While accidentally reading John Grisham’s “Theodore Boone” the other day, what struck me the most was the sheer laziness of the characterization. In particular, Boone’s uncle came across to me a paint-by-numbers Donald Sutherland part – the whole failed-lawyer-looking-for-redemption-through-a-younger-man’s-action thing, if you remember Time To Kill. Kind of set my teeth on edge right from near the start: not good, not good at all.
Similarly, the moment that the female lead in Russell Blake’s The Voynich Cypher appears wearing a “skin-tight black jumpsuit crafted from suede that left little to the imagination and calf-height black leather boots boasting four-inch heels” was the precise moment that the author left me behind. It’s not exaggerated, it’s not comic, it’s just lame, big-stylee. It’s not even Angelina Jolie (who would be too tall for the part).
Don’t get me wrong, I like independent writing and independent publishing: but there’s only so heavy a storm of genre clichés I can weather before I just want to shut the door on the lot of them. And on those terms, this was a perfect storm.
Yet even though other writers seem hugely comfortable with The Good Conspiracy Vs The Bad Conspiracy plot structure virtually all such modern cipher thrillers seem to roll out, here it’s handled without much finesse. In fact, if I were to say that it came across to me as a kind of Poundland remake of The Da Vinci Code with the Voynich Manuscript spliced in awkwardly, rest assured that that wouldn’t be giving away the plot.
As far as the writing goes, only one line stands out in the whole book (a bakery-related semi-gag on p.230, *sigh*), which quickly turns out to be no more than a clumsy artifice for introducing the young-sexy-woman-gets-it-on-with-the-older-man-despite-their-daunting-age-gap cliché. How many times have I read that? More to the point, how many more times will I have to endure it?
Sure, you might possibly like The Voynich Cypher, it’s certainly a quick’n’easy read… but personally, I just didn’t get it. Then again, I thought Fifty Shades of Whatever was, ummm, pants, so what do I know? 🙂
As long as you don’t get sucked into Michael Baigent’s book on Mary Magdalene’s blood-line……….
AND don’t trust every citation to the National Library of France (in Paris). That very much esteemed institution inadvertently validated a con man’s “ancient manuscript” submission to their library.
Wonder no more why I call myself “bdid1dr” !
Here are two more books that deserve to be read by any generation of readers who are interested in English history:
A novel (which the writer has meticulously cited historic events/people):
Portrait of an Unknown Woman
by Vanora Bennett
The second book, NON-fiction, written by a writer who invested several hundred thousand dollars of her own money (as soon as the material became available after the hundred-year-case history and files became available to researchers) :
“Portrait of a Killer – Jack The Ripper Case Closed”
Writer, Patricia Cornwell, has also written novels which titles tell you just where she was writing about. So, check ’em out if you’re so inclined.
One to add to your list of Rudolf-era codes and ciphers, if you don’t happen to have it already, Nick.
A cipher given to [two Jesuits] Campion and Parsons provided the Queen of England, the Queen of Scotland, Father General, William Allen, the Rector of the English College (Rome), Parsons, Campion, the English College (Rome), and Society of Jesus, with specific code-names resembling Greek letters. A simple numerical code allowed others to be mentioned, but the absence of names for James of Scotland, the Spanish am bassador, Duke of Anjou, etc., suggests that the code’s framers did not think that they would play a prominent role in any correspondence.
Subsequent ciphers,e.g., those between Parsons and George Gilbert (c.1582), William Crichton, Parsons and Claud Mattheau, had specific code-names or numbers for principal political and ecclesiastical figures in England, Scotland, France, and the Low Countries. Jesuits in England would not need more detailed ciphers because they were not news-gatherers or diplomatic couriers for ambassadors and kings.(p.210)
From
Thomas M. McCoog, ‘The English Jesuit Mission and the French Match, 1579-1581’, The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 185-213
Into the fifth year, I begin to think you may be right, Nick, about the text being divorced from the imagery.
The sort of matter that is in the imagery is, as far as I can see, so intensely practical that I cannot imagine a situation where it would have to be encoded; either people would not understand it anyway, or had no access to places it would be needed, or else (as with the month-series) they could get the information from another source if they really wanted to.
I can imagine severe abbreviation. I can imagine a text composed chiefly of numbers and values. I can imagine a scribe being asked to copy from an original text which he himself could not understand, and making a hash of it.
I can imagine some form of encoding if the matter was religious, and to be carried to, or through, places where it would meet a hostile reception.. but then why bother writing it in such an attention-grabbingly unique script?
I can *just* imagine a cipher appropriate to the imagery, but not one so sophisticated it could defeat modern code-breakers for a century.
I suppose one could just have an esoteric sort of key: like a wheel-cipher based on e.g. an astrolabe’s wheels, or musical modulations or some equally arcane result of long apprenticeship. But then disjunction between imagery and text would be so considerable that the usual assumption of a direct relationship informing the labels’ ‘code’ would be erroneous.
I think I’m going to stand over there, among the group which believes the text irrecoverable.
Which pretty much negates the purpose in explaining the imagery at all, doesn’t it?
Oh well, people seem to like the bits of my blog about European portolan charts so I suppose not all for nothing.
Diane: why, I do believe she’s starting to get it. 🙂
1. I’m quite sure that the imagery is both less (useful) and more (contentful) than you conceive: I tried to get that across in The Curse, but it’s devilishly hard to put into words. It was a vastly different era from now, when people simply had to remember things, because few had even the possibility of amassing a library: so I believe the function of the Voynich’s drawings was to trigger a memory, not to contain a memory.
2. Be wary of the intellectual baggage that comes with the word “sophisticated”: a non-mathematical cipher (which is what I think Voynichese ultimately is) doesn’t need to be clever to beat mathematical code-breakers.
3. If you can modulate “irrecoverable” to “possibly recoverable, but only with a small amount of additional historical information we don’t yet have”, I’m really not so far away from you. 🙂
Typical! You equate ‘getting it’ with agreeing with you! 😀
The information in the imagery is useful and would have had a real value ~ just as rare information ~ in early fifteenth century Europe.
Stylistics stumped me in reading Curse 1: I could see how a botanical picture’s meaning might be subverted to describe a geared system; but what was a puzzle was how he could know enough to draw, or copy, leaves of e.g. Podophyllum pleianthum in the first place.
(may I add a link without being Akismeted? http://www.dunngardens.org/plants/spring/Podophyllum_pleianthum.html)
For me, that’s the missing link: the imagery speaks consistently to certain subject-matter, and while one could suppose that meaning stripped and replaced with some other, you’d need to show that the person concerned acquired it in the first place ~ I should think.
By the seventeenth century, its conceivable. By the early fifteenth.. (waggles hand)…
But then, I don’t expect you think much of my analyses either, so let us agree to differ.
Thanks for the heartening words about codes and the possibility that the text may yet be recovered. Devoutly to be wished.
Thomas C. SInger, ‘Hieroglyphs, Real Characters, and the Idea of Natural Language in English Seventeenth-
Century Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jan. – Mar., 1989), pp. 49-70.
I do wish it were possible to interview you, Nick. I have a whole smallish notebook of questions I’d like to ask about ‘Curse 1’.
Guess I’ll have to wait for #2.
Unless I can submit them by email??
Diane: send me any questions you like, though I’d be happiest to answer via a blog post.
Diane: I spent a lot of time on the botanical imagery myself, so my viewpoint is that the Herbal A contained many things indeed drawn from life (or from death, depends how picky you are), whereas Herbal B contained almost nothing drawn from life. Whatever it is, it’s not a copied medieval herbal, even though it contains a number of stylistic details (heads in roots, snake in roots, little dragon, etc) that were plainly inspired by medieval herbals. Describing all that multi-phase near-paradoxical internal logic is quite an arduous challenge!
About western medieval herbals, i absolutely agree -except 9v which I accept for the violas – the long-leaved ones.
First question: do you see the ‘starry spiral’ near the castle as a body of water. If so which, and do you still place the castle in northern Italy?
Sorry – let me be more specific. Though perhaps ultimately connected at 2nd-3rd generation sort of remove, I cannot agree with you that the botanical section is “plainly inspired by medieval [western?] herbals”.
Diane: it could be water, but it ain’t necessarily so. 🙂
Diane: well, I guess we’re splitting hairs here. Heads in the roots (mandrake), little dragon (Paris herbal), snakes in the roots (snakeroot etc), and indeed snakes on a plane (New Line Cinema) were all well-worn medieval herbal tropes by the mid-15th century, and these all reappear (slightly mutilated) in the Voynich. It is these that I (and Sergio Toresella) think are plainly inspired by medieval Western herbals. As for the rest of it… who knows? 😉
What you call splitting hairs, I call trying to establish a valid lineage for the imagery in ms Beinecke 408, which can’t be done within the western herbal traditions because close matches are near-zero in number. A cousinly relationship, not parent-child.
Anyway, next question:
Some would think Averlino is a pretty minor figure in the history of Renaissance architecture. On the other hand Alberti’s connections, family history and their business gave them a presence in England, and through the Mediterranean, and their interest in banking, and antiquities, could explain things like the rumour that the book came from England, the antique forms used for the month-roundel centres and even I suppose any Ottoman elements you see in the manuscript.
Everyone had tricks of the trade, or things garnered from classical texts, which is all that was meant by ‘secrets’ in those days – wasn’t it? So why not Alberti?
Nick
These are genuine questions, not underhand angling. Please try to imagine that I’ve never done a scrap of any reading on the Voynich ms except your book and the mailing list.
Diane: From Alberti’s book on ciphers, we know that he hadn’t really considered the problem of cryptography before 1465: and in it he describes what he believes to be a near-unbreakable cipher (his famous cipher wheel). However, statistical analysis demonstrates that what we see in Voynichese was not enciphered using an Albertian cipher wheel.
It is, of course, conceivable that he developed a second near-unbreakable cipher (but one, say, based on clever transposition): however, his book includes (what I argue is) a report of a debate between him and an expert in transposition ciphers, who I believe was someone quite different from Alberti.
Diane: even underhand angling is ok, if done elegantly enough. Fire away! 🙂
OK – my bad. I should have said ‘the Alberti..’ i.e. family, including the architect himself.
A lighter question.
Since ‘Curse 1’ was published 6 yrs ago, I’m guessing you lighted on Averlino.. 12 months before?
So, since that time, has any work done by any other Voynich researcher [not me] made you stop and seriously doubt, or re-think, any part of Curse 1?
please delete previous attempt..
OK – my bad. I should have said ‘the Alberti..’ i.e. family, including the architect himself.
A lighter question.
Since ‘Curse 1′ was published 6 yrs ago, I’m guessing you lighted on Averlino.. 12 months before?
So, since that time, has any work done by any other Voynich researcher [not me] made you stop and seriously doubt, or re-think, any part of Curse 1?
In case that question doesn’t appeal, here’s an alternative;
Did you ever investigate the possibility that the encoding might take the form of mixed characters and phonetics. I’m thinking of systems such as that used in Japanese.
Diane: no, not really. For example, I still trust my art history dating (not before 1450, not after 1480) far more than the radiocarbon dating. As for what passes for “research” on the list, well… let’s choose not to speak of such things, shall we? 🙂
Diane: mixed characters and phonetics? Looked at that, many times. I’m quite sure that all that has happened to Chinese theorists and their tonal ilk is that they’ve got themselves knotted up in the “outer cipher” (i.e. what the ciphertext resembles, rather than what it is). I’ve been convinced for a long time (pre-Averlino) that what we’re all looking at in part (though not whole) is a verbose cipher, one designed to evoke the visual properties of language without actually being a language.
Line dropped out, so I’m not sure if the previous response made it before the portcullis went clang
So.
When you say “my art history dating (not before 1450, not after 1480)”. is that a history of costume, of architecture, or of drawing-style i.. or have I missed the point?
Secondly ~ about a text of mixed characters and phonetic elements ~ there seems to be an implication that you agree the text *presents* so, but you believe it’s no more than a facade. If I’m not being too subtle.
Since we’re working in alternate shifts, I’ll put another, more philosophical question as well.
A recent paper argued that the difficulty Galileo encountered was not the result of Catholic bigotry against science, so much as a more common and still-dangerous phenomenon – collegiality i.e. that mankind is primarily social, and only (a long way after that) rational.
Thus, Kircher was hostile to Galileo, and back then Kircher was the darling of the academic elite (as distinct from rich chaps made wealthy by ‘trade’), so everyone allowed Galileo to be hounded, but most expressed distate privately, only keeping quiet because they *liked* Kircher and wanted to remain part of his circle. Like a pop-star.
Also, of course, no-one wanted Krcher spreading black-rot gossip about *them*.
Long lead-up to the question (don’t answer if you don’t wish)
Suppose you were offered a way to remain feted as one of the club-able Voynicheros on the one hand, but on the other obliged to give up part of your views. Or worse, to assist in making a false concensus view, simply because of what one might call the ‘folding-key’ syndrome.
I can even posit a scenario. The deal runs thus. Person x wants the botanical section to be called typically medieval .. German/Italian/French. Person B wants to argue that the book was made during the Council of Constance. Person C (that’s you) needs part of it to involve northern Italy and things military. And person D needs to have the whole thing a late fake.
So how about this: we ‘adjust’ the C-14 dating to post 1450, but still argue that it is a fake version, by Averlino, of a genuine German copy of De Re Militari, made at the council of Constance.
And we could say that Averlino, while in the same library, distorted an originally French/Swiss (whatver) herbal, just to give him some extra obfuscatory space.
So it’s a nice scenario: makes a lot of people happy. You could get a quorum to vote ‘yea’ really easily, and no-one among the long-term researchers need feel left out or .. misguided.
Would you go for it? Knowing that there’s really no way anyone’s going to be heard if a collaborative book by the major names were published.
How much of your own work would you surrender for peace here?
sorry Nick – that was of course ‘De Re Militari’.
Diane: (1) my parallel hatching analysis says: if Germany, not before 1410 / if Florence, not before 1440, otherwise not before 1450. I’m sold on Milan and Venice, so 1450. (2) Cipher history dating the ‘4o’ points (if Milan) to not before 1456, and not after 1470. (3) Back page handwriting points to Savoy in the first half of the 15th century (can’t be more precise than that) (4) The uncovered swallowtail merlons on the castle (if Milan) point to before 1480. (5) The transitionary quire numbering system in a fifteenth century hand points to 1480 or before (probably).
Diane: also, what the text presents is a babble-like vowel-consonant mix (qo, al, ol, ar, or, ain, am, e, ee, eee, dy, etc), yet with many tightly structured groups (ain, aiin, air, aiir, etc). I can see how some linguists infer a kind of tonal structure from this, even if I don’t happen to even remotely agree with such a conclusion. 🙂
Diane: at the point where other people bring forward interesting and compelling evidence to support their positions, then perhaps we can look to find an Intellectual History rapprochement. But it hasn’t happened in the last six years, so it’s a good job I wasn’t holding my breath waiting.
I should say that the #1 reason for publishing ‘Curse’ was to give other people a chance to demolish the whole flimsy edifice. Which also hasn’t happened yet. 🙂
Nick
I’m not asking these questions as a way to lead into a demolition.
I’m grateful that you’re willing to answer these questions, which are some of the many I made as I was reading ‘The Curse..’.
I’m sure you understand what it’s like to have questions that only one person can answer – and which in many instances are taken not as questions but as attacks – so one desists.
Many thanks for your patience.
This is just a technical question.
At the beginning of Chapter 9, you illustrate f56r.
On page 145 you mention Stan Tenen, and a ‘particular type of spiral in f57r’
Am I right in thinking the ‘peculiar spiral’ is actually on fol.56r? Or was there a change of plan about which folio would head Ch.9? Oh – is the spiral supposed the form given the plant, or the loopy gallows?
Nick, you know I have a different take on things like the merlons and so on.
But unless you want to discuss those points – and I sense that you don’t much – I’m not here to argue about your reconstruction of events.
Without ciphermysteries’ civil, fair-minded (sometime acid) commentary on the field in general, I think one of two things would have happened: a ‘consensual’ version issued with more authority than validity or, alternatively, we should have descended to sitting in our own dark corners clutching our own cherished bags of nuts.
Your work on the codicology is unparallelled, as you know.
So while I cannot be comfortable with your conclusions about things like the merlons, I won’t try to discuss such things unless you feel you’d like an alternative point of view.
Enough for now. May I come back in a week or two and ask more technical questions? Or would you prefer I wait for Curse 2?
Oh – about the script and language. Mapping imagery,style, early documentary references etc. has suggested a possibility. But not my field, so I’ve passed the question on to someone who may or may not feel inclined to spend time on it.
If they will, perhaps there’ll be more to say. Who knows?
oh all right…
This is the problem:
Where you say:
my parallel hatching analysis says: if Germany, not before 1410 / if Florence, not before 1440, otherwise not before 1450.
I tend to add a bit more …like *if* this image was first enunciated in 15thC Europe.. but was it? better check first..
Otherwise the logic can build, and build, with perfect internal logic, yet the result will be simply untrue.
I don’t believe in trying to compel.
Diane: yup, f56r is what was intended – the spiral is the form of the plant. I should add it to the list of errata:
http://www.compellingpress.com/voynich/TheCurseOfTheVoynich-FirstEdition-Errata.pdf
Curse 2 will be announced properly in due course, as I’m still thinking about how best to publish it / run with it.
Diane: well… I know your position, so let’s just say that the Voynichese text hand seems to me to be firmly grounded in a European palaeographic tradition, and that’s good enough for me sans extra evidence to the contrary. *ducks rotten tomatoes hurled from afar* 😉
No rotten tomatoes from me, and I hope I shan’t have to field too many either.
I will say that after 30 yrs of being considered fairly good at this sort of thing, it is a novel experience to be dropping pennies down a well.
Cheers.
Diane: …and a particularly deep well at that. *sigh*
Not terribly. But perhaps we should start distinguishing more clearly between manuscript-as-object and manuscript-as-medium. Otherwise in another few hundred years, a thirteenth-century Psalter, written in Latin and attributed to the Heidelberg school will be taken as proof positive that the Psalms were first composed in Latin by a German author named David. (for any passing readers: the content is dated from the second millennium BC – sixth century BC).
I shouldn’t generalise. It seems to come out sounding so critical.
A breakthrough today, btw. Extra pleased because it offers a link between my sort of analysis and work done by another long-time Voynich researcher. Always heartening when lines begin to converge.
Nick – please count me in not only for Curse #2, but also if you ever decide to publish the codicological as a separate text. Without trying to make you blush – your work in that area is as important as Neal’s and imo more important than d’Imperio’s now.
Diane: good luck with your breakthrough (having seen so many false dawns myself along the way)… :-Z
😀
Where two or three people are gathered together..
I believe firmly in the ‘elephant’ principle in research. Each individual can be as careful and accurate as they like, but the true set is only the intersection of all partially true sets.
And finding the elephant in the first place is part of the problem. (also :-Z)
Nick – I thought your emoticon was a variant of ‘bored and confused’ :Z
on checking – someone else has been waiting 3 years for an answer re :-Z so would you care to translate it?
Here’s the query post from a Spanish blog.
~~~
Se emplea de la misma forma que la S, aunque tambien suele usarse a modo de confusion, o aburricion. ¿que significa el emoticon :-Z ?
Diane: funnily enough, that’s exactly what I believed when I started my Voynich research. A decade further on, however, I can’t help but conclude that the Voynich mailing list as it has become may well supply a comprehensive refutation of that foolish notion… they may all be holding an elephant in the dark, but they each think they’ve got the trunk. 🙂 *ducks hail of rotten tomatoes thrown from all sides*
Diane: with the :-Z emoticon I was trying to depict that curious face people sometimes pull where the left edge of the lip gets pulled up and the right edge of the lip gets pulled down, making the mouth a kind of twisty diagonal line. There’s probably a name for it, though I don’t know what it is. What I meant by it was “forgive my unusual pessimism, but I doubt that what you think is the case in this instance will turn out for the best“. 🙂
The French have a word for it of course – moue.
But I really came back here to thank you from the heart for this phrase, which should be engraved in gold on the top of every Voynich blog:
“Whatever it is, it’s not a copied medieval herbal”
Though as always, I’d be more specific
“not a copied medieval European Latin herbal”
It could conceivably be part of a non-Latin (i.e. Christian) herbal. To say ‘Christian’ is not done, so the more ambiguous ‘Latin’ is made to serve.