Right now, I have a Voynich Centenary Conference hangover…

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…though not at all from the nice Frascati DOC we were pleasantly plied with at lunchtime on the Friday.

No: rather, my head is still buzzing from the giant mass of tangled, fascinating stuff that came my way – some from the presentations, but a lot from conversations and spirited debates. So alas, anyone hoping that I’ll post some kind of a conference-in-a-nutshell micro-report here is going to be sadly disappointed: it’s going to take me months to work through it all, there’s just too much.

So, in no particular order, what you broadly have to look forward to is:
* My reflections on the radiocarbon dating
* Voynich and the Rosicrucians (yes, really!)
* Rich SantaColoma’s ‘Optical Instruments Hypothesis’ (but radically revisited)
* Claudio Foti’s new ‘Poggio Bracciolini’ hypothesis
* Rafal Prinke’s news on Baresch & Sinapius
* Rene Zandbergen’s discussion of Carl Widemann
* Johannes Albus’s new angle on f116v’s maddening marginalia
* Why I think Voynich statistics are a roadblock, not a bridge
* The three next big challenges – scans, error rates, language mapping
* etc

PS: having said all that, if you were there and have any neat photographs you’d like to share, please upload them to one of the many filesharing sites out there and send me through a link to them, as it would be quite nice to put together a bit of a visual walkthrough here. (Thanks Karsten for your photos!)

National Geographic – Ancient X Files – Voynich Manuscript documentary!

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WAGtv’s “Ancient X-Files” Voynich episode will first air at 20:40 on 10th May 2012 on the National Geographic channel in France, where the series has been retitled “De l’ombre à la lumière“. Though the episode is entitled “Sodom and Gomorrah” (“Sodome et Gomorrhe” in French), be reassured that 50% of it is the Voynich part. 🙂

And by a nice coincidence which Nat Geo’s schedulers seem, errrm, mostly unaware of, this is also when I shall be in Frascati preparing for the upcoming Voynich Centenary conference the following day. It’s time to tell some of the story behind the documentary…

1. “The Curse of the Voynich” Meets WAGtv…

Back in 2006, the general consensus was that the Voynich Manuscript was an extraordinary late 16th century hoax, constructed to part an extraordinary fool (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II) from his extraordinary money (600 gold ducats). And without the 2009 radiocarbon dating (which dated its vellum to 1404-1438 with 95% confidence) to help ground the whole debate, the Voynich was arguably even more like a blank historical canvas (upon which you can paint whatever theory you like) than it is today. Sad, really.

2006 was also the year that I wrote and published “The Curse of the Voynich” (copies still available, and at very reasonable air mail rates 😀 ), with the aim of summing up the research I had built up over several years – basically, that the Voynich Manuscript may well have been written by Northern Italian Quattrocento architect Antonio Averlino (better known as “Filarete“).

However, put these two things together and it should be no great surprise that, a couple of nicely appreciative reviews aside, my tree of research fell onto the Voynich research community’s forest floor with a deafening silence. (If, indeed, it fell at all.) Personally, I still think my book is a great piece of historical detective work (I posted a nice summary of it here), but I suspect it remains too “out there” for almost all Voynich researchers, most of whom seem to rely more on lightweight inductive logic than on the kind of heavyweight hyper-deduction I had to employ. 🙂

Fast forward to early 2010, when London-based factual television production house WAGtv were working on the the first series of Ancient X Files for National Geographic. Their producers approached me to ask if I would contribute to a 22-minute documentary segment based on “The Curse of the Voynich”: though it just missed the cut for series 1, I was delighted to be able to take part when they subsequently wanted to include it in series 2.

This whole Voynich segment was filmed over five days last summer [2011] in locations centrally linked to Antonio Averlino’s life and works, such as the Ospedale Maggiore & Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and the Campanile in Venice (looking down onto the onion domes of St Mark’s Basilica). Just so you know, the televisual conceit was to visually reconstruct the evidence chain and associated reasoning that led to my whole Averlino theory. In case your inner historian finds this somewhat annoying, please take a few deep breaths and remind yourself that “it’s just television” – if you want to read up on it properly, there is at least a 230-page book you can buy that presents all the evidence in a reasonably compelling way. 😉

2. Meet The Experts…

Naturally, there are few things more boring than seeing some random expert (yes, even me) expound to camera for 20+ minutes (which is, of course, why Dr Who always has an assistant). Hence the producers assembled a delightfully eclectic set of experts for me to talk with on camera, basically with the idea of placing the various deductive leaps I patiently ground out of the academic literature into their helpful mouths:-


Filippo Sinagra, a well-known Venetian code-breaker with a lifelong interest in historical & Mafia ciphers;


Stefano Calchi Novati, a Milanese architect (whose motorbike I sadly couldn’t ride because of insurance issues);


Rosa Barovier Mentasti, a thoroughly delightful glassware expert descended from the Murano glassmaker Angelo da Barovier, but whom I somehow managed not to capture on camera (the image is from Mauro Vianello’s nice glass blog);


A magnificent Murano master glassblower whose name unfortunately escapes me, and whose wonderfully rich Venetian accent proved near-impenetrable even to our Italian translator; and…


Well-known Venetian architect and historian Francesco da Mosto, presenter of several top-rated BBC series with the power to make many British women of a certain age swoon unashamedly.

OK, now that we’ve got past all the raw factuality, what really happened while filming?

3. Nine Top Secret Things That Happened On The Shoot

(1) I’d only previously been to Venice out of season (if you’re going, I recommend December), and July 2011 turned out to be a raging heatwave. Despite that, John Blystone (the director) had me marching back and forth across endless Venetian bridges to the point that I nearly got heatstroke, and had to sit down in a quiet corner eating ice cream for an hour while I cooled all the way back down to merely hot. Note that I don’t hold this against him – John’s a driven guy and wanted to get the best possible coverage going into the edit, and if he can make a bald historian bloke like me come out tolerably OK on camera, I have to say he’s pretty much on fire. 🙂

(2) While getting over heatstroke, I found out that Cesira (the translator) used to run short film festivals, though she bemoaned the fact that Italian film-makers were typically so talky that they thought 20 minutes should qualify as ‘short’. I then told her how I used to write stories in 30 words or less as a writing challenge: she didn’t believe that that was even remotely possible, so insisted I write her one there and then. Knowing that the crew was flying on to Rome to film a Da Vinci-related segment, this is what I squeezed into a mere 15 words:-

“Not again, Lisa!”
“What?”
“Every time you fart, you do that smile.”
“Sorry, Maestro Leonardo!“

(3) While in the Piazza San Marco, I suddenly noticed that the columns of San Marco and San Theodoro were leaning very slightly towards each other. Luckily I managed to straighten them up before any tourists got crushed by falling stones: an excellent result!

(4) I’d be a lying hound if I didn’t say it was more than a bit of a thrill meeting Francesco da Mosto & his lovely family in their Venetian palazzo, and lightly zipping around the canals with him in his near-iconic blue boat. Francesco is an enthusiastic, positive, laughter-filled big-kid-puppydog of a man that made me want to smile every time he opened his mouth: probably half the shots were ruined because we were having too much fun to look serious in an appropriately documentary-style way. I love the guy to bits, and wish him the very best of luck with finishing his historical novel “The Black King” (which, spookily enough, one online description I read said revolved around John Dee and a mysterious enciphered manuscript).

(5) When we got back to San Marco after filming (and eating late) in Murano, the tide was so high that we couldn’t get a boat into the canal near the apartment (“Casa Cioccolata”, a nice little place). This meant the crew had to carry all the equipment barefoot across the waterlogged piazza in the moonlight: a thoroughly surreal experience!

(6) Once nice thing in Venice which didn’t make it into the final edit was that the newly-restored clock tower close to St Mark’s Basilica has a 24-hour clockface Voynich researchers may well find eerily familiar:-


(7) Another scene which didn’t make the final cut involved comparing the pinion gears in that same clock with some of the (remarkably similar) gear-shaped leaves in the Voynich Manuscript. This didn’t quite fit the narrative the producers & editors wanted to extract from “The Curse”, so never made it in. If you do get a chance to take a tour around the insides of the Horologia clock, please do – highly recommended!

(8) While we were filming in Antonio Averlino’s Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, I was showing the curious pipework in the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 13 to the architect Stefano Calchi Novati when there was a surprised call from around the corner. The sound recordist (Stefano Varini) had noticed some decaying ancient terracotta pipework embedded in the fabric of the building – I knew it was supposed to be there, but had never actually seen it. Thanks to the “access-all-areas pass” a well-accredited film crew has, we had gone through to the far quadrant of the Ospedale that I hadn’t previously seen. It was really wonderful to see for myself what I can only conclude was Averlino’s original pipework still in situ – and that it turned out to be so very similar to the Voynich’s pipework was an even greater surprise.

(9) For me, the most amazing thing of all actually came after the documentary had finished shooting. Late on the last day, I had taken a picture from the right end of the middle wall of the Castello Sforzesco, looking out over the front wall: the reconstructed Filarete tower is in the middle, and the Duomo is clearly visible in the distance just to the right of it.

But it later struck me that if I had taken the same shot from the right-hand corner of the backmost wall (which is the only part of the castello that Averlino is known to have actually built), the Duomo would have ended up looking remarkably like the blue smudge behind the castle in the castle rosette.

Here, all the places Averlino worked are in green, the two rows of swallowtail merlons are in blue, and the place where I think the Voynich castle rosette drawing was made from (the middle of the rear courtyard) is in red. The two red lines mark the extents of the blue smudge just above the Voynich castle rosette.

4. Crew Credits

Seeing as this isn’t even remotely included in IMDb (shame!), I thought I ought to include the crew credits, give them their fifteen seconds of fame:-


Director: John Blystone


Camera: Peter Thorne


Sound: Stefano Varini


Fixer: Dario Canciello


Translator: Cesira de Vito

They were all a pleasure to work with, and I hope to work with them again very soon on the feature-length sequel “The Da Voynich Code” (though possibly not in 3D). 😉

UPDATE!

National Geographic episode rollout (I’ll update this as it propagates through the Nat Geo listings, please let me know if I’ve missed any!):-
* Indonesia: Fri, 11 May 2012 8:00 pm
* Hungary: Titkok és ereklyék (‘Secrets and Relics’): Szodoma és Gomora – 23-24 May 2012.
* UK: 9pm 22nd May 2012, and then several times a day all the way through to the 27th May 2012

Updated Voynich slides + Nat Geo announcement…

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My Villa Mondragone slides are getting ever closer to finished, which is just as well because the 2012 Voynich Manuscript conference is now a scant seven days away (*gasp*). Meanwhile here in Cipher Mysteries Towers, it should be no surprise that the caffeinated clatter of jittery journalists tap-tapping away at the walls for interesting angles on everyone’s favourite mysterious manuscript is starting to build up to a bit of a din, ahh bless.

So… here’s my latest version (#007) of Between Vellum and Prague. If you’ll be at Frascati (and I sincerely hope a good few of you will be!), please feel free to read it beforehand, I really don’t mind – in fact, I far prefer excruciatingly well-informed hecklers. 😉

However, the even bigger big news of the day is that the first screening date for the Voynich documentary I was filmed for in Venice and Milan last summer has just been announced: 9pm 22nd May 2012 on the National Geographic channel here in the UK, and then several times a day all the way through to the 27th May 2012. It’s part of a series called “Ancient X-Files”: my Voynich section time-shares an episode with a section on locating the Biblical cities of Sodom & Gomorrah.

It was a terrific lot of fun making it (despite the Venetian heatwave), as well as a truly amazing experience going to places as part of a full-on documentary film crew – doors that would stay resolutely shut to A. N. Other solo historian magically eased themselves wide, wide open. This meant that I got to see a whole load of wonderful, new surprising things – in fact, everywhere we went, everything we saw & everyone we met all far surpassed my expectations. So even if the Nat Geo documentary stands essentially zero chance of convincing you to drop your own Voynich theory for a picosecond 🙂 , I hope you’ll come along for the ride, a brief busman’s holiday to Quattrocento Italy with my Antonio Averlino / Filarete theory!

Come on, someone you know is bound to be a Nat Geo subscriber, surely? Go on, ask them! 🙂

Anyway, that’s all for the moment, but rest assured I’ll be able to post much more once it airs…

H. C. Reynolds – Chester Hill archive beckons!

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[Quick sidenote before I forget: Claudia Heilmeyer is apparently going to be reading about / from the Voynich Manuscript at 18:40 this Saturday 5th May 2012 as part of the “Prager Nacht” series in Freiburg… make of that what you will.]

Anyhow, a few days ago I posted here about what the Log of Logs had to say about the various ships on which our elusive Tasmanian Tamam Shud suspect H. Charles Reynolds worked during 1917-1919. I then found out a bit more about the RMS Niagara’s 51 log books and posted that here… all close, but no cigar.

Well, here’s a further update, this time thanks purely to the archival diligence of Diane O’Donovan and Cheryl Bearden who both very kindly put some time in to help try to resolve this…

Firstly, Diane O’D has found out where the SS Koonya’s logbooks are held: in the NAA’s Chester Hill archive, way beyond even the fabled back of beyond of Sydney. The suspicion seems to be that the shelfmark “3/4861.2” may also possibly include the archive’s number of nautical miles from civilization. 🙂 But if, kind reader, you do somehow manage to get there, please go through the 1918 logbook and tell us all if you find any mention of H. Charles Reynolds!

In fact, if you do happen to go there, please also have a look at the RMS Niagara’s log book I mentioned before (NAA SP2/1, LOG BOOK NIAGARA, 1917-1918, item barcode 464129) for the period 17th February 1918 to 20th April 1918 when Reynolds was on board, because that’s held in Chester Hill too!

Diane also noted a spectacularly-named book that came up in her search: J. Melton’s (1986) “Ships’ Deserters 1852-1900 including Stragglers, Strays and Absentees from HM Ships” (Library of Australia History, Sydney). She adds “I know the dates are out, but the title was irresistible. 😀” Yup, a hilariously tempting waste of time!

Secondly, I briefly mentioned the also intriguing-sounding NAA document A11803, 1918/89/729 “Correspondence (Intercepted). SS NIAGARA passengers” (1918). Though Cheryl B managed to find a reasonably detailed online description for this, her interpretation is (sadly) that “all messages from these files were letters and telegrams between high ranking UK-US-AUS-NZ-CAN military officials containing sensitive information. In my opinion, ‘Intercepted’ could simply mean ‘Received’, though there is the possibility it was a message intercepted by the Niagara from either a P.O.W. camp located near, I think, Canberra, or a Niagara passenger with ties to the camp.” So… a fascinating little nugget of WWI history, but not nearly nutritious enough to end our Reynoldian fact famine, alas! 🙁

So, we now know what we’re looking for and where to look for it (which is excellent!) We just need a knight on a white charger (a small white car would do) to be our virtual eyes in Chester Hill. Polish your chainmail, we’ve got a hot one for you, Penny! 🙂

So, here’s where the RMS Niagara log book is…

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I don’t know quite what was happening yesterday, but when today I tried a slightly different search interface at the National Archives of Australia, the RMS Niagara’s log books popped up immediately.

Remembering that our man Reynolds was apparently only covering on the RMS Niagara for a single round trip to Canada and back between 17th February 1918 and 20th April 1918, any reference to him is probably only going to appear in a single RMS Niagara log book.

And it seems as though there’s only one 1918 log book it might be: NAA item barcode 464129, a bound volume with contents dated 1917-1918 and held in Sydney, where it’s on open access and marked up as “SP2/1, LOG BOOK NIAGARA”. According to the overall series information, the set of log books held in NSW makes up 32.04 metres of shelfspace:-

Official Log Book(s) issued by the (United Kingdom) Board of Trade, some with Official Wireless Log attached. Entries have been kept in accordance with the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894.

History Prior/Subsequent to Transfer:
Prior to transfer: State Navigation Acts only prescribed that logs could be seized if necessary. Any so seized were held in State Shipping Master’s Office and have been destroyed. The Commonwealth Navigation Act of 1912 (No. 40 of 1913) required that an official log be deposited with the Superintendent of the Mercantile Marine Office. Under a Departmental instruction of 1919, all logs other than those containing records of birth, marriages or deaths, were destroyed.

I’m also slightly intrigued by the NAA document A11803, 1918/89/729 “Correspondence (Intercepted). SS NIAGARA passengers” (1918), whatever that might be. Finally, the RMS Niagara passenger list for 20th April 1918 on arrival in Sydney (barcode 1603134 in SP83/11, specifically 8 pages in box 38) is probably exactly what Cheryl Bearden has already gone over multiple times, but you never quite know with these things. 🙂

So… who’s planning to be in Sydney any time soon? And if so, what do I have to do to persuade you to have a look for young Mr H. Charles Reynolds in this particular RMS Niagara log book?

And the Log of Logs says…

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In the ongoing Tamam Shud hunt for elusive Tasmanian merchant seaman H. C. Reynolds, I got the chance yesterday to go through the Log of Logs, a stonking three-volume antipodean maritime bibliomanic obsession. Or rather, I’ve had a look at Volumes I and II, which (somewhat feebly) is all the British Library has of the set (bah!)

Anyway, as far as the SS Koonya goes, the LoL says that the Archive of New South Wales has eight logs including its 1918 log (shelfmark “3/4861.2”), the one we’re most interested in. However, I wasn’t able to find out any more about this at all from online catalogues of the AONSW’s holdings. So, I’ve emailed the archivists for clarification, and will hopefully have an answer back within 20 days.

Similarly for the RMS Niagara, the LoL says that Australian Archives in Sydney has 51 official logs dating from the periods 1914-1919 and 1932-1939 (shelfmark “SP2 /5418”, it seems to say). But, again, when I searched the NAA catalogues, I couldn’t find anything remotely like this (the nearest thing there was SYDMB20F010, which seems unlikely to me to be a copy of the logs).

So… how frustrating is that? A book that tells you where to look, had you been trawling the archives twenty years ago. But perhaps you have a better idea of how to find out where these have subtly migrated to? Please leave a comment here if you do! 🙂

Voynich Centenary – Nick’s quire number presentation (preliminary)…

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As promised, here are some preliminary slides for my upcoming Villa Mondragone / Voynich 2012 presentation, though not yet with any pictures to illustrate them (boo! hiss!).

Essentially, I’ve wrapped together all my various codicological analyses from the last decade into a single mega-sequence: these explain the step-by-step transformations that I’m fairly certain the Voynich Manuscript underwent once people started adding extra layers (quire numbers, marginalia, folio numbers, etc) to it.

Download the slides here: Between Vellum and Prague.

There’s also a mega-diagram handout to go with it: click on the following picture to expand it out into something you can navigate more effectively. The key graphic convention to note is that I’ve used underlines to denote where quire numbers were physically added (and on which individual digit!)

Ultimately, I think I’ve now managed to reach a level of codicological narrative that explains more or less everything that happened to the manuscript once it landed on the first quire numberer’s desk (though a question mark remains hanging over ‘Q6’, Quire #6 *sigh*). Having said that, I’m perfectly happy for you all to try to shoot any part of it down in flames… I wouldn’t present it to an international conference if I wasn’t reasonably convinced it was basically bulletproof. 🙂

Further reading:
* For basic background, my introduction to the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbering
* For much, much more on the ‘chicken scratch’ marginalia (and on Q8 and Q14), take a look at these posts: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

YAMDTATTH (“yet another michitonese decipherment to add to the heap”)…

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“Alien Embryo” has just now put forward a new transcription (and translation) of the ‘Michitonese’ on page f116v of the Voynich Manuscript. Without any further ado, it is:-

Pot leber u mon poti fer
Mihi con dabas tetar tere tum altos portas
Sic mar, sic mar vic alta maria
Valde ub vento mi (g?) almi (ho?) .

Bring the cup, (pot, cauldron) that it may be drunk on the mountain
To give me the right to rejoice at the gates of the high
It (the mountain?) marks, it marks the victory by the high seas,
Very much my blessing under strong winds.

Long-suffering Cipher Mysteries regulars will no doubt recall Esther Molen’s f116v transcription and translation, along with Edith Sherwood’s crinkly Italian take on the top line (“povere leter rimon mist(e) ispero”, “Plain letter reassemble mixed inspire”).

There’s also Marcin Ciura’s reversal of michiton oladabas to reveal the Czech-like “sa badalo No Tichim” (‘was studied by No Tichy’). And of course, the grand-daddy of them all is William Romaine Newbold’s “michiton oladabas multos te tccr cerc portas”, de-nulled into “michi dabas multas portas”, and then translated into the broadly English-like “To me thou gavest many gates”.

I’m not going to try listing all the others or I’d be here all night (and for what, really?)

Personally, I don’t buy into (or even like very much) any of these transcriptions: I’ve written here plenty of times about how I think most of the text on f116v has apparently been overwritten by a later owner, making transcription a hazardous process, let alone translation. But still people keep on trying… =:-o

Cod Sang 688 and abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals…

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While recently looking into the ‘pm9’ that Thomas Sauvaget found on Cod Sang 839 & trying to understand its relation with Cod Sang 840 and Cod Sang 841, I emailed St Gallen’s manuscript cataloguer Philipp Lenz for a little more information.

Interestingly, his opinion is “that this kind of quire numbering is [not] as extraordinary as you think” and though he unfortunately did not “have the time to look for specific examples of identical quire numbering“, he just happened to have a manuscript on his desk with the same kind of numbering in its text: Cod Sang 688.

Even though Cod Sang 688 has not been fully digitized, Prisca Brülisauer at the St Gallen library hen very kindly emailed me through PDF scans of them: Cod Sang 688 p.174 and Cod Sang 688 p.175.

What did I learn from this? Overall, I get the impression of a good scribe writing fast, thinking and abbreviating to fit the text inside two fairly narrow columns. Given that, I’m pretty sure the scribe isn’t abbreviating the Roman ordinals in a consistent manner or system: though we do (exactly as Philipp Lenz points out) see ‘4t9’ and ‘6t9’, the remainder are abbreviated in a fairly arbitrary manner.

What is also interesting to me is that the tension between Roman numbers and Arabic digits comes out in other ways, such as the ‘iiij’ on p.174 that the scribe has quickly clarified with a 15th century ‘4’ immediately above it. Perhaps Thomas Sauvaget and Philip Neal will have their own comments on these pages too! 🙂

Just so you know, Scherrer’s 1875 St Gallen catalogue dates it to “min. v. J. 1430 […] geschrieben von Fridolin Vischer in Mollis” – Mollis is a Swiss town in the Canton of Glarus, unsurprisingly, not too far from St Gallen. Cod Sang 688 is also linked with Cod Sang 686 and Cod Sang 687.

Oh, and if you’re wondering if there might be a Franciscan connection in all this 🙂 , Cod Sang 686 contains:-

S. 264-265: Epistola lectoris ord. fr. min. Friburg. ad. plebanos in Schoenowe et in Tottenowe de baptismo pueri in utero et Responsum de poenitentia publica. It. Epistola parochi ad abbatem S. Trudberti pro absolutione poenitentis.

The Franciscan Order of Friars Minor in Fribourg did indeed have a library. Bert Roest’s Franciscan library bibliography lists:

Renaud Adam, ‘Peter Falck (ca. 1468-1519) et ses livres: retour sur une passion’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 56 (2006), 253-272.[info on Capuchin library of Fribourg, Switzerland]

Pascal Ladner, ‘Zur Bedeutung der mittelalterlichen Bibliothek des Franziskanerklosters in Freiburg’, in: Zur geistigen Welt der Franziskanerim 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Die Bibliothek des Franziskanerklosters in Freiburg/Schweiz, ed. Ruedi Imbach & Ernst Tremp, Scrinium Friburgense, 6 (Freiburg/Schweiz, 1995), 11-24.

Romain Jurot, ‘Die Inkunabeln des Franziskanerklosters in Freiburg/Schweiz’,Freiburger Geschichtsblätter 81 (2004),133-217.

Just so you know! 😉

The Franciscan Voynich Hypothesis – Roger Bacon redux!

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In his 1665 letter to Athanasius Kircher accompanying what we now call the Voynich Manuscript, Johannes Marcus Marci wrote [Philip Neal’s translation]:-

Doctor Raphael, the Czech language tutor of King Ferdinand III as they both then were, once told me that the said book belonged to Emperor Rudolph and that he presented 600 ducats to the messenger who brought him the book. He, Raphael, thought that the author was Roger Bacon the Englishman. I suspend my judgement on the matter.

You be the judge of what we should think about it. […]

All very well: but surely this begs a huge question, one that everyone has seemed content to duck for the last century. Let’s not forget that Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky de Sebuzin & de Horstein was a lawyer, writer, poet, cryptographer, and even a favourite at the Imperial Court: basically, a smart, super-literate, well-connected cookie. So why on earth did he think this odd manuscript had anything whatsoever to do with Roger Bacon, of all people?

Of course, now that we have a 15th century radiocarbon date for the manuscript, Voynich researchers are a little inclined to be sniffy about Bacon, thinking this mostly a sign of Wilfrid Voynich’s personal folly – or, more specifically, WMV’s antiquarian obsession with finding any link that could be proven between his “Roger Bacon Manuscript” and Roger Bacon himself. Perhaps it was WMV’s burning desire that ultimately claimed poor William Romaine Newbold’s life, drained by his pareidoiliac compulsion to reveal its craquelure shorthand, with his friend Lynn Thorndike then unwillingly laying Newbold’s hopeful nonsense to rest.

But all the same, Roger Bacon is mentioned right there in Marci’s letter: and this is one of the very first things we have that describes the Voynich, as well as the manuscript’s earliest provenance link with Rudolf II’s Imperial Court. So why Bacon? What possible candidate explanations have been put forward?

Actually, surprisingly few of any great credibility, it has to be said. Some people have argued (without great enthusiasm) that the manuscript might possibly be a 15th century copy of a lost work by Roger Bacon. However, its tricky cryptography seems light years beyond Bacon’s era, while the near-complete absence of religious imagery (combined with the nakedness of its ‘nymphs’) also seem sharply at odds with Bacon’s monastic severity, let’s say.

In “The Curse of the Voynich” (2006), I speculated [p.219] that Roger Bacon might have been part of a cover story deliberately planted by the original author. Certainly there is reasonable evidence that the Voynich’s cipher alphabet was consciously constructed to look somewhat archaic to mid-fifteenth century eyes: say, 100 to 150 years older than its physical age. Bacon’s familiarity with Arabic sources and even possibly his (alleged) link with alchemy might then have commended him to the real author as a fake author… back then history was a little more forgiving, let’s say, over such issues as authenticity.

However, a key problem with this hypothesis is that many of the previous objections (the lack of religious imagery, the nymphs) apply just as strongly. Moreover, I’m now fairly sure that Bacon only had alchemical works (falsely) ascribed to him many decades later (around 1590-1600), which further weakens the argument. Hence six years on, I’m not so convinced any more… oh well!

And yet Dr Raphael thought it was Bacon ‘wot dun it’. How can that be? What reasonable explanation might there have been for this otherwise inexplicable lapse of judgement? Well, here’s my 2012 attempt to form an Intellectual History account of all this…

Could it be that the link with Roger Bacon wasn’t in the content of the manuscript but in something to do with Bacon’s Franciscan order? Simply put, might the Voynich Manuscript have been owned by Franciscans? Might it have lived in a Franciscan library? Even more specifically, might it have lived in a Franciscan Library not too far from Lake Constance?

I suspect that the deliberately plain brown habit and white belt of a Franciscan or Capuchin monk would have been an unusual sight at the Imperial Court, where the white and black habits of the Benedictine, Cistercian and Augustinian orders were very much more usual. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but Wikipedia’s list of Imperial Abbeys seems not to contain a single Franciscan friary, monastery or convent.

So, might the messenger bearing the Voynich Manuscript have therefore been a Franciscan monk? If it was, then I think Dr Raphael could indeed have reasonably inferred that the author of the Voynich Manuscript might well have been Roger Bacon: for if it was an enciphered manuscript of the right age from a Franciscan library with an unknown early provenance, Roger Bacon’s authorship could well have been a perfectly reasonable inference, and in fact no less wobbly than most of what has generally been passed off as 20th / 21st century Voynich theorizing.

Hence I’m pretty smitten by this Franciscan Voynich Theory: if true, it would explain Dr Raphael’s testimony in a parsimonious and reasonable way, even if it doesn’t actually help us read the manuscript itself. It may also be the case that the back page (f116v) was a little more readable circa 1610: the presence of what looks like “six pax nax vax ahia maria” interspersed with crosses then might have had far more religious import back then than it does to us moderns.

A reasonable next step might well be to start looking for Franciscan libraries in the Lake Constance area circa 1600-1610: I asked the well-respected Franciscan historian Bert Roest where to look next, and he very kindly directed me to the extensive online list of Works/info on medieval and early modern Franciscan libraries he helps maintain. I should mention quickly that it’s, errrm, a bit big.

Does anyone want to kindly volunteer to trawl through it to compile a preliminary list of candidate Franciscan libraries? For example, Bad Kreuznach, Thuringia, Gottingen, and Frankfurt are all in there, but I suspect that these might all be a little bit too far North, while Fribourg was also perhaps a little too far West. I’m not sure if there are many left! Perhaps this would best be done as some kind of Google Maps overlay?

However, I should caution that real history often turns out to be an unexpected anagram of all the things we suspect: that is, all the right ingredients, but arranged in an order that subtly confounds your expectations and carefully laid plans. Here, the historical ingredients are:
* a Franciscan Library
* Lake Constance (i.e. the Bodensee)
* Rudolf II’s Imperial Court
* a Chinese Whispers-like process whereby the original provenance was forgotten over many decades.

Given all that, I did notice one rather intriguing alternative possibility: Lindau, an Imperial Free City on its own island in the Bodensee. This was formed from the core of a Franciscan Library that was given over to the city in 1528 as part of the Protestant Reformation: it’s now part of the Reichsstädtische Bibliothek Lindau. Once again, do I have any volunteers for looking through the library’s early catalogue?

Really, the question comes down to this: might a representative of the Imperial Free City have taken a strange herbal-like book to Prague circa 1605-1610 from the former Franciscan library in Lindau as a splendidly odd gift for Emperor Rudolf II? Personally, I think it’s entirely possible and – best of all – something that might well be checkable against the historical record. Testable history: it’s something I can’t get enough of! 🙂