“Voynich Averlino hypothesis” summary…

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In the last few days, several people have independently asked me to summarize my “The Curse of the Voynich” Voynich Manuscript theory (that it is an enciphered copy of Antonio Averlino [Filarete]’s lost books of secrets). Good theories generally improve when you retell them a few times: for example, back when I was first pitching my new type of security camera [i.e. my day job], it would take me about an hour to explain how it worked, but now it takes me about a minute. So… can I condense 230 pages from 2006 into a thousand words in 2010? Here goes…

The first part of my art history argument places the VMs in Milan after 1456 but before about 1480, and with some kind of architectural link to Venice:-

  • “Voynichese” uses a “4o” verbose cipher pair (but not as Arabic digit pairs, i.e not 10/20/30/40). This appears in North Italian / Milanese ciphers dating from 1440 to 1456 and is linked with the Sforzas, yet here forms part of a more sophisticated cipher system. This points to a post-1456 dating, locates it in Northern Italy (specifically Milan), and links it somehow with the Sforza court.
  • One of the rosettes in the nine-rosette page contains a castle with swallow-tail merlons and circular city walls. However, the only towns traditionally depicted with circular walls are Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Milan, of which Milan is the only one in Italy. Therefore, I conclude that this is probably Milan.
  • Also, the Sforza castle in Milan only had swallow-tail merlons after 1450. This gives a probable earliest date & place for the VMs of (say) 1451 in Milan.
  • Late in the 15th century, swallow-tail merlons were covered over to protect the defenders from flaming projectiles. This gives a probable latest date for the VMs of 1480-1500.
  • I argue that the central rosette shows a (slightly scrambled) view of St Mark’s Basilica as viewed from the Campanile beside it, linking the author of the VMs with Venice.

The second part highlights (what I consider to be) very close parallels between the VMs and the “little works” of secrets mentioned by Antonio Averlino in the later phases of his libro architettonico (but which have been presumed lost or imaginary), and which he compiled between 1455 and 1465.

  • The subjects of Averlino’s lost little books were: water (spas), agriculture, engines, recipes, glass-making, and bees.
  • I think Quire 13 depicts water – both spas and plumbing machinery / engines
  • I think that Herbal A pages are agriculture (grafting, herbiculture, etc)
  • I think that Herbal B pages contain engines (but visually enciphered to resemble strange plants). I also suspect that Averlino was the author of the lost mid-Quattrocento “Machinery Complex” manuscript postulated by Prager and Scaglia.
  • I think f86v3 specifically depicts bees (Curse pp.138-140)
  • After publishing my book, I discovered that Averlino did indeed have his own herbal, written “elegantly in the vernacular tongue“

The third part outlines what I suspect was Averlino’s opportunity and motive for creating the VMs, based on well-documented historical sources (plus a few specific inferences):-

  • Antonio Averlino was interested in cryptography, specifically in transposition ciphers. His libro architettonico partly fictionalizes himself and many of the people around the Sforza by syllable-reversing their names – for example, his own name becomes “Onitoan Nolivera“.
  • Averlino was friends with the powerful cryptographer Cicco Simonetta, who ran the Sforza Chancellery: when Averlino suddenly left Milan in 1465, he left his affairs and claims for back pay in Simonetta’s hands.
  • Disenchanted by his experience of working for Francesco Sforza, Averlino planned to travel from Milan across Europe to work in the new Turkish court in Istanbul – his friend Filelfo drafted a letter of introduction for him.
  • I infer (from the peculiarly intentional damage done to the signature panel of his famous doors in Rome) that Averlino travelled to Rome in the Autumn of 1465, perhaps even with the party travelling from Brescia with what is now known as MS Vat Gr 1291.
  • I also infer (from a close reading of Leon Battista Alberti’s small book on ciphers) that an unnamed expert in transposition ciphers debated cryptography practice in detail with Alberti in late 1465, and I suspect that this expert was Averlino, who would surely have sought out his fellow Florentine humanist architect while in Rome.
  • Some art historians have put forward particular evidence that suggests Averlino did indeed travel to Istanbul around this time to work on some buildings there.
  • However, this happened not long after the notorious incident when Sigismondo Malatesta’s favourite painter Matteo de’ Pasti was arrested in the Venetian-owned port of Candia in Crete. His crime was attempting to take a copy of Roberto Valturio’s book on war machines “De Re Militari” to the Turks, punished by being hauled back in chains to Venice for interrogation by the Council of Ten.
  • Though not always 100% reliable, Giorgio Vasari asserts that Antonio Averlino died in Rome in 1469: so there is good reason to conclude that if Averlino did indeed travel East, he (like his old friend George of Trebizond) probably travelled back to Italy before very long.
  • Overall, my claim is that if Averlino made (or tried to make) the dangerous trip East in 1465 and wanted to take his books of secrets (which, remember, contained drawings of engines just like “De Re Militari”) along with him, he would need to devise a daring way of hiding them in plain sight. But how?

The fourth part of my argument describes how I think Averlino trickily enciphered his books of secrets to make them seem to be sections of a medieval herbal / antidotary written in a lost language. However, given that this section is extraordinarily complicated and I’m rapidly closing in on my thousand-word limit, I’ll have to call a halt at this point. 🙂

Three years after committing all this to print, I still stand by (pretty much) every word. Obviously, it’s a tad annoying that the recent radiocarbon dating doesn’t fit this narative perfectly: but historical research (when you do it properly) is always full of surprises, right? We’ll have to see what the next few months bring…

Some online herbals…

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Blogger of the visually bizarre BibliOdyssey has a number of nice online herbal scans you might well enjoy: each page has a brief description of the related manuscript and links to other places you can read more about the subject, while each picture links to its own Flickr page (which is handy).

  • ‘Arzneipflanzenbuch‘ [BSB Cod.icon. 26], Augsburg circa 1525. Herbal with lots of eccentric roots (sounds familiar, eh)
  • Hieronymous Braunschweig’s Distillerbuch, Strasburg circa 1500. Distillation manual, with plenty of alchemy, chemistry, botany, medicinal tips, etc.
  • Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydeboek, Belgium 1554. Hugely popular herbal built on Leonhard Fuchs’ equally famous herbal (but with many additions).
  • Tacuinum Sanitatis, 15th century copy owned by the Bibliotheque Rouen. An extremely nice-looking herbal book of medicine with herbal bits, exactly the kind of high quality artefact the Voynich Manuscript plainly isn’t.

The Center for Cryptologic History’s 2010 calendar…!

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It’s not widely known that the US National Security Agency has a small section at Fort Meade devoted to the history of code-breaking: The Center for Cryptologic History. As well as making scans of a number of useful documents available on its website (most notably Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”), the CCH convenes its own history of cryptology event every two years: the 2009 conference had David Kahn, Elonka Dunin, Whitfield Diffie and loads of other well-known crypto people both attending and giving talks. Though the focus was mainly 20th century, the two notable exceptions were…

  • Kathryn Schwartz, Harvard University – “The Academic, Poetic and Militarised Impetuses behind Medieval Arabic Cryptology’s Development”
  • Richard Belfield, Fulcrum TV – “The Story Behind the Shepherd’s Monument Inscription at Shugborough Hall”

Note that though I didn’t rate Richard Belfield’s “Six Unsolved Ciphers” book very highly when I reviewed it here, the Shepherd’s Monument chapter was by far its best section, so his lecture on that same subject would probably have been well worth catching.

And now we have a new reason to be interested in the CCH: its 2010 calendar contains several pictures of the Voynich Manuscript, which is an especially good reason for Cipher Mysteries readers to want their own copy. But you can’t buy this in the shops (except on eBay, where you can buy pretty much everything that isn’t actually thermonuclear): according to the CCH’s Barry Carleen…

If any of your subscribers would like to order calendars, they can send an e-mail to [email protected] and we’ll be glad to provide them as long as supplies last.

So there you go – a happy 2010 to you all! 🙂

Proto-Swedish Voynich food theory…

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As far as theories of the Voynich Manuscript’s linguistic origin go, people have over the years proposed proto-Russian, proto-German, proto-Dutch, in fact proto-just-about-every-European-language-going… yet it seemed that nobody had tried Swedish as a possible match for Voynichese.

However, when I gave this a go, I found to my great surprise that the two meshed really well, particularly the unique “dinka-donka” (i.e. ‘verbose’) scansion they apparently share. After a bit of work, I managed to compile the following set of letter equivalences (EVA transcription in square brackets):-

chefese

(The full EVA key maps “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” →  “o–bmc–r-stxkeydnfu—-h-“, and
“ch / sh / ckh / cth” → “v / i / g / w“). This transforms the following Voynichese on f116v…

pchal larar al ckhal rain alol fchy rpchey shfy ches ar opche kan dlr
olkeey rain shey qoraiin shey ol lchedy rshey qokeedy chtain oly
soraiin ykeey rain sheeky qokain sheey qol cheds ar r arshe
qokain ar raiin shek okain yrshey qolchey okain shckhy qokam
shedy qokeey qoka qokeey lchey olkey raiin cthar shckhy qotar

…to the proto-Swedish plaintext…

yvot tonon ot got nork otet cvh nyvmh ich vmf on eyvm sok btn
etsmmh nork imh denorrk imh et tvmbh nimh desmmbh vuork eth
fenorrk hsmmh nork immsh desork immh det vmbf on n onim
desork on norrk ims esork hnimh detvmh esork igh desox
imbh desmmh deso desmmh tvmh etsmh norrk won igh deuon

I then needed to find a remote community where this (otherwise lost) proto-Swedish is still in use. After an extensive research trail, I uncovered rare video footage of the one person in the world who still talks this language: and, amazingly, I was able to link up the text in the Voynich Manuscript’s recipe section with a short section of the tape (as per the subtitles), proving without a shadow of a doubt that the eleventh starred paragraph on f116r contains the recipe for meatballs:-

SCmeatballs-subtitled-2

You couldn’t make it up. Nor perhaps would you want to. 🙂

Voynich quill forensics…?

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Not sure if anyone has suggested this before, but I was musing on Locard’s exchange principle (which proposes that “with contact between two items, there will be an exchange”) and how that relates to the quills used to write the VMs. Marxists are fond of pointing out how both people and machines are consumed by industrial processes (not just raw materials, the notional “consumables”), and so surely the same should be true of writing with a quill pen?

That is, because the process of writing with a quill pen blunts (i.e. consumes) the quill, Locard’s exchange principle suggests that we should in theory be able to find tiny fragments of quill pen embedded in or around the stream of Voynichese ink. All you’d need is an idea of what you’re looking for, a microscope, access to the VMs, and a fair bit of patience. 🙂

How might that help us? Well… a quill is a feather, and feathers are organic, so feathers have DNA. We might therefore be able to use the quill fragment DNA in conjunction with the vellum DNA to try to physically locate where the writing was done.

Of course, if you wanted to get a full genome from a feather (as per this paper), you’d need more than microscopic fragments to work with. But I’d guess a determined investigator would be able to identify the species even from a tiny piece. And if it turned out to be a dodo feather, we might be able to prove that the VMs was a spectacularly knowing hoax courtesy of insiders at Rudolph II’s court. 😉

More 1400-1500 dress sources…

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Just in case you think my take on VMs history is excessively Italo-centric, I should point out that Jacqueline Herald’s (1981) “Renaissance Dress In Italy, 1400-1500” has a sister volume in the series – Margaret Scott’s (1980) “Late Gothic Europe, 1400–1500“. Considering that Herald’s book goes for £400+, this is a relative bargain at a mere £120 or so. Doubtless both are excellent, with Herald’s opus probably having helped countless SCAdians to reproduce that much-prized Isabelle d’Este look over the years: yet given that the pair are a fine gold thread under thirty years old each, might there be something more current to which we could look?

For medieval dress, the answer could be (the very same) Margaret Scott “head of the history of dress at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and a consultant on historical dress for the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other museums“, according to this page. Her most recent book is “Medieval Dress and Fashion” (2009), though her (1986) “A Visual History of Costume: The 14th and 15th Centuries” and (2003) “Medieval Clothing and Costumes: Wealth and Class in Medieval Times” both seem likely to be just as relevant.

All the same, I do suspect that for Voynich research Jacqueline Herald’s book (summarised here) will ultimately prove to be the most useful of  all of these. As a starting point, Herald’s glossary of Quattrocento clothing terms has ended up online: I also liked Vangelista di Antonio Dellaluna’s practical page on Renaissance jewelry and her Garb Closet, plenty of good (if sometimes SCA-centric) stuff.

But then again, if you look for similar book recommendations to Herald & Scott in LibraryThing, you find “Dress in Italian painting, 1460-1500” (1975) by Elizabeth Birbari, the five-volume “Storia del costume in Italia” (1964-1969) by Rosita Levi Pisetzky, “The Dress of the Venetians, 1495-1525” (1988, Pasold Studies in Textile History) by Stella Mary Newton, and “Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing” (2005) by Carole Collier Frick, let alone the slightly earlier “Gilding the Market: Luxury And Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy” (2006, Middle Ages Series) by Susan Mosher Stuard.

In short, is there some kind of Quattrocento fashion / dress book glut going on here (but which we were collectively completely unaware of)?

“Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500″…?

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While searching for things to do with the humanist minuscule hand, I stumbled across a reference in a short 2002 paper by Jessica Wilbur to an oversized 1981 hardback by Jacqueline Herald called “Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500“. Now, I thought, that sounds like a book I’d really like to buy: only to find out from Bookfinder.com that copies now go for between £403 and £836. Ohhhh well…

However, according to the M25 Consortium and WorldCat there are at least 20 copies of it in libraries not too far from me (including the British Library, the Warburg Institute, Kingston University, Cambridge, Oxford, etc), so it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of this by some [hopefully legal] means.

Is this something any Cipher Mysteries reader has already seen? It seems almost the perfect book to have in one hand while examining the various Voynich nymphs’ costumes: and it seems strange that such a strong visual resource didn’t feature in the recent Austrian documentary. Maybe its very rarity has made it lost to a whole generation of researchers, who knows?

Update: having posted this, I settled down to continue reading the copy of Mark Phillips’ (1987) “The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence” that I bought yesterday in the very pleasant  Oxford Street Books in Whitstable. And in footnote 22 on p.40 there just happens to be… yes, a direct reference to Jacqueline Herald’s book. What are the chances of that, eh?

Happy New Year, and some predictions for 2010…

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Once again, it’s time to roll out and dust off the Cipher Mysteries crystal skull crystal ball (no, I didn’t buy it on eBay, nor did I nick it from the British Museum) to peer dimly ahead to 2010. What will it bring us all?

Of course, 2009’s big news was the radiocarbon dating of four slivers of the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum for the recent Austrian TV documentary, which yielded an oddly early date (1405-1438 at 95% confidence). We’re still waiting for the actual data to get a better feel for the historical reasoning: doubtless there will be more announcements to come during this year (some from the Beinecke Library itself), perhaps as the English version of the documentary edges closer to broadcast. Hence…

Prediction #1: by mid-2010, carefully combining the raw data from the documentary with what we already know about the Voynich Manuscript will move us to an entirely new and unexpected (though no less paradoxical or awkward) mainstream position.

Of course, hard evidence is doubly hard for some to swallow: while behind the scenes, quite a few people are silently beavering away with their own VMs-related stuff. For example, I can’t help but notice Jorge Stolfi pa-/de-trolling the Wikipedia Voynich:Talk page, which rather makes me wonder what he’s up to. Hence…

Prediction #2: throughout 2010, a whole bunch of Voynicheros will exit stage right, the arrival of hard evidence having spoiled their long-running soft evidence gig. At the same time, a whole scrum of other researchers will join in the VMs pool party. The Voynich research landscape will become more overtly historical, less wildly speculative (and about time too).

In 2009, we’ve seen quite a few academics looking at the VMs: but I think it’s fair to say that none to date has fully engaged with the breadth and heterogeneity of the evidence that plagues & intrigues us all. If Lynn Thorndike were alive, I’d be camping outside his office 🙂 but circa 2010 what kind of historian has the breadth and daring to take on the risk of rising to this challenge? Anthony Grafton? Charles Burnett [in 2010]?

Prediction #3: I suspect that late in 2010, we’ll see the arrival of perhaps the first truly heavyweight academic Voynich Manuscript paper for decades. I just can’t shake the intuition that something big is coming this way…

Combine all of the above with the conservative set of analyses carried out by Andreas Sulzer’s team, and I think you get:-

Prediction #4: throughout 2010, the Beinecke Library’s curators will receive many requests for specific art historical forensic tests to be carried out on the VMs, such as multispectral imaging on the marginalia / paints / inks (to try to separate out the different authorial and/or construction layers) and/or vellum DNA analysis (to try to reconstruct the original bifolio grouping). However, they will probably say ‘no’ to all of them (a shame, but there you go).

Ummm… here’s looking forward to 2011, then! 😉

Bacon = Shakespeare, 2009 remix…

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A modern day Baron Frankenstein (actually, a mild-mannered Norwegian) has wired up the electrodes to a monstrous-looking zombie most thought long dead. It rises! It stands! It lives! It liiiiives!!!!!

I’m referring, of course, to the whole idea of using wobbly cryptography to prove that Francis Bacon = William Shakespeare, that David Kahn somewhat derisively called “enigmatology”. Note that I’m not saying the end result is wrong (even though I personally suspect that Shakespeare collaborated rather more thoroughly than his “solo genius” biographers tend to claim), but rather that the kind of reconstructive Renaissance pseudo-cryptography usually employed to try to prove that end result is usually pants central highly questionable guff.

So… what of church organist Petter Amundsen’s “Sweet Swan of Avon – The Shakespeare Treasure” claims (which I found via the forum posts here)? It’s a pretty chunky bit of TV: four 50 minute episodes, of which part 1, part 2 and part 3 are available for viewing online (mostly in Norwegian).

It all (somewhat inevitably) starts with the original version of “Good frend for Iesus SAKE forbeare…” (the start of Shakespeare’s Stratford plaque, much loved by Shakespeare conspiracy novelists), with its camelcase and extraneous dots, all good grist to Renaissance cryptographers’ mills (they also loved hiding things with doubled letters). Only in this case, Amundsen reads them as our old friend the Baconian biliteral cipher:-

BAAAB - AAAAA - AABAA - AABBB - BAAAA
  S       A       E       H       R
AAAAB - AAAAA - BABBA - AABAA - AABAA - ABBBA
  B       A       Y       E       E       P
BAAAA - AABAB - BAABA - AAAAA - BABAB - AAAAA
  R       F       T       A       X       A
BAAAA - AAAAA - BABAA - AAAAA - BAAAA
  R       A       W       A       R

…which leaves him with the letters…

S A E H R
B A Y E E P
R F T A X A
R A W A R

…where he arbitrarily transposes the two coloured groups into “W SHAXPEARE” (blue) and “FR(ancis) BA(con)” (red). But what to make of the mysterious “YETA” in the middle? After some (frankly rather kabbalistic) meditation, Amundsen decides to add “DUST” to “YETA” (modulo 24, I think) to get:-

+   Y E T A
    D U S T
    C A N V

 …thus filling out the middle of his letter rectangle even further…

S A E H R
B A C A E P
R F N V X A
R A W A R

 …i.e. “FR(ancis) BACAN V(erulam)”.

OK, I’ll admit it: we’re only halfway through the first episode of four and my patent-pending “pants-o-meter” is already shrieking like a robotic pig fed AC rather than DC… not a good start. It goes on to talk about the School of Night, the importance of the number 53, freemason plots, Oak Island, la-la-la.

Ultimately, it comes down to the age-old question: cryptographically, do I think Amundsen is (a) onto something or (b) on something? Sadly for Baconian enigmatologists everywhere, I have to say that (b) is looking far more likely. But please feel free to watch all four episodes yourself, don’t let me stop you making up your own mind. 🙂

“The Curse of the Voynich”, now back in print…

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Today’s brief news is that 100 copies of “The Curse of the Voynich” have just arrived from the printers, so those 20-odd people who ordered one from Amazon this month should be receiving it by the New Year (post willing). Alternatively, if you’d like your own shiny signed copy, order one via PayPal using the “Buy Now” [UK, Europe, R.O.W.] buttons at the top of the Compelling Press book page, let me know by email, and I’ll add a suitable anagram on the front page for you. 🙂