MS Coislin 338 & the Voynich Manuscript…?

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Rene Zandbergen recently stumbled upon a circular drawing in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France’s MS Coislin 338, and wondered whether it might be “a possible precedent for a Voynich astronomical illustration, where the original MS is Greek“, just as for two other Greek manuscripts (Codex Taurinensis C VII 15 and MS Vat Gr. 1291) he turned up and wrote about in other years. What he finds interesting is that “the Voynich MS astronomical illustrations are rather arcane, and do not deal at all with the astronomy of the times of Copernicus and after, but with the times much before that.”

To my eyes, though, comparing just one page of MS Coislin 338 with the thrice-great APOD picture isn’t the whole story. You see, a fair few years ago Voynich researcher John Grove proposed that the VMs’ Quire 9 had been misbound along an incorrect fold after the quire numbers had been added but before the folio numbers were added: and if you follow his argument through, you discover that without much doubt the VMs originally placed its 16-way “sun-face” page f68v1 immediately adjacent to its 12-way “moon-face” (APOD) page f67r1.

f68v1-f67r1-tiny

This elegant (but still fairly basic) codicological observation is why I find the APOD comments (for each of the three times the picture on the right has come up) lacking, because nearly all of them were made without grasping these two pages’ original context. OK, so far so “Curse of the Voynich” (pp.58-61, to be precise) – and I would add that it seems fairly unlikely to me that the two (very different) blue paints on these pages were added when they were in their original page order. But what is new for 2010 is that MS Coislin 338 also contains a 16-way circular diagram (fol. 121v) placed immediately adjacent to Rene’s 12-way circular diagram (fol. 122r). And the zigzag edging on the two right-hand 12-way drawings seems eerily familiar too…

f121v-f121r-tiny

So… you might reasonably ask what amazing secrets this section of MS Coislin 338 holds: but if you did, you’d perhaps be a little disappointed to find out that it simply contains a Greek commentary by Theon of Alexandria (Hypatia’s father, as historical proto-feminist conspiracy fans may already know) on Ptolemy’s Handy Tables. Intriguingly, this particular copy was made in the 15th century – but that may (for the moment) be just about as far as we can take this whole parallel.

The problem we face is that we simply don’t know whether such irritatingly good matches between documents are causal, correlative, or (given the large number of documents that have been trawled over the years for comparison) simply random. Really, it would take someone sitting down with a proper critical edition of Theon’s commentary around these pages to see what kind of data it describes, and then prolonged meditation on what we might think about the Voynich Manuscript’s possibly-linked pages as a result. But is anyone likely to do that? I’m not sure… but perhaps we’ll see!

Edith Sherwood on the Vinland Map dating…

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Edith Sherwood very kindly left an interesting comment on my “Voynich Manuscript – the State of Play” post, which I thought was far too good to leave dangling in a mere margin. She wrote:-

If you read the 14C dating of the Vinland Map by the U of Arizona, you will find that they calculate the SD of individual results from the scatter of separate runs from that average, or from the counting statistical error, which ever was larger. They report their Average fraction of modern F value together with a SD for each measurement:

  • 0.9588 ± 0.014
  • 0.9507 ± 0.0035
  • 0.9353 ± 0.006
  • 0.9412 ± 0.003
  • 0.9310 ± 0.008

F (weighted average) = 0.9434 ± 0.0033, or a 2SD range of 0.9368 – 0.9500

Radiocarbon age = 467 ± 27 BP.

You will note that 4 of the 5 F values that were used to compute the mean, from which the final age of the parchment was calculated, lie outside this 2SD range!

The U of A states: The error is a standard deviation deduced from the scatter of the five individual measurements from their mean value.

According to the Wikipedia radiocarbon article:
‘Radiocarbon dating laboratories generally report an uncertainty for each date. Traditionally this included only the statistical counting uncertainty. However, some laboratories supplied an “error multiplier” that could be multiplied by the uncertainty to account for other sources of error in the measuring process.’

The U of A quotes this Wikipedia article on their web site.

It appears that the U of Arizona used only the statistical counting error to computing the SD for the Vinland Map. They may have treated their measurements on the Voynich Manuscript the same way. As their SD represents only their counting error and not the overall error associated with the totality of the data, a realistic SD could be substantially larger.

A SD for the Vinland map that is a reasonable fit to all their data is:

F (weighted average) = 0.9434 ± 0.011 ( the SD computed from the 5 F values).

Or a radiocarbon age = 467 ± 90 BP instead of 467 ± 27 BP.

I appreciate that the U of A adjust their errors in processing the samples from their 13C/12C measurements, but this approach does not appear to be adequate. It would be nice if they had supplied their results with an “error multiplier”. They are performing a complex series of operations on minute samples that may be easily contaminated.

I suggest that this modified interpretation of the U of A’s results for the Vinland Map be confirmed because a similar analysis for the Voynich Manuscript might yield a SD significantly larger than they quote. I would also suggest that your bloggers read the results obtained for 14C dating by the U of A for samples of parchment of known age from Florence. These results are given at the very end of their article, after the references. You and your bloggers should have something concrete to discuss.

So… what do I think?

The reason that this is provocative is that if Edith’s statistical reasoning is right, then there would a substantial widening of the date range, far more (because of the turbulence in the calibration curve’s coverage of the late fifteenth century and sixteenth century) than merely the (90/27) = 3.3333x widening suggested by the numbers.

All the same, I’d say that what the U of A researchers did with the Vinland Map wasn’t so much statistical sampling (for which the errors would indeed accumulate if not actually multiply) but cross-procedural calibration – by which I mean they experimentally tried out different treatment/processing regimes on what was essentially the same sample. That is, they seem to have been using the test as a means not only to date the Vinland Map but also as an opportunity to validate that their own brand of processing and radiocarbon dating could ever be a pragmatically useful means to date similar objects.

However, pretty much as Edith points out with their calibrating-the-calibration appendix, the central problem with relying solely on radiocarbon results to date any one-off object remains: that it is subject to contamination or systematic uncertainties which may (as in Table 2’s sample #4) move it far out of the proposed date ranges, even when it falls (as the VM and the VMs apparently do) in one of the less wiggly ranges on the calibration curve. Had the Vinland Map actually been made 50 years later, it would have been a particularly problematic poster (session) child: luckily for them, though, the pin landed in a spot not too far from the date suggested by the history.

By comparison, the Voynich Manuscript presents a quite different sampling challenge. Its four samples were taken from a document which (a) was probably written in several phases over a period of time (as implied by the subtle evolution in the handwriting and cipher system), and (b) subsequently had its bifolios reordered, whether deliberately by the author (as Glen Claston believes) or  by someone unable to make sense of it (as I believe). This provides an historical superstructure within which the statistical reasoning would need to be performed: even though Rene Zandbergen tends to disagree with me over this, my position is that unless you have demonstrably special sampling circumstances, the statistical reasoning involved in radiocarbon dating is not independent of the historical reasoning… the two logical structures interact. I’m a logician by training (many years ago), so I try to stay alert to the limits of any given logical system – and I think dating the VMs sits astride that fuzzy edge.

For the Vinland Map, I suspect that the real answer lies inbetween the two: that while 467 ± 27 BP may well be slightly too optimistic (relative to the amount of experience the U of A had with this kind of test at that time), 467 ± 90 BP is probably far too pessimistic – they used multiple processes specifically to try to reduce the overall error, not to increase it. For the Voynich Manuscript, though, I really can’t say: a lot of radiocarbon has flowed under their bridge since the Vinland Map test was carried out, so the U of A’s processual expertise has doubtless increased significantly – yet I suspect it isn’t as straightforward a sampling problem as some might think. We shall see (hopefully soon!)… =:-o

The balneological Panteo…

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A nice email arrived from Paul Ferguson, pinging me about Giovanni Antonio Panteo/Pantheo (i.e. not the Giovanni Agostino Panteo who wrote the Voarchadumia as mentioned here before) and his book on baths & spas that is listed in the STC as Annotationes ex trium dierum confabulationibus (printed in Venice 1505).  According to The Story of Verona (1902), this balneological Panteo was “an author of various works in Latin, and a friend of all the learned men of his day“. His book begins:-

Annotationes Ioannis Antonii Panthei Veronensis ex trium dierum confabulationibus ad Andream Bandam iurisconsultum: […] in quo quidem opere eruditus lector multa cognoscet: quae hactenus a doctis viris desiderata sunt. De thermis Caldarianis: quae in agro sunt Veronensi…

There are a fair few copies around: for example, in addition to its other textual artefacts 🙂 , the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds one. Back in 1998, Christies sold one for £1,495, but a cheaper option is to get a microfilm copy (from NYU’s Reel #491). 

Panteo’s original manuscript has been dated to 1488, and is held in Verona as MS 2072 (about a page down):-

Giovanni Antonio Panteo, De thermis Calarianis; Andrea Banda, Sylva Caldariana suo Pantheo. Manoscritto cartaceo, ultimo decennio del secolo XV; mm.300 x 200; ff.150; scrittura corsiva e littera antiqua, inchiostri bruno e rosa; iniziali miniate decorate, tre grandi disegni a penna colorati; legatura recente in cuoio. Ms. 2072

The description given there says that this is a humanistic manuscript, and that it contains three large coloured diagrams “of great interest for the attention and documentary realism with which they represented the characters, landscapes and architectural details: the unknown artist was probably aware of the stories of Saint Orsola that just in those years (between 1490 and 1495) Carpaccio painted in Venice.” However, it’s not clear if those three drawings were reproduced in the Venetian book version: or if they were, how well they transferred across.

Of course, the reason this is relevant to Cipher Mysteries is because of the baths depicted in the Voynich Manuscript: for if the vellum radiocarbon date (1404-1438) is a reliable indicator of when the VMs was written down, then we should arguably be looking closely at 15th century texts on balneology to try to place these into their historical context. This is because the 15th century saw the medicinal cult of the hot springs’ rise to prominence, as well as its fall – by 1500, people believed (according to Arnold Klebs’ book, which I discussed here) that spas and baths were the source of syphilis, causing interest in them to rapidly wane.

Unfortunately, the impression I get is that balneological historians tend not to look very hard at this period: far more effort seems to have been invested on stemmatic analysis of the many manuscripts of The Baths of Pozzuoli than on compiling synthetic accounts of the development arc of balneology in the 15th century. Please let me know of any books that buck this apparent trend!

Anyway, what is interesting is that there is actually a recent monograph on this balneological Panteo: “Prime ricerche su Giovanni Antonio Panteo” (2003 or 2006?) by Guglielmo Bottari, published in Messina by the Centro interdipartimentale di studi umanistici, ISBN 8887541272. 185 p., [2] c. di tav. : ill. ; 22 cm. Not many out there, but 40 euros buys you a copy here. Perhaps that might have more to say about this matter, and possibly even a copy of the coloured drawings in MS 2072 (which would be nice). 🙂

* * * * * *

Update: Paul Ferguson very kindly (and swiftly) passed on a link to a low-resolution scan of an illustration from Panteo’s manuscript featuring debating humanists, baths, and swallowtail merlons – thanks very much for that! 🙂

panteo-illustration

“The Voynich Code” movie…

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EXT. Shadow of a European castle. A balding bloke in dark glasses is laying on a gold-plated deckchair next to a gold-plated swimming pool. Behind him, workmen on ladders painstakingly paint gold leaf over the castle’s swallow-tail merlons. A gold-plated mobile trills.

NIC CAGE (picking up phone)
Manny, I’m busy.

AGENT
Hey, Nicky – looked at the proposal yet?

NIC CAGE
You gotta be kidding me – $6m and four points above the line, all for some book nobody can read?

AGENT
It’s “Da Voy-nitch”, Nicky. A real life Da Vinci Code – no joke! Right now it’s a hot cake, everybody wants a slice of it.

CAGE
But I don’t get it: how does this fit my whole “Joe Schmo” schtick?

AGENT
Don’t sweat the small stuff, that’s what I get my 15% for. Just look at your fax machine…

 CAGE pulls page after page of unreadable text from his gold-plated fax machine.

CAGE
Hey, I can’t read a thing – this doesn’t make any sense…

AGENT
So…

CAGE
You mean… I get to make up basically all my lines and nobody cares?

AGENT
Like, bingo. An unreadable script for an unreadable book. Genius high concept. Spielberg loves it. We all love it.

CAGE
Right… and my character’s back story is… what?

AGENT
You play international bookseller and revolutionary man of mystery ‘Wilfrid Voynich’ …

CAGE
So do I finally get to be married to Helena Bonham Carter this time?

AGENT
Do NOT call her “Johnny Depp’s sloppy seconds”, or I’ll haveta call the u-n-i-o-n. But yes, she’s Lily Boole.

CAGE
Boole is cool. Roger Ebert will love it, again. Are there lots of…

AGENT
…implausible action sequences that add nothing to the plot? Check.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, Wilfrid Voynich is charming, devoted to his wife, yet strangely unsure of his own sexuality.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, you get to fight against the drone armies of the Conspiracy, both for gold and for glory.

CAGE
I don’t know… can they go to five points? I’m getting a good feeling about this…

More APOD spin-off comments…

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The APOD third-time-lucky Voynich page has (just as you’d expect) been reblogged and retweeted near-endlessly, even on the What Does The Prayer Really Say blog, which describes itself as “Slavishly accurate liturgical translations & frank commentary on Catholic issues – by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf“, and has a Catholic priest smiley in the header:  o{]:¬)  Quality-wise, I have to admit that this tramples all over my (similarly-vaguely-autobiographical) ‘surprised balding bloke’ smiley, so score one for God here. =:-o

Interestingly, Fr. Z’s version of the APOD page has a few more pertinent comments than the original APOD page, including one (indirectly) from commenter Brother Charles’ mother who just happens to work at the Beinecke:-

That’s one of our most notorious holdings. We used to have a form letter to answer inquiries about it. Now I suppose it’s a form e-mail. I believe that the best guess is that the manuscript is an herbal with pharmaceutical recipes, etc. All kinds of people, some of them pretty far out, are trying to ‘crack the code.’

Also, Denis Crnkovic (who was once asked to see if the VMs was written in Glagolithic – apparently “it is not“) remarked that “My conjecture (totally unproved) is that it is a “secret writing” codex from around the Prague area used to further the scientific experiments and conclusions of the Prague alchemists.” Well… this would arguably be the #1 Voynich hypothesis, were it not for what seems to be the set of Occitan month-name labels on the zodiac emblems. But a damn good try, anyway. 🙂

As a final aside for the day, here’s a link to a set of urban myths about the Beinecke Library, courtesy of the Yale Daily News. Enjoy!

Voynich Manuscript APOD, yet again…

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The APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) for 31st January 2010 was the Voynich Manuscript’s page f67r1… yet again. By which I mean it was first featured there in 2002, and then again in 2005, and now here it is for the third time round. Before very long, the 2010 discussion page had accumulated a hundred comments and several thousand views: and didn’t it all just annoy the heck out of me.

The overwhelming majority of comments that have been left there are basically the kind of superficial semi-snarky stuff that gee-whiz bloggers who stumble upon the VMs tend to fire and forget: you know… from a twin universe / a board game / you need 3d glasses to read it / language of the birds / solar eclipse / solar calendar / compass rose / herbal written in an “obscure form of Gaelic” / autistic author / mirrored text / language of the Cathars / “lunar phase mandala related to alchemy” / written ” by a snoutband of suspicious blood” / early sci-fi author / Macedonian “after-oak” / the 24 cardinal directions of Fenshui (and so forth). Basically, a load of ingenious and observant people reinventing a century’s worth of dud wheels, all of them simultaneously square and punctured. Sorry to go all curmudgeonly on you, but how is this in any way a positive assistance to the whole VMs research debate?

The only genuinely thoughtful commenter was Neal Brodsky, who wrote: “The text appears to have been set down in a 15th century western European cursive script. The language itself has elements in common with medieval Germanic languages. It would be difficult and perhaps a bit bold to substantiate any further claims about the nature of this MS.” Which is fair enough, but does make it look as though the taxi dropped him off at completely the wrong party. 🙁

I just don’t know: in the same way that Egyptologists honestly don’t need yet another conceptual theory on the Pyramids in order to advance, I can’t honestly say that Voynich researchers need any more off-the-cuff femto-theories gaily geysered up by shooting-from-the-hip clicksperts. In my opinion, what we need now is to construct proper, tightly-focused (yet eminently do-able!) research questions that stand a reasonable chance of advancing our knowledge by being answered, such as:-

  • What precisely was the original order of the Voynich Manuscript’s pages? [and how to go about working this out?]
  • What was the ‘alpha’ [original] state of those pages where we can apparently see layering? [and why were the layers added?]
  • How did Voynichese evolve during the manuscript’s construction [and what does that tell us about Voynichese?]
  • What did the now-unreadable marginalia originally say? [and what happened to them to make them unreadable?]
  • Where was the Voynich Manuscript between 1450 and 1600? [and who owned it?]

All of which is to say that I think the time has long since passed for Voynich research to leave puberty behind, i.e. that it should stop trawling historical byways for half-cocked answers, but instead put its collective efforts towards developing workable questions. OK, maybe that’s not a PR-friendly vote-catcher of a manifesto to nail to the church door, but at least it’s an honest statement of principle, make of it what you will. 🙂

Review: Erich von Däniken’s “History Is Wrong”…

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It’s a real-life Jurassic Park scenario: for decades, all most people have heard of Erich von Däniken is the occasional fossilized soundbite (such as “Chariots of the Gods“). But now, like a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex cloned from dinosaur DNA, von Däniken is back with a new (2009) book called “History Is Wrong” – it lives, it liiiives!

…OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. The von Däniken that emerges from its pages is, let’s say, far less bodacious than the one of old – though his most famous subjects of interests (Nazca lines, metal library, Book of Enoch, Father Crespi, etc) all get wheeled out, you don’t have to read too far in to notice that his delivery has changed from ‘strident’ to (frankly) ‘rather whinging’.

Actually, for the most part “History Is Wrong” focuses less on why historians have got ancient history wrong than on why contemporary historians have got von Däniken wrong –  to be precise, its full title should be “History Is Wrong… About Me!”

Hence, he goes to some lengths to paint a picture of how (particularly in the case of the underground metal library) his sources switched their stories to make him look like a fool; how subeditors and translators altered the slant of his text to make him look like a showman; how journalists (specifically German ones) serially misrepresented his claims to make him look like a conman; and, finally, how everything he wrote back then still remains basically true today. Even if everyone else thinks it’s nonsense.

So, I think the key question this book poses for the reader is whether history is right about von Däniken – is he (or is he not) a foolish showman/conman?

I’ll answer this by looking at how von Däniken looks at the VMs (which is, of course, this blog’s specialist subject). He opens the book by describing how he asked a hundred people if they had heard of the Voynich Manuscript – only one person had (yup, 1% or 2% would be about right). He then quickly recounts its history (getting some bits right, other bits wrong) with a few minor digressions, before leaping sideways on page 21 to Father Crespi, Plato, terraforming, Adam’s book, Berossus’ Babyloniaca, the Avesta, Enoch (for more than 30 pages!), IT = “Information Trickery”, Plato again… until finally (on page 81!) he loops back to the Voynich Manuscript again (but then only very briefly).

From my perspective, I don’t think you can say that von Däniken offers anything useful or insightful about the VMs that hasn’t been rolled out a thousand times before – for example, though he discusses “89” and “4”, he does this in only a fairly superficial way. The only interesting Voynich ‘authority’ EvD cites here is “German linguist Erhard Landsmann” (p.85), who (rather impressively, it has to be said) concludes in his own Voynich paper that “A prophet is thus a pumpkin shaped spacecraft” (p.6). [Note: his name is actually “Landmann”.]

Purely based on EvD’s treatment of the VMs, I can only really conclude that:-

  • von Däniken doesn’t read his sources as carefully or as deeply as he thinks he does.
  • He actively seeks out fragmentary correlations across time and space, which he then misrepresents as compelling evidence of causal connection between the two.
  • He doesn’t really know how to do history: his interest is in peering past mere facts to the shared web of doubt that he believes supports them all, that offers us glimpses of the “gods-as-astronauts” meta-narrative behind historical reality.

In short, his book is no different to the mass of non-working, unmethodical Voynich theories out there already, with the only exception being that he doesn’t even get as far as suggesting an answer. Even for von Däniken, that would be just too whacko a thing to do. 😉

And yet… because his book is in many ways an autobiography, the main thing that emerges from it is actually EvD himself: a charming and driven man, yet a victim in equal parts of his own optimistic enthusiasm and other people’s bullshit. Really, if you had a meal with him circa 2010, I think he would actually be delightful company. Sure, he became madly rich from his books (and goodness knows that few authors manage that these days): but maybe History will indeed turn out to have been (a little, just a little) Wrong About Him – that for all the readers taken in by all his non-history, I suspect that perhaps he conned himself ten times more.

Parchminers, scriveners, lymners, bookbinders, stationers…

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Since the recent Austrian Voynich Manuscript documentary (where the age of the VMs’ vellum was tested using radiocarbon dating), there has been debate about how vellum was created, stocked, sold, stored and used in and around the 15th century. The #1 issue is that if uncut pieces of vellum were routinely held for long periods (years? decades? centuries?), Voynich theories that require a later use dating still stand. Conversely, if you acknowledge that the manuscript itself displays many of the attributes of a copy, Voynich theories that require an earlier creation dating still stand. In which case, hard science would appear to have gone fairly soft on us.

However, simply relying on the possibility of storage is historically imprecise (if not actually woolly): we might well do better to try to understand the medieval parchment ‘ecology’ – that is, the set of trade, guild, and use behaviours associated with parchment – and see how parchment worked within (and for) the broader economy.

An accessible starting point for this is the first chapter of Cyprian Blagden’s (1960) “The stationers’ company: a history, 1403-1959”. According to this, the word stationarius (“stationer”) is mentioned in Oxford and Cambridge in the 13th century, and in London and York in the early 14th century, and denoted a permanent stall-holder (and so “stationary”, though we now spell it as “stationery”) rather than a hawker or peddler: the word quickly became associated with the book trade. The main people involved in 14th century book production in London were:-

  • parchminer – supplied the parchment
  • scrivener – wrote the text
  • lymner – added the illustrations
  • bookbinder – sewed gatherings into quires, and bound quires and covers into books
  • stationer – “arranged for the manufacture of a book to a customer’s order” (p.21)

Of course, these were the trades most directly affected by the introduction of printing: but interestingly, Blagden notes that “even parchminers and text-writers were only gradually squeezed out of the book business” (p.23), and that there was “no evidence of unemployment or of organized opposition” (p.23) to mechanical printing presses in England (unlike in Toulouse in 1477).

Some Voynich theorists have posited that the parchment trade suddenly collapsed, so that old vellum was readily available many years later. Well… it’s true that paper eventually killed the parchment trade, just as video eventually killed the traditional radio star: but the suggestions that circa 1450 parchminers ‘suddenly’ found themselves with warehouses full of uncut parchment that would subsequently sit around unsold for decades or centuries seems just plain wrong. As paper manufacturing slowly evolved (and as madly expensive incunabula gave way to quite expensive books, and as the later gradually became affordable), parchment usage did experience a slow decline – but I can’t see obvious evidence of any rapid ‘phase change’ or ‘parchment catastrophe event’.

For sure, we’re still waiting for the raw radiocarbon dating values so that we can validate the headline dating calculation (and make a sensible assessment of the various uncertainties that would be implicit in it) in a transparent kind of way. But if the date range is basically as claimed, I’m finding it grasp to glimpse the economic mechanism by which sufficient uncut parchment to make the VMs would be stored for even a decade, let alone 50, 100, or 150 years. The numbers don’t seem to add up… all in all, a tricky history challenge.

Coming soon to your TV: “The Voynich Channel”?

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Stephen Chrisomalis, “anthropologist, linguist, historian, and all-around numbers guy” (oh, and author of the soon-to-be-released “Numerical Notation: A Comparative History“), recently blogged about being interviewed as a talking head for a Canadian TV documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, a show that will apparently be hosted by none other than (as he delicately puts it) “WILLIAM FREAKIN’ SHATNER“.

Chrisomalis seems pretty well clued up on the structural properties of Voynichese (which is nice to see), but somehow omitted any mention of whether the documentary makers asked him about the VMs’ curious quire numbers (“abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals”, technically speaking), which appear to be a unique historical feature of the codex. I mean, he is Mr ‘History Of Numbers’, right? D’oh!

No more significant details about the documentary itself as yet… but given that documentary makers are excited enough to be wheeling in Captain Bloomin’ Kirk, it seems pretty safe to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript has suddenly become the lowest-hanging fruit upon the giant TV tree of enigmas. Expect a blizzard of TV Voynich documentaries to air around December 2010 – OK, perhaps not quite enough to make up an entire “Voynich Channel“, but a relatively cornucopic amount nonetheless. 🙂

Hmmm… the image of countless documentary teams being scrambled worldwide to film the VMs brings to my mind Nina Hagen’s #1 “99 Luftballons“, whose lyrics hinge on the idea that a set of toy balloons could trigger a nuclear armageddon. When does reaction become overreaction?

99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

🙂

SCRIPT 1.2 – special Voynich section…

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Web-journal SCRIPT (est. 2009) aims to publish articles / videos / pictures / (OK, pretty much anything, really) on “abject textual forms including: code arrays, asemic writing, graffiti, tattoos, and any other marginal(ized) scripted utterance“. Unsurprisingly, for its next issue the editors have put out a call for roughly-5000-word up-to-the-minute belletristic commentaries on the Voynich Manuscript and similar cryptotexts:-

While almost certainly undecipherable (various master WWII code-breakers and modern computers have tried), the Voynich manuscript — a.k.a, the Beinecke Library’s “MS 408” — has arguably more value in abstraction than it would in translation. A word-filled but language-less text; a collection of empty signs; a simulacra of simulacra — one can accept that texts like this may forever remain origin-less and undeciphered. But as such, they offer textual culture something unique: words and text abstracted from the weight of functional representation, semantics, and the other duties language routinely performs. As such, these cryptotexts can be seen as a form of literary abstraction that, like other forms of asemic art, puts a great deal of tension on the graphic/text binary and challenges readers to reevaluate their relationship, and conception of, each.

Articles on, and artistic treatments of, the Voynich manuscript itself are welcome as are those concerned with other failures of cryptanalysis and other texts/language systems that remain undeciphered and/or untranslated.

Doubtless you already know whether or not you are interested…

The editors’ apparent position – that the VMs is probably indecipherable, but that we stand to learn a lot about how we look at such linimal objects from our reaction to them – is something I’m broadly sympathetic to. However, to me the greatest value of the VMs comes from the complicated historical journey we face to reconstruct its fragmented conceptual origins. That is, trying to work out why its meaning continues to evade us should help us to understand the limits of modern thinking and knowledge when applied to difficult historical problems.

All the same, I rather suspect that lumping the Voynich Manuscript in with meaningless writings (whether consciously asemic or not) would be a category mistake: what lies beneath its shiny cryptographic surface is most likely hyperrationality, not anti-rationality or irrationality… three very different things.