Much as you’d expect, YouTube user weasel6666 (not me, not even slightly!) has uploaded WAGtv’s “Ancient X-Files” Series 2 Episode 4 “Sodom and Gomorrah” episode that aired on National Geographic UK only a couple of days ago. If you fast forward to 22:00, you can see the Voynich Manuscript half, which is loosely based on reprising the research I did for my 2006 book “The Curse of the Voynich” (copies still available, very reasonable postage rates, etc).
Even if you’re one of the many who don’t agree with my art history conclusions (but given that you’ll all get there in the end, I’m cool with that 🙂 ), enjoy the historical ride to Venice and Milan, and have a look-see at all the fabulous things I was able to get to for the first time, thanks to the magic of having a film crew filming my every damn move for a week. 🙂
I think it’s fair to say that the WAG team recorded enough footage for a 2-hour special and then tried to edit it down into a 22 minute half-episode slot: which in a curious way is a fair representation of my book, which similarly should probably have worked through its material at a far more leisurely pace (say, over 500 pages) than jammed into 230 pages.
But all the same… how was it for you? Leave your comments below…
Nice piece of work Nick, well worth watching.
Just watched it! Fascinating.
You may like to know, as an aside, you have an avid follower on the borders of Burma.
Bron
Fascinating.
Good show! Ekshuly, I was able to understand your Italian friends dialogue more than yours….stiff upper lip and all that… WHERE did they get those huge books that had the Voynich pages enlarged to six or times their actual size?
Ennyway, I was fascinated with the glass-blowing demo (as well as with the S & G segment’s discussion of the “glaze” on pottery fragments). I recently received a necklace with a pendant of clear blue glass that has a double row of tiny “silver” bubbles within. We have several blown glass gallery/shops within a 50 mile radius. Tell your friends “thanks for the show”! I, for one, would not have been able to see it at all if it hadn’t been for your presentation, here!
%-)
I have been following your website for a while, and I find ciphers really interesting. Imagine my surprise when I saw you in the documentary! I was like hey, I know that guy!! I’ve only seen your face on a little icon on this blog, but I remembered how much awesome information you had on your site about the Voynich Manuscript and looks like I was right 😀 I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how much sense your theory made, compared to some of the other ones out there it makes the most sense to me right now. My only disappointment was that they didn’t at least devote a whole episode to discussing it.. there is so much interesting material they they could have easily ran a full episode or made a special out of it. Voynich deserves an episode all it’s own, not being tacked to the end of Sodom and Gomorrah.
PS: When will you finally unravel your #1 mystery? I am excited to see what might be more mysterious than the Voynich Codex.
Julie: the #1 cipher mystery is something I originally thought would take a couple of weeks to put together a decent page on, but – frustratingly – the more I put into to it, the bigger it seems to get. And what’s worse, I’ve recently ended up looking at something that’s potentially an even bigger cipher mystery story, which would mean the Voynich Manuscript would get pushed down to #3. Now, a list where you can’t reveal the top two items isn’t much of a list… but sadly that’s where things are pretty much at right now. 🙁
Of course, in an ideal world I’d have the time and money to make films and books about such extraordinary things: but sadly my riches are in neither of these. So I guess I’ll just have to ask for your patience as I roll them out somewhat more slowly than we would both like. 🙂
Tony, Bron, Ken, Bobbi, Julie: thanks for your comments, I’m glad you all enjoyed the show, even if at 22 minutes it was somewhat shorter than anyone would really like. Oh well! 🙂
Nick:
When I first signed on to this page, I was not aware that you had visited Naples the year before. So, here I am, some many miles down the coast (from Frascati and the Lakes) roaming the Volsci Mountains to visit the one or two Benedictine scriptoriums (BESIDES Monte Cassino) where I have found the script identical to the “Voynich” writing. So, who is catching up with whom?
BIG grin! bdid1dr
Bobbi: not sure where you got the idea from, but I’ve never actually been to Naples. Enjoy your Italian adventure, good luck finding things that catch your interest. 🙂
Hi Nick,
my response of yesterday seems to have vanished in the depths of the net. I enjoyed watching the film, and it must have been a great trip. What I liked best was the comparison of the Pharma jar with the Venetian glass. Too bad we didn’t get a year or range of years on that type of design…
Overall, indeed, well worth watching,
Rene
So, where was your portion of the NatGeo special filmed?
Ennyway, I’ve found an excellent website for a pictorial history of Rome and the Papacy. There is brief mention of Rudolph II, the Aldobrandini/papal palaces, gardens, and works of art. If you and your readers would like to see some very strange artwork and garden designs, check it out:
An Abridged History of Rome – Part III-IV
http://www.romeartlover.it/Storia22.html
Eh, Bobbi, ask a stupid question, get an answer you deserve: Thanks for your very polite answer! Venice, Milan! Ennyway, check out the very interesting link I just posted. Cupids, eight-pointed stars, grotesque garden grottos……and Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati.
Rene: basically… not before 1450, and probably not after 1550 (I’m pretty sure). But you knew I was going to say that! 🙂
Hey Nick, just watched the show here in Brazil. I am now obsessed about the manuscript. I’m trying to get your book to read. P.S.: post more stuff on twitter.
have you noticed that there are many hexagram stars like the “star of David” on the manuscript? (well, of course you have…) Isn’t that weird? Were was the book first found? Any correlation?…
Gone from YouTube though it may be, this episode shall forever live on at: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:f5db18f1c07f48a653ecd4c4eae211e8fd40c997
Thanks for being awesome, Nick!
Another Voynich documentary:
http://www.bitchute.com/video/leGdBJsr0IfR
It was a bit like the National Geographic documentary with Rene it in as it went through a list of theories. (And, yes, your favourite Edith Sherwood is there again with Mr. Da Vinci.)
I can’t say I learnt anything of interest from it, except I was intrigued by a comment on the humanistic handwriting. The implication seemed to be that the handwriting was more consistent with the manuscript being Italian as apparently Gothic writing was more common in the rest of Europe. I do remember when Professor Harvey, he of Medieval Maps fame, looked at the manuscript when I met him he guessed straightaway that it was Northern Italian.
Mark Knowles: what a load of old tosh! 42 wretched minutes of my life lost, and for absolutely nothing. What did anyone watching that actually learn, apart from the fact that Laurence Fishburne has a great suit? Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves, what useless uninformative nonsense.
Oh yeah, and it gave an airing to the modern-day Voynich chestnut that when the radiocarbon dating pointed to the 15th century, everyone was surprised. Really? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Idiots.
Nick – I didn’t see the programme but if for the commentator’s ‘everyone’ you add an implied “…. who’s anyone” my tally of the individuals (the not-everyones) who got that right consists of Kraus and unnamed specialists in the 1950s/60, and more recently but before the radiocarbon dating was done – Philip Neal, Patrick Lockerby, Edith Sherwood, you and me. Does that match your recollection?
@Nick
You write “42 miserable minutes of my life lost”.
Since you also write about it, it is 45 miserable minutes!
If you answer me now, we can make it 50. 🙂
Nick: I, now, feel a little guilty for wasting your time, by referring to the documentary, although I did say that I learnt very little of interest from it.
I only mentioned the writing style as I was wondering if the Voynich writing style was more in keeping with Northern Italy than other parts of Europe at the time to which it has been carbon dated or whether at that time it was widespread throughout Europe and on that basis no more likely to be from Northern Italy than from another part of Europe. In the documentary it is pointed to this reason as a point in favour of Da Vinci, though obviously, as you well know, there are very many reasons against him.
My favourite Voynich documentary is the BBC Four one from 2002, I think. The documentary that you did about your Averlino theory is also interesting.
However a lot of the documentaries about the Voynich seemed to be focused on sensationalism, dumbed down and uninformative; these are the typical problems with Voynich documentaries. Because there is a limited amount known for certain about the Voynich there seems to be a tendency to fill the documentary with different theories, though usually most of these theories are shown to be wrong or unlikely by the end of the documentary. Why go through describing theories that you are ultimately going to dismiss? The National Geographic documentary dominated by Rene Z should have started with the carbon dating, not ended with it, wasting people time talking about Edward Kelly etc. just to say that those theories were wrong.
There are points of consensus or widely held opinions that could be discussed. There are lots of things that can be discussed entropy, images found more amongst Germanic or Italian manuscripts of the time, other statistical features. If Voynich researchers were to produce a broadly speaking consensual script for a TV documentary they could come up with something much better. However a more serious documentary may be deemed to be less entertaining to the lay public. Anyway who were half the people commenting on the Voynich in that documentary? I didn’t recognise most of them. One thing that was new to me in the documentary is, I think, it was the first time that I saw Lisa Fagin Davis’s eyes, as she normally wears dark glasses, I am not sure if this is down to a specific problem with her vision, though she has perfectly nice looking eyes.
Mark Knowles: please don’t feel bad about passing on a link to that documentary, I had actually been looking forward to it – it was hardly any fault of yours that it stank the room out. =:-o
In the end, what it mainly reminded me of was why I stopped maintaining my list of fruitless Voynich theories so many years ago: because they tell us more about folly than about wisdom. I’m not sure any part of the documentary landed on what you might call “the wisdom side of the line”.
Yes, Lisa does indeed have an eye condition.
So I looked at that video. Which gave a message to our friend Mark Knowles. And here I can write to you that it’s a very weak video. The so-called: Great Poverty. Poverty. Great uselessness.
Where did Lisa pick up that Janet Yellen twang, surely not during her own time at Brown. Although does not come across so well on air her eyes show a degree of clarity not generally noted in many of the Voynich stamp. I saw the doco and was not overly impressed though I shd say that it may have entertained viewers not up to speed on the whole load of not so ancient VM cobblers. I confess to missing the segment on Elizabethan charlatan emissary Edward Kelly nor, come to think of it, any mention of Rene Z. man at the centre of the C14 dating surprise outcome.
only Morpheus is good in that video.
Josef: yet none of the theories were The One. 😉
Amen. 😉 Was the video at least funny?
Darius: no. It wasn’t even tragically tragic, or comically tragic. It was like a compilation of all the bits Shatner didn’t want. I mean, I’m sure Erich Von Daniken’s family love him dearly but…
I daresay the video was made for the ‘world at large’ and not for the select readership of this rather opinionated forum. Or any other for that matter.
Rene: if the world at large is happy with colour-by-number claptrap like that, then we may as well all give up now, opinion or no opinion. 🙁
It’s an interesting question which is the more base – deliberately to mislead those who know no better, or to insult those who do.
Nick: I think the problem is trying to be populist and so going for a mass audience who are attracted to a sensationalist theory. I mean incorporating the “stranded alien” theory was a particularly low point and really cemented the idea that it wasn’t a serious documentary. I think often documentaries, particularly the American documentaries(I don’t have anything against Americans), that are very commercially focused, try to get as many eyeballs as they can and so opt for the lowest common denominator. The BBC, used to, I don’t know if they still do, aim to make more highbrow serious documentaries. Now, I am not saying the BBC Four documentary was wonderful, but I think they tried a bit harder to make a serious documentary on the Voynich given the year was 2002.
Anyway I don’t expect to learn much from a Voynich documentary. Unless the documentary contains a new revelation, kept under wraps, about the Voynich I am sure you would already be aware of any details it includes.
I suppose the real question is what kind of audience and what kind of interest it generates from the public; in that respect it was negligent. Did it encourage the next generation of serious researchers or the next generation of kooks?
Mark Knowles: I think it was an insincere presentation, insofar as it picked “big ticket” theories (Roger Bacon, alien, Leonardo) that tell you more about the the theorist than the object itself.
I don’t really think it encouraged anyone to do anything, except maybe take the blue pill. 😉
Mark, Nick,
To cheer you up, as it did me, I recommend instead of the blue pill, you try Irving Finkel, of the British Museum, on the subject of documentaries. Best start around 16:30 for a bit of the backstory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfadDEZdSoQ
Enjoy
I don’t expect anything revolutionary new from this kind of documentaries anyway…
As for me, I like much more to discuss very concrete topics in detail: distribution figures, grammars, narration in relation to images, lexicographic and linguistic themes (in which languages participle constructions are expressed simple by infinitives, in which imperative forms, is flexion a topic – seeing VMS for the first time I asked myself, where is the word ending diversity needed for flexion in ‘European’ languages. Germanic languages don’t have a vary developed flexion, English even more limited than German, but flexion should definitely occur in the endings, etc.).