Anyone in the UK wanting a cheap copy of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” might consider heading on over to ebay.co.uk, where one has just been put up for sale. It’ll be interesting to see how much it gets… happy bargain hunting! 🙂
Errrm… signed copies are still available from the author yada yada yada. 🙂
Here’s a novel explanation for the curious “aiin” and “aiir” pattern found throughout the Voynich Manuscript’s curious text (AKA Voynichese) that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.
In my 2006 book, I pointed out that the Voynichese stroke conventionally transcribed as “n” (in EVA) is actually far closer to a “v” with an embellished right stroke: I then went on to suggest that these lettergroups might well be pretending to be page numbers: “iiiv” for “2v” (i.e. folio 3 verso), “iir” for “2r” (i.e. folio 2 recto), etc. Yet however appealing an idea this might be, it fails to explain the preceding “a” sign (“i”-groups are almost always preceded by “a”). And so the follow-on question is this: why do “iiv” and “iir” appear as “aiiv” and “aiir” in the text?
The answer I now propose is brutally simple, and (dare I say it) possibly even obvious to anyone who has seen my recently posted page on the Voynich Manuscript’s own unusual quire numbers. Though quires were usually “signed” (i.e. they had signs added to them to allow a binder to be able to bind them together in the correct order) with quire numbers in the late Middle Ages, these quire signatures normally used quire letters in the early Middle Ages – a, b, c, etc. And so what “aiiv” would have most strongly resembled to a would-be reader circa 1450 is simply a rather old-fashioned reference to “quire a, folio ii verso“.
Having said that, not for a minute do I think that this kind of page reference is what the lettergroup actually represents – instead, I strongly believe that this is all part of the slightly convoluted rationale for the VMs’ cover cipher (i.e. what the cipher is pretending to be, rather than what it actually is), a deceptive surface arrangement of faux-historical letter shapes that attempts to tell/sell a misleading story to the casual observer.
All the same, I should mention that I did briefly wonder whether lettergroups such as “aiiv” apparently highlighting a page might simply be standing in for a letter hidden in plain sight on that very page, encoded (for example) as the shape of the plant or root there. In this manner, f1v could just about be read as “t” or “f” or “v”; f2r might conceivably be “m” or “e” (in the roots); f2v “p” or “o” or “q”; f3r “v”; and so on. What is so intellectually appealing about this is that it would make the first quire nothing more than a huge one-page-per-letter steganographic cipher dictionary. Though this isn’t something I could myself accept, I thought I ought to flag it as a novel idea: errrm… neat, but rubbish. 🙂
I’ve just added a new page to the Cipher Mysteries site that looks at the (historical) mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbers. This is an aspect of the VMs that has had relatively little coverage (apart from pp.15-18 of my book, *sigh*), yet which should form one of the key dating data.
Should be plenty there both (a) to pique the interest of any passing mainstream historians and (b) to annoy late Renaissance hoax theorists. Enjoy! 🙂
I suppose this is the review I’ve spent two years steeling myself for. No matter what book critics may say, reviewing other people’s books is an easy word-game to play (typically revolving around inserting themselves into the commentary): whereas putting your own writing under the same spotlight is something closer to therapy. What, with the benefit of hindsight, do I now make of “The Curse of the Voynich“?
“The Curse of the Voynich”, by Nick Pelling
Firstly, the title didn’t work. To an avowedly rationalist commentator such as myself, a “curse” is merely a kind of game a community plays with itself when its members all willfully look away from the ball while wondering why nothing is moving. Fair enough: but the Voynich’s own mythology is so close to fiction that the word’s far stronger associations with literary curses (the Curse of Blackadder, for example) predominates. This means that people’s first reaction is normally to wonder whether the book is some kind of curious historical fiction: so, a bit of an own-goal there.
Secondly, the cover didn’t work: Alian Design did an excellent job of interpreting the brief I sent them, and produced something that was evocative and uncertain in all the ways I intended. But, again, people have a low tolerance for uncertainty: and typically “read” the cover as somehow implying that the book lacks focus. Cover art has a rigidly defined set of conventions, which publishers (even small ones) can only pragmatically subvert, not replace: the absence of a picture of the VMs on the cover (quite literally) sent out the wrong message to buyers. This was own-goal #2.
Thirdly, the editing didn’t work. Though my friend Tabby Magas splendidly subedited my clausally-complex original draft, the overwhelming pay-per-page commercial model for digital print meant that I was forced to squeeze the whole thing into under 240 pages to keep the final price under £10 – roughly a hundred less pages than the content dictated. More pictures to support the visual arguments would have been nice, but these too used up too much of my limited page budget. And so the writing suffered.
Fourthly, the content didn’t work. Even though modern historians now routinely make use of a hugely multi(ple-)media set of influences / evidences when forming their arguments and discussions, few would dare to take on the Voynich Manuscript as a subject because of the overwhelming variety of strands that would need tackling and integrating (let alone try to draw a conclusion based on such a multi-disciplinary approach). “The Curse” set out to build an entirely new research field: while it is true that many elements of “forensic codicology” had been carried out before, I was trying to bring them all together in perhaps the most concerted way yet attempted. Essentially, I was trying to do to the many historical methodologies what mechatronics did for mechanical engineering and electronics – bring them together in parallel and direct their focus on a tangible problem. But, almost inevitably, this was too ambitious a project – to do this properly would require an entire history department, not some baldy bloke in his second bedroom with a wallful of old books, no matter how persistent he happens to be.
Finally, nobody wanted an answer. People inside the Voynich research field seem blissfully content with the irascible status quo that lays upon everything like a stifling smog: feathers get hugely ruffled if anyone so much as suggests a century for the manuscript, let alone a country, town, or (heaven forfend) an individual, never mind if they try to back it up with anything approaching an argument. At the same time, few VMs outsiders have any great interest in such questions: to most people, it’s just a historical curiosity (if, indeed, it is anything at all).
I also received some hostility about my openness to Steve Ekwall’s claims: yet only three people had written anything particularly cogent about the VMs (Rene Zandbergen and Mary D’Imperio were the other two). To me, Steve Ekwall poses a greater mystery then the VMs itself: while I have a rational explanation for everything in the VMs, I have no such explanation for Steve Ekwall. All I can do is observe that his claims about what the VMs actually is do chime to a remarkable degree with what it took me years to grasp, despite the fact that he apparently has no useful art historical grasp of the object at all. And your own rationalization for all that is… what, exactly? Of course, I could (just like everyone else does) simply pretend Steve doesn’t exist: but what is there to be scared of?
No matter: probably the biggest single criticism of my book project is that I exceeded the amount that readers could accept all in one go – it was all too much, all too soon. Yet even if (as is always possible in historical research) the whole Averlino hypothesis is somehow proven wrong, I’m pretty sure I will turn out to be at least “the right kind of wrong” – looking in the right place for the right evidence for the right reasons should be nothing to be ashamed of. In time, people will doubtless catch up and overtake me, to the point that everything in “The Curse” will stop looking like some kind of mad hallucinatory multi-dimensional take on an enigmatic Renaissance curio, and instead become high historical orthodoxy. When you’re ready, I’ll still be here.
Anyway, here’s the first punchline of the day: a brief appendix to “The Curse” that you probably weren’t expecting.
Following my recent post on Giovanni Fontana, Augusto Buonafalce kindly pointed me towards a recent single-page note he wrote for Cryptologia, suggesting that a memory machine called a “speculum” (resembling a set of concentric disks with alphabets on) designed by Giovanni Fontana might well have somehow inspired Leon Battista Alberti’s famous code wheel. But how did that idea travel? In the Quattrocento, hardly anybody knew about Giovanni Fontana’s secret works – even his encyclopedia (composed around 1450) didn’t appear in print for a further century.
In my book, I argued that when Antonio Averlino left Milan in 1465, he went to Rome, and was there when Alberti was researching and writing his little book on ciphers. I further argued that Alberti’s book has a dialogue-like summary of his debate with a different cryptographer (who, like Averlino, favoured transposition ciphers over substitution ciphers), which I argued was probably Averlino. That is to say, I concluded that the two men were probably looking at revolving cipher machinery at the same time and place. In much the same way that I don’t believe three Dutchmen independently invented the telescope at the same time, I don’t believe that Averlino and Alberti both happened to invent revolving cipher machinery at the same time and place – I believe that they were at least aware of each other, if not actually working in some kind of edgy collaboration.
But how might the idea of a “speculum” have travelled to Rome? Fontana lived until 1454, probably in Padua or nearby Venice – yet we can directly place Averlino in Venice and Padua in 1450 and 1461. What are the odds that the secrets-hungry Averlino, broadly the same kind of freelance “travelling master” as Andrea Mantegna, learned of Fontana’s mnemonic wheel directly from Fontana himself in Padua, and then brought the idea with him to Alberti in Rome? In the absence of any better information, this is now what I believe probably happened.
The odds that the secretive (and secrets-obsessed) Averlino was the person behind the VMs have already been shortened, thanks to my recent discovery (from a brief mention by Lynn Thorndike) that Averlino showed off his elegant (but now lost) herbal written in the vulgar tongue in Bergamo – and if there is a better candidate for the plaintext of the VMs’ herbal pages, I have yet to find it.
So now, here’s the second punchline of the day, which is, frankly, as hallucinatory as anything I’ve encountered.
One thing Steve Ekwall repeats over and over is the VMs’ enciphered text’s reliance on the “mirror”. The problem is that Steve has no idea what that actually means – basically, what could a “mirror” be in this kind of context? Somewhat disturbingly, the Latin for mirror is “speculum“. Could it be that it is Fontana’s letter-rearranging “speculum” that Steve Ekwall has been referring to all these years? Myself, I wouldn’t really like to say – but it’s a coincidence that makes me shudder at the thought.
My final bombshell of the day is that all of this basically closes the loop for my whole research programme – that, within the limits of the evidence currently available, I feel I have performed as complete an intellectual pathology on the VMs as is currently possible, which sharply reduces my level of curiosity about it.
I’m therefore now taking a long-term break, both from the VMs and from the blog (though please stay subscribed, as I shall still occasionally post book reviews). I’ll leave my various research leads (on dating, on f57v, and on the zodiac section) open for another day, they’ll probably still be there when I return. 🙂
But all the same, let me know if you find anything good!
A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).
In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂
With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.
I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.
So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮
As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.
If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.
Readers of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” will doubtless remember (if you made it though to Chapter 12, *sigh*) the parallels I drew between physical architects (such as Antonio Averlino / Filarete, of course) and software/cipher architects: both achieve their design ends using a kind of “intellectual structuring” means. But might there be even closer links?
Concealment through architecture is an old story: one might think of priest holes, for example. Famously, Francesco Sforza constructed hidden passageways and staircases in the Corte part of the Castello di Porta Giovia in Milan to allow him to come and go as he pleased (see Evelyn Welch (1995) “Art and Authority in the Renaissance”, pp.205-207): countless other castles have secret tunnels and passageways along this same general theme.
Novels, too, like to reprise this idea: I’m just finishing “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell (2007), whose Bard-esque historical scavenger hunt makes liberal use of architecturally-concealed bits (though perhaps echoing Nic Cage’s “National Treasure” rather more than was strictly necessary for the plot, I’m sad to say).
But I was delighted to find out that real life still trumps most fiction: an obsessive architect called Eric Clough designed a truly remarkable $8.5m house on Fifth Avenue in New York, with layer upon layer of clues, tricks, mechanisms, puns, crosswords, ciphers (even a skytale!), panels and salamanders (!) for the owners to discover over a period of months and years. It’s a marvellous (if slightly mad) story, one I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Don’t forget to click on the 15-photo slideshow at the left: this has close-up pictures of many of the puzzles. Very cool!
PS: speaking of architectural ciphers, my sister once told me about an architect who had his house made backwards, so he could watch TV. But I might have misheard her. 🙂
…A.K.A. “small fire in allotment near Harpenden“, as the radio show “Hello Cheeky” used to paraphrase dull news.
Ok, so it’s only a brief mention in a Portuguese blog: but all the same, it’s nice to see someone reading it. I’ll get back under my rock, then…
It’s a typical writer’s puzzle: when something you read (or write) really sucks, but an even half-satisfactory alternative is nowhere to be found. That’s basically how I feel about almost everything that’s been written about the VMs: even though it’s an amazing mystery, that also somehow highlights all the dangerous sides of knowledge, accounts always amble off in the same kind of leadenly pedestrian way. For example, I spent ages tweaking and polishing the first sentence of “The Curse”:
“In 1912, when the ancient Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome was running short of funds, its managers decided to sell off some of its rare books.“
Just like the (abysmal) VMs Wikipedia entry, the sterile factuality and precision here can’t be faulted: but it’s aiming for the head, not the heart. But mysteries have a certain kind of tactile, claustrophobic presence to them: they surround you, taunt you, tighten your chest as you sense an approaching breakthrough. You think you’re hunting the target, when in fact all the clues are hunting you – the reader is the target.
In short, even though everything surrounding the Voynich Manuscript is a mystery, why do people persist in writing about it as if they are writing a description for a car auction – its size, shape, page-count, first historical mention, list of owners, number of pictures, valves, bhp, lalala? Capturing the raw factuality of a mystery in this way achieves little or nothing.
When I went to the Beinecke, I tried to read the texture of its pages with my fingers (to tell the hair side from the grain side): I smelt its cover and pages (just in case I could pick up any hint or note of the animal from which the vellum was made): I looked at its surface under a magnifying glass: I looked at special features through narrow-band optical filters, which I tilted to try to adjust the wavelength. I tried to stretch my range of perceptions of it to the point where something unusual might just pop out.
But most of all, I tried to imagine myself into the position of someone physically writing it: how the act of writing and state of mind mixed together, what was going on, what they were thinking of, how it all worked. And that was yet harder still.
At supper this evening, I told my son that the biggest mystery in the world is what other people are thinking: and really, that is perhaps at the heart of why the Voynich Manuscript is the biggest mystery ever – because we still cannot reconstruct what its author was thinking. It is this absence of rapport that opens up the possibility for mad, bad, and bizarre theories: because we can project onto the manuscript whatever feelings and thoughts we like.
Yet when authors write fiction, this empathy is typically where they start: working out how to create characters with whom the readers will be able to sustain some kind of reading relationship over the course of 200+ pages. Take that basic connection away, and you can end up with a writer’s folly, an artificial construction to which the narrative or flow is awkwardly pegged.
So how would I start the book, if I were writing it right now? Perhaps with Averlino at his point of death – the moment when his strange book was finally set free.
“What master of Destiny was he, when the Fates had carried him back to this holy place he despised so: and what kind of master of Nature, when he could see his death fast approaching and yet could do nothing?“
You may not like it: but is that just because you’ve become too used to reading Wikipedia?
For me, Voynich research is one of those things that grind slowly onwards for long periods of time, punctuated by occasional testosteronal fist-clenching-in-the-air moments of elation, a bit like a prisoner being unexpectedly set free. OK, I know it’s a bit cliched: but I do it anyway.
For “The Curse of the Voynich“, I forensically examined the manuscript itself, travelled to all the places, critically read all the secondary sources, and from all that reconstructed the story as best I could. In short, I’d done an OK job: but though readers told me they liked it, it hadn’t set the world on fire. Though it ticked all the right boxes, it was obvious I had to go away and try harder. But what could I do better?
At first, I bought a pile of books on the history of cryptography, such as David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”: all fascinating, but the question I’m trying to answer – “at the Quattrocento birth of mathematical cryptography, what kind of cryptography died?” – only features marginally (if at all) in the generally rather positivistic accounts presented there.
And then I realised what I had been missing. Sure, I had read plenty on Quattrocento individuals such as Filarete, Alberti, Brunelleschi, Taccola: but there was one gigantic motherlode of information which most historians seem to pay lip service to (rather than have to set aside several months to read): Lynn Thorndike’s epic multi-volume “History of Magic and Experimental Science”.
I therefore bought volumes III and IV (for the 14th and 15th centuries) and have now reached halfway through the latter. What continually amazes me is the amount of ground Thorndike covered that has apparently not been touched by anyone since: though there is a large literature tree cascading off it, it is very deep in places and non-existent in others.
From what I have read, I am now quite sure that virtually all of the Voynich Manuscript’s roots will turn out to be directly traceable from the late 14th and early 15th century: which means that we might in time be able to reconstruct or predict plaintexts for some sections. But these are still very early days in this ultra-long-term research programme. *sigh*
However, the good news is that I also bought a copy of “Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century” by Lynn Thorndike: and one obscure page from that gave me precisely the clenching-both-fists-in-the-air-YESSSSS-moment I mentioned at the start. The details are too convoluted to go through here, but trust me, it’s a peach.
I recently found a German Voynich Lexicon wiki-page, with lots of nice things that appear almost nowhere else (such as a link to my Compelling Press Voynich book page, *sigh*).
It has quite a light touch, reminiscent of my old Voynich friend Elmar Vogt: for example, it has a short “Newbold of the month” section pointing to two latter-day Voynich “solutions”, neither of which I’d heard: Erhard Landmann’s book, and Dirk Schroeder’s kabbalistic numerology.
Perhaps more usefully, the site also has a list of Voynich media mentions, going from 2001 all the way up to 2008. OK, it’s in German: but even so, you can get a good idea of what’s being said about the VMs (and where). There’s a link there to a 2007 Suddeutsche article I was interviewed for (and which I’d forgotten about until I saw it there just now).
But here’s the punchline: the more Voynich coverage from around the world I see, the more it seems to me that the English-speaking world doesn’t currently give a monkey’s about the whole issue. With all due respect to the army of novelists out there slaving away on their Voynich-themed soon-to-be-masterpieces, you might consider avoiding making them too parochial: the translations may well make you more money…
Incidentally, I’m now 50 pages into Scarlett Thomas’ novel “PopCo”: I’ll post a review here as soon as I’ve finished it…