidence. But if you don’t look at all the detail, it’s easy to misrepresent complex, well-formed hypotheses by extracting only a subset of pieces from them and presenting them as the whole story.
Hence the biggest criticism of skepticism is that it doesn’t really understand the historical research process, which involves reading a vast amount of data around any given subject to place all the threads and ideas in an hypothesis in proper context. Instead, it treats hypotheses as simple-minded summaries – like Harvard MBA case studies – that can encapsulate everything relevant about an argument, without having to do the hard work of engaging with them. My book covers more than 200 pages of dense argument and historical context culled from hundreds of sources and statistical studies, placing its logical reasoning right on the surface: I worked hard to try to actively disprove any part of it prior to publication, but was not able to. Yet for all that, it sits on Internet lists besides all the nonsensical / satirical / mad (UFOs, Lovecraftian wannabes, xkcd-a-like) Voynich theories, deftly summarized in a couple of lines of text.
I find it hugely ironic that you decry “speculation and wishful thinking”, yet find the 16th century hoax hypothesis appealing – even by 1930, John Manly had pointed out that most of the Voynich’s marginalia was written in fifteenth century hands (which would seem to wipe out any possibility of a late 16th century hoax), so it’s not really as if much of the evidence I rely on is hugely new. So if you want to be properly skeptical about the VMs, I’d advise putting your own beliefs and instincts under the microscope of skepticism and see what you find!
The hard evidence all seems to point to the creation of the manuscript early in the 15thC. I’m a little less inclined to suppose a style of writing tells us definitely where a manuscript was manufactured, since it was about this time that we see the rise of the professional, rather than monastic scribe and as others have pointed out, the professionals could turn out works in the same year, working in the same city, but employing half-a-dozen different ‘hands’.
You’ll want an exemplary reference for that, I suppose. Offhand, Chris Harmel’s book mentions this. Probably around pages 12-17. I’m guessing, though. It’s hols and I’m no where near a copy of his book at the moment.
*hang on…*
Its his //A History of Illuminated Manuscripts// that I’m thinking of. (Phaidon, 1997).
Diane: Sergio Toresella’s experience arises from having travelled the world for decades to examine first-hand just about every pre-1500 herbal manuscript possible – so it’s about as empirically-based an opinion as you can ask for. Apart from that, I’d (of course) agree with you. 😉
First of all: I consider the hoax hypothesis the most plausible one, but I don’t stick tot he 16th century. In my Telepolis article I wrote probably between 1450 and 1520 and almost safely between 1350 and 1650. Meanwhile I would narrow this estimate to roughly the first half of the 15th century. I also used to consider a 20th century forgery possible. If you call this a „hardcode skeptic position“, you are right: there is no reason for it any more. However, I use the word skeptic in a different sense.
>I’m a great fan of scientific methods, but
Are you saying: „If scientific methods don’t bring us further, we should use non-scientific ones“? I don’t agree. As scientific research hasn’t answered most of our questions, we have to accept that these questions are still open. There is enough room for more scientific work, maybe some of the questions will be answered in future. Which non-scientific methods should we apply? Stating hypotheses without trying to proof or disproof them? Ignoring Occam’s Razor (every hypothesis is equally valid, no matter how unlikely and how far away from established knowledge it is)?
>You can’t be using Occam’s Razor
I do think that Occam’s Razor is applicable. Of course not in the hard sense (only the most likely hypothesis is accepted), but in a constructive sense: The most likely hypothesis is prefered to the second most likely one and so on. Each time new evidence comes up, the ranking may change (and of course it is not always possible to determine the probability in an objective way). Without Occam’s Razor we are lost in an abundance of theories. Was the VM written by an alien? Have I written it in my last life? In my view it is always important to check the probability of a claim.
>Seriously, though, your favourite Voynich
>hypothesis (the 500-year-old hoax) is an elegant,
>parsimonious explanation that has been widely
>promoted and believed – but in light of the
>scientific and historical data available to us, it
>just stinks.
This is, what we need to discuss. I prefer the 15th century hoax theory for the following reasons:
– None of the theories explaining the purpose oft he VM sounds plausible to me. So, I consider it the most probable explanation that it didn’t have one (except for creating a mystery).
– None of the explanions for the illustrations sounds plausible to me. I consider it the most probable explanation that they only had the purpose to make the VM look more mysterious.
If the VM is a hoax, I nconsider it probable that it has no meaningful content. This view is backed by the fact that nobody has decrypted the text so far (which is really unusual for a 15th century cryptogram with such an amount of material for analysis).
What are the arguments against my view?
– The structure of the text. As a cryptologist I know that it is far from trivial to produce equally distributed ranmdom text, but as we know this one is not equally distributed. Was it impossible to produce such text in the 15th century? There are only very few examinations on this question. I wouldn’t consider it impossible.
– Nobody would invest so much effort in a hoax. I don’t agree. There have been even more elaborate forgeries in history. The VM was certainly worth the effort, if somebody paid a high price for it.
Is my reasoning wrong? I am open for discussions. However, if we don’t talk about plausibility and probability, I don’t think such a discussion is very helpful.
Klaus: thanks for another detailed response, much appreciated!
Firstly, for me a “hardcore Voynich skeptic” is simply someone who judges the available evidence to be not strong enough to build any hypotheses of workable complexity upon – I tried to make this clear in my previous comment, sorry if it still wasn’t clear enough.
Secondly, I think the unhelpfulness of scientific methods as applied to the VMs is most definitely not a call for non-scientific methods, but rather a call to adventure for intrigued skeptics (such as yourself) to explore why this should paradoxically have proven to be the case… and what we can do to reverse this curious tide.
Thirdly, I’m currently preparing a post on the history of randomly generated texts – this should provide a pretty clear picture of the overwhelming lack of such objects pre-1650. As such, it casts a long shadow of doubt over both 16th and 15th century generative hoax claims for the VMs. But more on that shortly…
Finally, I’m somewhat surprised that you basically consider my own hypothesis so unworthy of discussion – that you instead prefer to conclude that the VMs is probably a hoax made for unknown purposes by unknown people using unknown constructional techniques at an unknown time & place. I’m also somewhat doubtful of your overall argument (that if we don’t as yet have a plausible explanation proposed for the VMs, then it probably didn’t have a purpose or explanation beyond pure mystification-just-for-the-sake-of-it). Is this reasoning honestly skeptical, or are you just using skepticism to back up your initial unsupported instincts about the VMs?
* “Por mis resultados obtenidos, no creo que sea una falsificación, y posiblemente otros investigadores pueden decir lo mismo.
Que motivos? No puedo explicarlos en público… pues como investigador me interesa obtener un resultado definitivo, para conseguir el prestigio de resolver el manuscrito.
Puedo decir que tengo un sistema criptográfico con los mismos resultados del manuscrito, con todavía algunas incoherencias.
Pero hasta que no lo finalice no diré nada, no quiero que alguien se me avance.”
Con este planteamiento egoísta, lógico y muy humano, la mayoría de investigadores solo aportan al publico, datos sin ningún valor o que no llegan a ningún camino.
Pero tienen de tener presente que irracional: pensar que el libro es una falsificación como creer que es un libro con significado, ambos resultados todavía no se han demostrado.
Decir que: El fracaso de las anteriores investigaciones es razón para pensar que es una falsificación… es una falacia.
* “For my results, I do not think it is a forgery, and possibly other researchers can say the same.
What reasons? I can not explain in public … as a researcher because I am interested in obtaining a definitive result, to secure the prestige of resolving the manuscript.
I can say I have a cryptographic system with the same results of the manuscript, with still some inconsistencies.
But until it is complete I will not say anything, do not want someone to feed me. ”
This selfish approach, logical and very human, most researchers only provide the public, or worthless data that do not reach any way.
But they have to keep in mind that irrational to think that the book is a fake as believing that it is a meaningful book, both results have not yet been demonstrated.
Say that: The failure of previous investigations is reason to think it’s a fake … is a fallacy.
I am rather troubled by the way arguments about one of the manuscripts component elements are being treated as if they necessarily applied to one or more other such elements. If one found a copy of the Gospels written in code, in a Turkish hand of the thirteenth-century, it still wouldn’t make the material, or proper date of the content either thirteenth-century in date, nor Turkish in origin…. not even if it were filled with accompanying illustrations which also found their closest comparisons in thirteenth-century Turkey.
What can be said about the manuscript-as-object is that it is of early fifteenth-century date. That tells us nothing except these sheets of parchment were made, and inscribed, at that time.
To accept a fifteenth century date for the making and inscription of the manuscript is not to offer any proof at all that the matter copied is of fifteenth century, nor of European origin.
In the same way, any theory developed by close consideration of the imagery cannot be simply transferred to the written text as if the one proved the other. Again, one may find a fifteenth century copy of the Psalms in which every illustration refers to contemporary life in 15thC Europe… but to argue a fifteenth century origin for the matter of the written text, simply from knowledge of the imagery and style of hand-writing, would lead to very wrong conclusions.
You cannot determine the course of human history and behaviour by logic, which is why the fashionable definition of the skeptic – as a ‘logical, scientific’ type – so often fails to show any relevance in disciplines which consider the range, and development, of human societies. We may be sociable creatures, but humanity has rarely shown, en masse, any capacity for rational action.
So again, even granted that the material of the ms is early 15thC., and that the handwriting is of a style common in northern Italy at that time, and that (as I agree) the work is herbal in style…
We are still no closer to knowing the nature, or origin of what may be contained in the written text.
We can number-crunch all we like, and theorise about whether or not the text is written in cipher – but all we know surely is that the cipher cannot be in a style later than the fabric of the manuscript: which is early 15thC.
Since I simply cannot imagine any monarch (even one as foolish as rudolph II) paying for a mere 15thC work an amount twice the phenomenal sum paid for the Vienna Dioscorides, I am strongly inclined to believe that even if Beinecke 408 is a work produced in northern italy, in the 15thC, its content was not.
As some may know, I am of the view that the imagery in it is appropriate to the hellenistic environment, and to a time not later than about the 3rdC ce.
But I live on the fringe of these studies, and have little involvement in the study of the Voynich’s script.
Diane: logically, Rene Zandbergen’s argument that the VMs’ zodiac nymphs appear to have been directly inspired by Vat Gr 1291 suggests another dating restriction – that because Vat Gr 1291 was made ~770 CE but only surfaced in Brescia in mid-15th century (it has a date of 1465 in the front, but was apparently first owned by a Bishop of Brescia not earlier than 1457), both prior dates and most intermediate dates could be hard to sustain. Just so you know!
http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/byzs.1978.71.1.41
http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/byzs.1985.78.2.355
http://www.voynich.nu/extra/vatg1291.html
http://www.voynich.net/Arch/2002/10/msg00057.html
>Secondly, I think the unhelpfulness of scientific methods as applied to the VMs
>is most definitely not a call for non-scientific methods
I agree. Of course we have to ask ourselves, why scientific methods have not been too successful so far. One might simply be that there is not enough evidence. This is not unusual. There are nearly infinitely many historical questions we can’t answer for this reason.
>Thirdly, I’m currently preparing a post on the history of randomly generated texts
This sounds like a very interesting and helpful work. I am looking forward to it.
>Finally, I’m somewhat surprised that you basically consider my own hypothesis
>so unworthy of discussion
Okay, maybe I should publish a more detailed analysis oft he Averlino hypothesis in the near future. I don’t want to promise anything, but if I find the time, …
>I’m also somewhat doubtful of your overall argument (that if we don’t as yet have a
>plausible explanation proposed for the VMs, then it probably didn’t have a purpose or
>explanation beyond pure mystification-just-for-the-sake-of-it). Is this reasoning honestly
>skeptical, or are you just using skepticism to back up your initial unsupported instincts about
>the VMs?
The question is: What is more likely? 1) The VM has a purpose nobody has discovered yet. 2) The VM has only the purpose of being a mystery. In my view 2) is a lot more likely. There are not too many potential purposes a book like the VM can have, and so far none of the published ones sounds really convincing to me. On the other hand, it is not uncommon that somebody creates something just to sell it as old and rare.
Hi Nick.
When the manuscript is written. Lazy John. And the name manuscript gold mud.
What else are you looking for?
Nick,
Sorry about the late response. The close proximity in dating means that we can only say that the Vms and Vat Gr 1291 were produced within a fairly short time of each other. The content of Gr 1291 is, of course, Hellenistic.
Stylistically (as it happens) the way the nymphs appear in Gr1291 is quite distinct from that of the Vms, which I think reflects a closer adherence to materials of that [Ptolemaic] era.
I’m more and more inclined to wonder about the ‘cache’ (for want of a better term) which turned up the Tabula Peutingeriana, which evidently also first [re-] appears about this time.
re:
“Rene Zandbergen’s argument that the VMs’ zodiac nymphs appear to have been directly inspired by Vat Gr 1291 suggests..”
That there are similarities between the two manuscripts does not prove any direct connection between them, nor that one has descended from the same source as the other.. only that both reference a similar – earlier – genre, which in this case is that of the pre-Christian, Greek-influenced world. Vat.Lat.Grec 1291 includes, for example, the signature ‘crown’ of Helios/Apollo which we find on Hellenistic coins made in Rhodes,where the Vms contains imagery of the sun which includes a false beard: also found in Carian centres, but known as a motif of Egypt, Phoenicia and Arabia. Examples pre-date even those Rhodian coins. So, with all – and deep – respect to Rene, that analogy doesn’t work so precisely.