Like (hopefully a fair few) other Voynicheros, I’ve ponied up my 50 euros for the 2022 online Voynich Conference being hosted by the University of Malta in the next few days.

One of the fields in the application form asked for my university or institution: I put down “Cipher Mysteries”, on the grounds that it has ended up a bit of a cipher institution. 🤔 But mainly to make myself laugh. 😁

Will Malta reveal something incredible, awe-inspiring, unexpected, shocking, or amazing about the Voynich Manuscript, in the way academic conferences in novels and films have primed everyone to believe? Actually… maybe, sort of. But not in the way Dan Brown and his overexcited ilk like to portray.

20+ years ago, I remember trying really hard – with almost zero success, it has to be said – to persuade anyone that the Voynich Manuscript wasn’t some kooky fake cooked up by Dr John Dee (back then the fairly dominant opinion), but a genuine historical artifact worthy of close, careful study.

Well, from the 2022 conference’s participant list and programme of papers, it seems that that aspect of my struggle back then has at least borne fruit. It’s now a serious business.

But will there be The Big Breakthrough? You know, the introvert outsider’s slide that shyly reveals The Secret Cipher Key we’ve all long dreamed of? Cue clunks round the world as Voynichero jaws collectively hit the floor.

(*snort* Not a hope, sorry.) But with so many smart, insightful, observant researchers all trying to move forward in broadly the same way, who’s to say that something won’t emerge from it all?

Perhaps it won’t be something showy (or even immediately obvious), but even a tiny step forward would feel Heaven-sent. So let’s just pray a little, hein?

57 thoughts on “Voynich Conference 2022 about to begin…

  1. @ Nick – but why only online? Malta has such a Voynicher vibe! And great 🚪 doors! The only thing it lacks is trees!! Here we go round the prickly pear, the prickly pear, the prickly pear…

  2. John Sanders on November 28, 2022 at 10:24 pm said:

    Jo: and you don’t need me to tell you the best way to make a Maltese cross do you?

  3. John Sanders: hack his conference presentations?

  4. D.N.O'Donovan on November 29, 2022 at 8:15 am said:

    Nice post Nick. May we hope to read a review here in a few days’ time?

  5. Great that you will be there, Nick.

    This conference is certainly an important step in the good direction – get some momentum going on academic Voynich research. I’m hoping this could become a regular thing. Like biennially for example (the pool of available researchers is probably too small for an annual conference).

  6. Diane: I guess we’ll see how it goes. I try to only post stuff here that I think moves everyone forward, so it really depends what comes up.

  7. Koen Gheuens: in some ways, it’s a really good thing that Malta is happening – but I can’t help but wonder how much use it will actually be without proper focus. For example, it’s great that codicologists and palaeographers are now looking at the VMs, but it’s still a mystery to me why the back page hasn’t got a conference all of its own – that at least should be resolvable. 🙂

  8. D.N.O'Donovan on November 29, 2022 at 10:36 am said:

    Nick, about 116v – it’s just a bit of margnalia, with elements in it (such as an ‘x’ form and specifically Christian elements such as the ‘cross yourself’ mark) which are so notably absent from the rest of the ms that interesting as any marginalia is in itself, it won’t tell us much about the big issues like the nature and origin of the ms’ content – not even where it was bound.

    Still, it would be good to know whether the hand is more like a fifteenth- or a seventeenth-century one. (I find Anton Alipov’s interpretation of the ‘pox leber’ line the most convincing).

    I do hope you find it worth your time to write a review for us non-cipher focused types. As for me, the times are just not possible, alas.

  9. Diane: the point I keep trying to make about f116v is that I don’t believe it’s encrypted / obfuscated in the way that the rest of the text is, i.e. that it has become unreadable rather than was originally designed to be unreadable. So conventional tools – albeit top-end ones – should help us solve the physical and puzzle and read what it says. And then we can move forward from there, wherever ‘there’ is. 🙂

  10. D.N.O'Donovan on November 29, 2022 at 1:31 pm said:

    Nick – oh, absolutely. I just don’t think serious palaeographers are likely to spend time on marginalia if they can offer constructive commentary on the main text(s).

    If I had a tame palaeographer to hand, I’d ask him/her to comment on whether or not the darker ink suggests a much later than 15thC hand.

    btw – your post decided me to join up for the Conference, The times are impossible for me, for the couple of talks I want hear, but it seems as if I might be sent links to the videos after the Conference ends – which would be very nice.

  11. So you think 116v for itself alone deserves even a conference?

    “the point I keep trying to make about f116v is that I don’t believe it’s encrypted / obfuscated in the way that the rest of the text is”

    This is visible, a few letters (glyphs) are different to the rest… For me the first question reg. this page was: why? And the answer I gave to me couldn’t be simpler: they needed additional letters. There is something on this page, which couldn’t be expressed in “pure” Voynichese. Now assume the plaintext of the script is this or that language (e. g. Aramaic 😉 or Old Church Slavic…) but you have something to write down in encrypted Latin style and you don’t want to mess up with languages. You don’t have the right set of letters, because you miss them in the rest of the plaintext but you want to be accurate. And where do you need to be accurate? With personal names! And, by chance we have mostly personal names on the first or last pages of a book, script: authors, editors, dedications, acknowledgements, “according to [this or that] man we ascribe this compilation to [this or that] people”, “the compilation was in the hands of [this or that] man and was studied thoroughly by him”, “thanks for help and your endowment to [this or that] office, which made it first possible to create this wonderful script we named [title]”. Naturally, the compilation, the script had a name to be found on this page. So, from that perspective of speculation f116v is the easiest page to anticipate the content.

  12. Matt Lewis on November 30, 2022 at 3:32 pm said:

    Nick, I am going to follow this from the sidelines, thank you. Your propensity to invoke Dan Brown all the time is starting to botherme. Maybe you should consider that *I* don’t really care for JRR Tolkien very much. I am not that impressed by his somewhat thin career at Oxford, and even more at his questionable knowledge of, and academic credibility on things, like for instance near east history, that I am almost certain he had some interest in. Like Mesopotamia and such. I would enjoy being proven wrong by Tolkien scholars. For pertinence sake Nick mentioned thought there was some likelihood that Tolkien had a fairly early viewing of the Voynich, not that it needs to be pertinent, Brown hasn’t written anything about the VMs.

    Your ideas regarding the Voynich manuscript also more clarification. Are you still standing by the Averlino/Filarte theory? What have you learned since introducing it? Have you figured out the migration of the manuscript from Averlino to Rudolph or even to Kircher. Anything new there? Do you even still accept this theory yourself?

    Matt

  13. Matt: I just like to make aspects of historical cryptography (which is, let’s face it, a crushingly niche subject) relatively accessible. If that means invoking Tolkien’s tweedy ghost or even Dan Brown, then so be it, that surely ain’t no big thang.

    As for Averlino: I pretty much drained every Filarete river dry back in 2006, so there isn’t much to add, apart from the fact (that I found out later) that he had his own elegant herbal, written in the vernacular tongue. Which certainly doesn’t worsen him as a candidate. 😋

    But did he make the Voynich? The best way to find out would be to decrypt it, which is what I’ve been trying to do ever since. Unless you’ve got a better idea?

  14. John Sanders on November 30, 2022 at 11:00 pm said:

    Happy birthday Jean-Louis Boudeloque, inventor of the pelvimtor in 1789 and as revealed to moi in f84r October 2018.

  15. D.N.O'Donovan on November 30, 2022 at 11:14 pm said:

    Matt, Nick
    With some reluctance – I’ve made enough comments here recently – I’d like to give an outsider’s point of view. Apart from my interest in the manuscript as a fascinating work, and being prepared to publish articles aimed at elucidating its drawings, I’m hardly part of the community.
    However, I have been contributing for quite some time and in fact my first essay was kindly put online here by Nick.
    So it seems to me, Matt that you are confusing two very separate areas of research. A study of the manuscript itself is concerned with the materials and content set down (as all evidence to date indicates) during the first decades of the fifteenth century.
    Once you move past that period, you are not involved in ‘manuscript studies’ as such, but in the sort of matters which interest dealers and librarians – the chain of ownership.
    It is of course true that people acquired manuscripts of interest to them… but they also had mss willed to them or inherited by them, stolen by them or that came as part of some job lot, as when they bought a house with all contents.
    So there’s no rule which allows us to determine the nature of a manuscript’s content by any chain of ownership. Even if the person bought it, you don’t know why they bought it. The chief purpose of provenancing in that sense is to discover more exactly where and when a work was made, that it isn’t spurious, and above all the price tag that can be put on it.

    So, quite properly, many Voynich researchers set the end-date for relevant investigation around 1450. After that, it’s just an object and no different from a vase or a ring.

    There’s no reason why Nick should ” figure out the migration of the manuscript …” as you put it. Quite irrelevant to any understanding of the written, or of the pictorial text unless someone wants to imagine the whole thing made about two hundred years past the vellum’s date. Bless their hearts.

    Nick – I don’t see that you need to nominate any author; so much else about the manuscript (including a consensus of specialist opinion by the 1960s) points to ‘the south’ and probably to Italy, and the vellum’s date supports you, pretty much. I must say that if you came into a museum or one of the major libraries with a sheet from the Voynich manuscript and tried to sell it as ‘a work by Averlino’ you’d be carrying it with you when you left. A formally trained architect of ‘humanist’ ideals produce such drawings.. no. Not only the few remaining examples of his drawings but the whole humanist ethos and its ideals denies this, I think. And, as you seem to say, his herbal is typically humanist in its elegance, and I would expect too (can one see that herbal) a pronounced effort at literalism in the way the plants were drawn, if they originated with him.
    I’ve always wished that ‘Curse’ had been published in two parts. One the palaeographic, codicological and cryptological research you did, and the other the Averlino narrative.

    On a less personal note – if I could do it, I’d ask the Vatican librarians to haul up for me all the manuscripts extant from the Avignon papal court and those acquired from the library of the Spanish ‘antipope’ Luna – who is still greatly admired by the Catalonians. I’d also ask to see the diplomatic correspondence from c.1350-c.1450 … if I had another lifetime. 🙂

  16. john sanders on November 30, 2022 at 11:14 pm said:

    …..f80r Sorry, I was in a rush to make the deadline and still missed it. Of course f84r was the swimming pool scene, significance there being to do with positioning of the red bucket and the writing beneath it.

  17. John Sanders on December 1, 2022 at 8:42 am said:

    I may as well add that Dr. J. L. B’s clever pelvimiter design was inspired by then in common use birthing (delivery) forceps that stubborn 1432 Voynicheros have out of ignorance chosen to confuse them with. The standout difference being in the addition of a clever swing out tabulator known to 19th French obstetricians and midwives as ‘Baudeloques Measure’. I’ll repeat what I’ve said time and again that this protruding device can be seen upon examination of VM f80r if one chooses to check it out..which I somehow doubt!

  18. Darius on December 1, 2022 at 9:27 am said:

    @John Sanders: so you deny the use of logic is here of benefit?

    @ Nick: was ever an attempt worth mentioning made to understand the mystery of the Filarete Door inscriptions?

  19. and John S. your homily: everyone sees what he wants to see has been seen. But you would agree that there are infinite many primes? So, we have at least something outside of a post modernistic head and out of reach of a potential “inerrable” consensus of a majority.

  20. john sanders on December 1, 2022 at 10:50 am said:

    Darius: had your average Voynichero had any in-house logic to use, the realists among us could pack up and go back to solving late Victorian pictogram puzzles.

  21. Diane,

    Cipher folks (or linguists) will always have the trump card on this, it’s true. However there will obviously be some necessity once the text is cracked to fit it into some sort of context. Thats, if it it is cracked. Until then looking for origins and some sort of migrational path is not unreaonable. Someone might assist here. Although the Copiale cipher was broken not too long ago, was it ever understood fully?

    Nick, I take it then you are still interested in Averlino. The reason I was asking is you mentioned something to Rene awhile ago when you were discussing a possible local Czech origin for the Ms, something to the extent that he was not sure the path that it took to get to Rudolf, suggesting you might. So I wondered if you had more knowledge this stuff regarding your own theory.

    The things about Dan Brown, et al. Brown sold an immense amount of books, though also with a strong cryptographic angle, namely, Kryptos, the mysterious sculpture at the CIA. Tolkien had this whole “magical” ring element to his stories, and that was related in a post you had regarding the hoopoe bird, that looks a little like the bird at the beginning. John Dee was very interested in creating a ring for magical operations called the Pele ring. He drew inspiration from *somewhere* for that, I am fairly sure.

    Tolkien, I should say although I love LOTR, and particularly the Jackson films, let me down a little bit as a human being. He was overly fussy, and I think a little more religiously confrontational than he needed to be.

  22. Mark Knowles on December 1, 2022 at 7:30 pm said:

    Diane: You are not the only one who would like to see the diplomatic correspondence from c.1350-c.1450 in the Vatican Archives. I have made some enquiries along those lines, but locating them is not so easy. Unfortunately they are scattered it seems in various places in the archives and it is not quite clear where they are to be found. It would be nice to imagine that there is a section of the archives headed: “Diplomatic Correspondence from 1350 to 1450”, however it is very far from being that simple from my understanding. One important point is that they do have records from Antipope Felix V, who was also Duke of Savoy Amadeus VIII, in the Vatican archives so rather than looking in the Turin or Geneva archives for the cipher records of the Duchy of Savoy, they may be in the Vatican.

  23. Matt: I’m always on the lookout for new Averlino stuff, but that’s getting rarer and rarer. The route that the Voynich Manuscript took to get to Prague was the subject of a very in-depth presentation at today’s Voynich conference: there seems a good chance it was Karl Widemann who sold a pair of unusual books to Emperor Rudolf for 500 Thaler.

  24. D.N.O'Donovan on December 1, 2022 at 10:32 pm said:

    I look forward to the pre-print versions. I’m curious to see if there is any distinction made in the documents between manuscripts and printed books.

  25. D.N.O'Donovan on December 1, 2022 at 10:59 pm said:

    Matt,
    I may be mistaken in this, but I’ve always supposed that for people to break the cipher they need to start with some idea of when, where and by whom the ciphertext (assuming it is one) was invented and used, and what sort of matter was being enciphered, so that they compare it with appropriate grammatical order, vocabularies and so on.

    As I say, I might be mistaken; Google-trans can identify languages.

    I find it curious that a majority of Voynich writers have assumed, simultaneously, that the Voynich images are ultimately unknowable before the text is read, yet that pictures in medieval Latin mss should be self-evident to them despite having not a word of Latin and no particular background in comparative iconology.
    The fact that westerners have so little difficulty, as a rule, reading images in medieval Latin mss though having no Latin, but so very much difficulty – having to rely on guesses, imagination and various asserted analogies – to interpret the Vms pictures is perhaps the single most important fact about this manuscript. Very few ‘speak European’ at all.

  26. With respect to the 500 Taler, the presentation was a bit confusing. As discovered by Stefan Guzy, the price for the seller was 600 “Rheinische” florins, but this appeared in Rudolf’s books as 500 Taler, which is probably the amount of money that the “bearer” (from Marci’s letter) Geizkofler received. Oddly enough, a portrait of Geizkofler survives, but none of Widemann

  27. Darius on December 2, 2022 at 4:22 pm said:

    Diane, you wrote:
    “I may be mistaken in this, but I’ve always supposed that for people to break the cipher they need to start with some idea of when, where and by whom the ciphertext (assuming it is one) was invented and used”

    Why this? To produce bias in your search space? First, the assumption I would make is, that we have here a substitution cipher (wouldn’t spend much time at a numerical approach). But substitution doesn’t mean you can start to substitute right away. I would admit to some call it pre-substitution and/or post-substitution processing. Substitution cipher means then for me: there is a point in the decryption process where glyphs are substituted by letters or phonemes of a plaintext language. What this pre-substitution process would be – I will describe it one day, but that’s not a rocket science. It should make the vords matchable with the plaintext words. The simplest what you can imagine as a such pre-substitution process is e. g. changing capital letters into small letters. If you don’t change them your program wouldn’t be able to find a match. It isn’t so simple with Voynichese but not too complicated neither. And then your pattern matching algorithm should work for you and produce contradictions. Assume you look for a pattern like ABBBBA (which you can find in VMS) and try to match with English words – bad prospect, even if you slice this pattern into two words. If you hit on contradictions again and again and again so you probably have chosen the wrong plaintext language. As for European languages, and many others too, with BIG data you should be able to extract eventually two disjunct sets of letters (the consonants and vowels), they should be used alternately so at latest after two consonants a vowel should occur. Do we have something like this in VMS? Instead, we have multiple repetitions of the same glyph in one vord or a few consecutive vords. The logic tells, we probably have here word breaks, so e. g. one B is the end of the first word and the next B is the beginning of the next, might be not always, but frequently. But in that case, we were confronted with a language with extremely short words (as the average of the VMS vord length is 5,6 glyphs if I recall correct and we split them even further).
    But you see, in this first step we don’t need any semantics, etymology or the provenance of the ciphertext. What we need at the beginning is a good pattern matching algorithm, because we process huge data, entire lexicon of a language and we assign to every single pattern all possible permutations of the underlying letters. But our heuristic will operate on melting data basis with every new pattern we include into examination until we run out of possibilities to assign and have to revise our language decision. That would be for me the first step – still nothing said about a concrete alphabet and assignment of glyphs to concrete letters and faraway of any concrete translation. These are further steps, but enough as for now…

  28. Josef Zlatoděj Prof. on December 2, 2022 at 6:26 pm said:

    Darius. Voynich is a very complex substitution. You must take all letters ( characters ) as numbers. You are writing here about the letter R. It has the value of the number -2. The whole group of numbers 2 = B,R,K. So where you see or the letter R is written in the text (you can recognize it by the sign that looks like the number 2, slightly tilted), So you can of course read a word in which the letters B,R,K are present. The magic of this notation is precisely the complex Jewish substitution, which is very difficult because all the letters are numbers. There are many medieval ones written in this way. All over Europe.
    You also need to know the language in which the manuscript is written. In the text of MS 408, it is written on many pages: I write in Czech. (or it is written there – Czech words). There are also many dates in the manuscript. You also orient yourself accordingly. Various names are also written there.
    Further. Medieval language is very different from modern language. He has undergone some development during that time. So looking for vowels and consonants is surely useless. (unnecessary because there is a substitution).
    It is important to know the meaning of written characters. Without it, no one can decipher the handwriting.
    Kabbalistic Numerology System of Gematria.
    number 1 = a,i,j,q,y.
    number 2 = b,r,k.
    number 3 = c,g,s,l. (look at page 2r. This is the author’s hint. Every Jew or whoever controls this substitution should understand it immediately.
    The root is the base of the plant. No plant can grow without a root. The root is made of letters – C,G,S,L.

    The basis of each word is – a letter. No word can be formed without a letter.
    (that’s why the author shows it to you at the beginning of the manuscript). So it is important to see well and of course also to know something. Without it, all effort is in vain)
    That it is number 3, the author showed it in the picture – Flowers.
    There are 3 of them (3 flowers means the number 3).
    number 4 = d,m,t.
    number 5 = e,h,n. (etc.).
    This substitution is based on 8 numbers. And the entire alphabet contains just those 8 numbers.

    As I write, this is a very complex substitution cipher.

  29. Nick and Rene,

    Very interesting indeed. I hope that something might be made out of it. Ducats, Thaler or Florins. It does give the fans something to roll around in their heads when considering the overall situation. I’m not sure quite how much that was back then, though I’m guessing a princely sum.

    Widemann’s connection might be interesting in that according to his Wikipedia page had something to do with Paracelsus manuscripts. One of Paracelsus’s most famous ideas that of the dread Homunculus, and we are of the opinion that the drawings in the manuscript be either magically encouraging ,the hoopoe or magical in and of itself (Nicks find) the Catoblepas. The more diabolical, the better in my opinion, though I’m a little weird.

  30. Hi Prof, nice to hear from you! I would be delighted if we had here a Slavic language plaintext. But honestly, I don’t see it. For that I miss the diversity needed at the end of the words. The flexion, the 8-fold casus for every substantive with different endings depending on genus – all that requires here much more diversity as present, more as e. g. in Germanic or Romanic languages. And, as I wrote, generally the pattern for consonant-vowel alteration is missed in so many vords.
    I’ll write a doc about pattern recognition and which computational model I used to extract the substitution candidates and put some code there (which can be used as template for whatever substitution findings, probably Victorian picogram puzzles included). The principle must be understood (constraint satisfaction), as it isn’t a GUI-equipped user-friendly system but a chunk of code, which one have to amend, if he/she wants to adapt it for other problems. But it’s a mighty computational model, in fact equivalent to Turing-Machines or formal grammars btw, so you can use it for every computable problem, if you are familiar with computer science… But in contrast to the first two it’s convenient for practical use too, especially for some kind of problems, where you construct a solution rather than evaluate something.

  31. D.N.O'Donovan on December 5, 2022 at 1:13 am said:

    Matt – about coins – you touch the point. The Rhenish florin was a gold coin; the thaler a silver one which, at that time, was still a recent introduction. On the face of it, there seems little reason for any separate/secondary/supplementary payment at all, but It might all be explained in the paper and the data checked.

  32. Diane, back in the day when a lot less was known about the manuscript, I detected perhaps a palpable resentment to the amount paid, which I think was estimated at perhaps $10000 American, and for instance no password, and no solution given to Rudolf. Anyone who thinks I am overstating things, speak up, though that’s what I thought. It is a thing if you might kindly grant me, and led to ideas that John Dee had something to do with it. “You sold me a crummy watch, and I want my money back!” That sort of thing.
    Though I am interested if anyone really has maybe an inkling beyond cryptographic or linguistic, where it actually did come from, and is simply not being forthcoming. Some folks seem to have forgotten Yale owns it now. That could change, sure.

    As to cryptographers and there sort of “ours ours ours” with it, I grant they have probably put more time, longer and I respect their grabbiness. However at some point the decryption will have to be transferred into a “known” language, and if it can’t be that would be interesting. I guess Nick would say Italian, though maybe French. Chinese has been offered up by some. How about Hurrian? I read a theory that the Black speech of the Orcs might be inspired by that quite ancient language. If there is *any* consensus on what that language is, I have never heard it. It could be an unknown language, and scholars that weren’t even linguists might need to be consulted, yanno.

  33. D.N.O'Donovan on December 8, 2022 at 3:19 pm said:

    Mark,
    Concerning diplomacy and papal Avignon, I’ve come across this title:

    Karsten Ploger (2005), England and the Avignon Popes: The Practice of Diplomacy in Late Medieval Europe.

    A very small preview includes this information

    “For the period 1342-62 there are twenty-eight copies of accounts of envoys to Avignon in E 372 but only eighteen extant original accounts in E101.
    National Archives: Public Record Office, series E101. Chancellors Rolls E352.”

    no more as yet… but these records are at least in England as I think you are(?). If there are these accounts, there could be other correspondence connected to those envoys.

  34. Peter M. on December 9, 2022 at 7:20 am said:

    Now that several books have been bought for 600 guilders, the whole thing makes more sense.
    Consider that the annual pension of a higher-ranking person in Rudolf’s service was about 120 guilden.

    But now the actual value of the VM manuscript can no longer be explained.

  35. D.N.O'Donovan on December 9, 2022 at 4:20 pm said:

    Peter M.
    I wasn’t able to attend at the time that paper was delivered, and reports of it are confused, so I’d be glad to know more. First – how do the records differentiate a manuscript from a printed book? Secondly, when you say “several books had been bought for 600 guilders” do you mean a group of several books cost (for all of them together) 600, or that there are several occasions when Rudolf paid 600 for one book? And again, were these manuscripts or printed books – and how do we know?

    When you say “the actual value can not be explained” – I thought the whole point of that paper was to try and justify the rumour recorded in the ‘Marci’ letter of 1665/6. Are you saying it did not do that? Or do you mean that the usual ideas about the Vms’ content as e.g. a common hausbuch, an ordinary zodiac, an ordinary herbals etc.etc. cannot justify such a price?

    I should wait in patience until the papers are available, but if you’d care to explain further, I’d be interested.

  36. D.N. O'Donovan on December 9, 2022 at 4:39 pm said:

    Matt.
    You say regarding Widemann’s that “according to his Wikipedia page” he had something to do with Paracelsus manuscripts.
    Over the years, I’ve found more than once that as soon as anything is even remotely suggested connected to the Vms, some enthusiast creates a wiki item for it, and often one that is less-than-objective or balanced. I’ve even come across a couple of instances where a theorist unable to find evidence supporting their theory has created a ‘wiki’ article, and then quoted that as their reference. Caution is advised.

  37. Matt Lewis on December 10, 2022 at 1:11 am said:

    Diane, here is the link to the current article

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Widemann

    The article mentions the book Paracelsus by Ole Peter Grill of which one can have a gander here on Google books:
    https://books.google.com/books?id=_m1Mf52bK70C&q=Paracelsus+Widemann&pg=PA163#v=snippet&q=Paracelsus%20Widemann&f=false

    From the Wikipedia article:

    “Karl Widemann or Carl Widemann or Carolus Widemann,[1] was a German author, physician and collector of manuscripts, from Augsburg, and secretary of the English alchemist Edward Kelley, at the court of Emperor Rudolph II.[2]”

    (Kelley had a secretary? Interesting…)

    “Karl Widemann is known for copying and collecting over 30 years the works from Paracelsus. Because of this many unpublished works from Paracelsus survived to the present day.”

    It looks interesting. I haven’t heard the quibbles with the identification of Widemann. Don’t take it on the face value of me being interested either It looks like an good book.

    I am not actually that diabolical as I mentioned in an earlier comment. These things do relieve boredom.

    Do you have any problema with this identification?

  38. D.N.O'Donovan on December 10, 2022 at 9:01 am said:

    Oh – Paracelsus again. 🙁

    Much too late, but my next planned post is (or had been before a recent request to reprint one from Voynichimagery) about what sort of things became secrets in the modern sense and what were treated in that way during the 13th-15thC, and re-examining the old, old assumptions such as Baresch’s notion of ‘secret medicine’, Paracelsus name gets a passing mention.

    The ‘Paracelsus’ notion has been around since at least 1921, and perhaps since 1912. A hundred years to actually test the possibility and it has gone no-where. I expect it will still go no-where because nothing in the manuscripts materials or drawings is compatible with his era and environment. In my opinion. But you never know…

    I have often wondered, though, if his being a hermaphrodite might have had something to do with Rudolf’s obsession with masculine looking female figures. But that’s just waiting-for-the-train sort of musing.

  39. D.N.O'Donovan on December 10, 2022 at 9:55 am said:

    Paracelsus was in print during his own lifetime – if anyone else is interested in the idea of some link between the Vms and P.
    No reason I can think of to encipher a work of his when it was openly available. Or is the argument that it’s “Paracelsus in shorthand”? 😀
    oh dear – it’s good to laugh.

    Info on some of the editions, from one collection in the US.

    The Schlueter collection includes the larger part of the original writings of Paracelsus and surveys the distinct Paracelsian schools and revivals of interest that have flourished in Germany, England, France, and other countries over the past five centuries.

    The collection consists of six titles of the twenty-four known editions which were published during the life-time of Paracelsus, that is between the years 1527-1539. The earliest is the first edition of his three works on Syphilis, 1530, and the latest is the third edition of his Great Surgery, 1537. There are 161 titles from the remainder of the sixteenth century, and seventy-seven titles from the seventeenth century.

    Five titles represent the important later editions between 1549 and 1560, including some translations. There are 131 titles of the publications between 1560-1588 which include the works published from the personal manuscripts of Paracelsus. Eighty-four titles represent the collected works between 1589-1658, during which period there were publications by Paracelsists, such as John Glauber, William Johnson and Ferdinand Parkhurst, including the Huser edition of his complete works, 1589-1591, and the Latin translation (Frankfurt, 1603).

  40. Peter M. on December 10, 2022 at 11:53 am said:

    @Diane
    The letter (seller) says that several books worth 500 Taler (600 Gulden) were sold to Rudolf.
    This corresponds to the value Marci mentioned.

    This is what was mentioned at the conference.
    https://twitter.com/voynich2022/status/1598336833393401858

  41. D.N. Sorry no, not Paracelsus. Widemann. Do you think Widemann sold it to Rudolf? I am interested in the Paracelsus aspect, of course. If he was a secretary to Edward Kelley, I would think it might bring The Dee/Kelley angle back. Will this finding be made public so as to let the hoi poloi read it?

  42. D.N.O'Donovan on December 11, 2022 at 3:53 am said:

    Peter M.
    Thanks for that information. I’m see that after 15 years the makers of Rudolfine storylines are now trying to rope in such themes as journeys, the world east of mainland Europe and ‘exotic’ plants. Fifteen years.

    Concerning the twitter post – thank you very much for kindly sharing that – but Peter, it speaks of “a transaction (sing.).. involving a small number of alchemical books… bought for 600 florins”.

    That’s a problem for that narrative because specialists in early modern alchemical imagery have said pretty plainly that there’s none of that in the Vms – a negative assessment confirmed by Dictionaries of Alchemical imagery and art history as such. This was all made clear to contemporary theorists as long ago as the first mailing list (in conversations of c.2002 or thereabouts).

    I believe the Conference paper was very good indeed, but more as a contribution to economic history and the history of early modern books.

    As usual, the problem with such Voynich storylines is the things never asked and never checked against the wider context.

    For example: wat was the usual price for a printed book in those years? How unusual was a price of 100 ducats each (taking that ‘small number’ as six books for the sake of argument. ) Was it customary at the time for a traveller-salesman to include his travel and lodging expenses in the overall price? Were they separately reimbursed? What happened when the hawker didn’t simply turn up but the books were ordered from a distant printer?

    Have contemporary printers’ and publishers’ lists and prices been considered (not by Guzy; by the Voynicheros)?
    Guzy seems to have made a fine contribution to economic history and the history of collections in the Rudolfine-era.

    What has not been shown is any clear point of connection with the fifteenth-century artefact that is Beinecke MS 408.

  43. Peter M. on December 12, 2022 at 7:28 am said:

    @Diane
    The VM doesn’t look like alchemy to me either. The symbols for metals and chemicals are missing.
    But I don’t know how it was looked at before, or specifically by the seller.
    “I think, therefore I am”….” I can’t read it, therefore alchemy”. Honestly, I have no idea.
    About the price. I distinguish between hand-copying and printing.
    Paper was already cheaper than parchment around 1400. Printing, more books in less time.
    Handwritten were mostly commissions or made for oneself. I think with printing, the first buyers were the universities.
    Here, too, I can’t tell you much about it. I think it’s the execution that counts here.
    Gutenberg Bible, first edition of 1000. Imagine 1000 monks doing that by hand.
    Rudolf was a collector. I don’t think the price would have really impressed him, and it’s probably secondary.
    How should one judge that today.

  44. Peter M. on December 12, 2022 at 8:18 am said:

    Correction.
    First there were 180 Bibles.
    After the court case 1000.

  45. D.N.O'Donovan on December 12, 2022 at 9:38 am said:

    Peter M.
    In the first mailing list, when the ‘alchemical’ notion was raised, someone very sensibly wrote to one Adam McLean, of the most widely-accepted specialists (albeit not an academic). McLean wrote back very clearly scotching that idea – at least if its European alchemy being suggested. He has a website called ‘alchemy.com’ and though he has occasionally revisited the Voynich – the result is still ‘no’. Besides which other and earlier experts, such as Lynn Thorndike would have noticed any such elements in the imagery. But I might also say that I tested it for myself and found no reason to dispute McLean – not European alchemy.

    About the cost of books etc. You don’t need to fall back of imagination and guesswork. It’s aspect of economic history, and there’s a world of bibliophiles, specialist booksellers, even a Society for the history of the book.

    It’s not as if the Voynich manuscript occupies some unique plane of existence to which all other scholarship is irrelevant, is it?

  46. Grzegorz Ostrowski on December 13, 2022 at 7:14 pm said:

    Since this thread concerns the summary of the highly publicized and advertised Voynich Conference that took place in Malta, I would also like to comment on this event.

    So that’s right, the conference passed several days ago and so far silence. Nothing is known about any of its effects. If there were any spectacular ones – of course they would be widely known, not only in the “specialist media”, but also in the “popular” ones. Unfortunately, so far there are no effects – even the minimal and ephemeral ones.

    Participants and commentators of this Conference “turned their tail under themselves” like a beaten dog and little can be learned from their silence. It may be different – but nothing else can be inferred so far.

    I had already expressed my skepticism about its results many months before this Conference.

    “As for the International Voynich Manuscript Conference, I don’t expect anything of value from this “conference”. In my opinion, its “scientific” assumptions and the evaluation composition are in fact the values which, a priori, disqualify this undertaking. It is a promised scientific conference in a very effective way, which I associate with the title of William Shakespeare’s comedy “Much Ado for Nothing.”

    The perceptual abilities of the creators of the ossified Voynich Manuscript decoder theories can be compared to eighty-year-old ballerinas trying to dance in Swan Lake.”
    link – https://ciphermysteries.com/the-voynich-manuscript/voynich-theories#comment-456811

    And now after this extremely impressive Conference, where, I presume, very exquisite dishes were eaten and some very colorful drinks were drunk, there was a return to everyday life – that is, to grinding, like an old-fashioned mill, again the same “numb” topics regarding the Voynich Manuscript handwriting: what letters there’s more in the writing – ‘X’ or ‘Y’, how and where the asterisks are arranged, and things like that.

    Nevertheless, I am curious about the “scientific” translations and summaries of the Conferences by their organizers. It will be, I suspect, quite a cabaret.

  47. Grzegorz: it was a purely online conference, so no fancy buffet snacks. The papers were actually ok, hopefully you’ll get a chance to see them for yourself before too long.

  48. D.N.O'Donovan on December 17, 2022 at 9:43 pm said:

    Reading between the lines, it looks as if behind the scenes there’s a movement to reduce the availability of the papers.

    Initially, I was led to think every paper cleared for presentation had already been vetted and that a copy would be provided after payment of the Euros required, the organisers understanding that few people could be on zoom for two days/nights.

    No pdf arrived before the talks were given. None arrived even during the next several days.
    An email to two organisers – the one who had been very prompt in processing the payment, and another in double-checking the payment had been made – resulted, after the Conference, in nothing but determined silence.
    Not a good look for Yale or for Malta. Who took over that job after the conference ended, one wonders?

    Then, a notice was issued – not to attendees but only to such researchers who happen to have joined a particular online forum that they could expect the papers “soon”

    Now the same people (only) have been told that “the presentations are being reviewed… ”
    Or is that actually “re-viewed”?

    and that “it takes time….”

    Why? Has some interfering type decided to give researches nothing but air-brushed versions of the zoom vids?

    Hardly the way to attract scholars. What, is everyone supposed to sit in front of a video and transcribe the text for themselves?

    I’ve sometimes had to wait a couple of years for the published version of Conference papers to appear, but there has always been a pre-print version available for attendees. How long does it take to make pdfs and send them by email?

    Let’s hope, at least, that someone isn’t out to forget the whole academic thing and settle for another of those dreadful commercial tv docos.

    No, no – optimism. Scholars who specialise in relevant studies are on hols, but will review papers after the break and before those papers are issued in print or (at least) somewhere like academia.edu

    Let’s hope.

  49. Josef Zlatoděj Prof. on December 18, 2022 at 4:37 am said:

    Dear Ms. Diane. You have to wait until the whole scientist Lisa F.D. will check. He will discuss with experts Rene and other scientists. This will take about 3 months. Then you will learn more about the conference. Until then, hang in there. Otherwise, I can write to you here that there is certainly no progress in manuscript research and there will not be in the foreseeable future.
    And so everything is the same. This means that it will always be researched. A long time. Because it is a big puzzle and a mystery for many scientists from all over the world. So hold on.
    Hello .

  50. John Sanders on December 18, 2022 at 5:23 am said:

    D.N. O’Donovan: My thoughts and prayers go out to both you and all your fellow Scholars who appear to have been ripped off in a devious Malta Mafia promise to release a hitherto missing squires of VM pages &c. This is undoubtedly the biggest con since large bite Rudolph II got snipped for a cool 600 whatsits by slick John D, Queen Elizabeth’s emmissary and sole authorised purveyor of 16th century Welsh pornography. Glad I’m not a schollar mate.

  51. I can’t speak for the organisation of the conference, so I won’t. I do happen to know that all of the speculation starting with “Reading between the lines, it looks as if behind the scenes there’s a movement to reduce the availability of the papers…” is imaginary and incorrect.

    This is being organised by actual scholars who know what they are doing because they have done this before, not by would-be scholars commenting from the sideline.

    Getting the proceedings out takes time. That’s all there is to it.

  52. D.N.O'Donovan on December 18, 2022 at 10:28 am said:

    Dear Dr. Zandbergen,
    This is not the first time you have indulged your own fantasies in public, and in print, to insinuate that you – an engineer with no relevant formal training a ‘proper scholar’ of medieval manuscripts, art and history and that I am not.

    Self-delusion is no crime, but as I was once before obliged to warn you when you went too far in public and in print, such efforts to demean may be judged libellous.

    What we have in common, in the moment, is lack of information. You lack information to which you are not entitled and exercise your imagination. I am obliged to exercise mine for lack of information to which all attendees are reasonably entitled.

    Professor Zlatoděj says that you are one of the persons involved in the post-Conference review and editing – but you do not.

    I would be quite interested to know, if you are involved, which types of paper you feel that you are qualified to evaluate by reason of your formal qualifications and professional experience. No need to give chapter and verse on your personal history: just an idea of what types of paper, if any, you intend editing.

  53. Josef Zlatoděj Prof. on December 18, 2022 at 12:02 pm said:

    Hi Rene. You certainly know a lot. As a scholar and scientist. I also know something, so I know that no Voynich scholar can crack it. Neither in Malta nor at Yale. Voynich is complex even for Czech strivers and scholars and scientists.
    Everyone likes you. It is well. I like all of them too. And so I would ask you to write to ninja that I like them too. For you to understand. So there sits a scholar, a certain Koen, or whatever the name of this scientist is. And I wrote to him there in one of the threads, which concerns the scholar Hanzíková Iren. That this scientist works to clean up the city of Nová Paka. Where he sweeps sidewalks and roads and a bunch of gypsies. As Irena herself says in her first YT video. (which everyone can verify).

    And that Koen wrote that I was a racist and blocked me. He’s a weird scientist. But I still like him. But I can’t write it to him there.
    Then write it to him there. That I like him, boy of one.

  54. D.N.O'Donovan on March 4, 2023 at 1:44 pm said:

    One of my fan-critics is asking me about reviews which may have been offered abut last year’s Conference papers and says he has heard something about ‘Rob at Goodreads’ having written something.

    I’ve asked around but no-one seems to know who the ‘Rob’ is supposed to be, or which Goodreads page might review the papers.

    It may be information circling within some theory-group or forum. Does anyone here know more?

  55. Holly Red Dwarf on March 4, 2023 at 7:18 pm said:

    No problem, colleagues. The adventurer seems to calculate well.

    Of course, after studying what this ant has posted, he is again working very poorly.

    Robert H. Edwards.

  56. D.N.O'Donovan on March 4, 2023 at 11:19 pm said:

    Holly, Tavi – I feel a certain antipathy to the idea that any scholar should decide to become an ‘ant’.
    However, to each to his own.
    Thank you both. I’ll pass that information on.

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