Letters hidden in Voynich plants…

by ⋅ 60 Comments

For years, numerous Voynich researchers have pored over the VMs’ confusing images, hunting for any tiny clues that might possibly be hidden beneath the clumsily-applied paint. And yes, I admit that I’ve done probably more than my fair share of this kind of thing (Curse pp.96-102 stands as testament to this endeavour): so it’s now interesting to hear that René Zandbergen believes that there is “rather strong” evidence (a) that some of the plant parts in the VMs have letters to direct the colouring of that page (let’s follow Vera Segre Rutz and call them “colour annotations“), and (b) that those colour annotations are written in German. Here’s what René says:-

If we go back to the [alchemical herbal] web page of Philip Neal, one of the herbals mentioned there is “Vicenza, Biblioteca Bertoliana MS G.23.2.3 (362) s. 15, Italy and Germany“.

Actually, “G.23.2.3” is the old shelf mark and now it is usually referred to as “Vicenza MS 362“. It’s a 15th century Italian herbal, with illustrations from the alchemical herbal tradition. It also says ‘Germany’ because Segre Rutz in her book quoted by Philip describes that it has ‘colour annotations’ in German. Indeed, in the few illustrations I have from this herbal, you can easily see many occurrences of ‘rot’, ‘gr(ue)n’, ‘gelb’ (red, green, blue) and also ‘erd’ (earth) or ‘weiss’. Additionally it has one illustration with alternating red and green leaves, with alternating single ‘r’ and ‘g’ characters written inside.

These all look extremely similar to the few colour markings in the early quires of the Voynich MS. There’s a clear ‘rot’ in the root of f9v (already seen by many), there’s the ‘g’ in f1v, and then there’s another ‘rot’ with some individual ‘r’s under the paint of the viola tricolor mentioned above, and another ‘g’ to the side of the flower on the right.

Here’s one page of Vicenza MS 362 with ‘rot’ in the root (barely visible in this resolution), while this page has alternating ‘r’ and ‘g’ characters (and the same problem).

Well… the first thing to note is that if Vicenza MS 362 is an Italian herbal with German colour hints, then the same could well be true of the Voynich Manuscript – if we’re talking about a manuscript with depictions of Italian castles (there are actually two sets of swallowtail merlons on the nine rosette page), a provenance that (currently) starts in Prague, and Stolfi’s putative “heavy painter” adding organic-looking paints later in the VMs’ life, then there’s no obvious conflict between the two narratives. All of which begs a whole constellation of questions, such as:-

  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to be colour annotations?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to be written in German?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to have been written by the author?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven not to have been written by the author?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be dated independently of the VMs itself?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to have been written by the author of one of the marginalia?

You already know what I’m going to say: let’s look at the primary evidence for ourselves. With the help of Jon Grove’s clever colour remover plugin (which I recently discovered can work inside IrfanView, a highly recommended hack!), you can make a pretty good stab at seeing past the paint to the letters beneath. Here is an image of what I found when I tried this on the top left flower on f9v (the viola tricolor page I mentioned recently):-

top-left-blue-flower-noblue

Note that even though I tried really quite hard to image process this to a satisfactory state, I didn’t really succeed to the degree that I’d hoped: but still, I think it’s good enough to see that (a) the claim that the top left petal clearly says “rot” doesn’t really hold up; (b) that there are colour annotations in at least three of the five petals in the same hand; and (c) that the colour annotations are even smaller than the Voynichese text.

Let’s move on to the claimed colour annotation in f4r’s root. In “The Curse”, I built a whole cryptogrammatic superstructure on top of my reading of this (rotated) as “TOA”, which is one possibility (though in retrospect, I do see how it seems a little hopeful). However, I also think that reading “rot” here (as a column of letters) is just as hopeful but in a completely different way.

f4r-rot-cropped

However, if you assemble these two (claimed) colour annotations onto the same page and add in the f66r and the f116v marginalia, I think you find something really very surprising indeed:-

voynich-marginalia-link

What I’m claiming is that they all seem to share the same unusual-looking “topless p with a preceding upstroke” first letter (even the supposed “portas” word, which I’ve never believed was the right reading at all). What does it mean? Was all this added by the author or by a later owner?

Update: here’s the leaf Voynichese painted over in f2r René mentions in his comment #1 below (but with the green paint removed), with the rather puzzling EVA “ios.an.on“:-

f2r-leaf-closeup-nogreen

“Love In Idleness” and the VMs…

by ⋅ 18 Comments

This week is “Shakespeare Week” at my son’s school: his year have been allocated A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so get to do their lessons in costume for a day. All of which yielded an ideal family opportunity to break out one of those tediously aspirational The-Bard-For-Kidz boxed sets and run through a heavily abridged version with him to see which character he’d like to play (i.e. which outfit we’d be rapidly constructing). And so Puck it was. 🙂

In business school terms, Oberon and Puck come across to me as an idealized (i.e. pragmatic yet dysfunctional) CEO and CTO pair, i.e. where Puck trolls around the wood trying to implement Oberon’s barking mad strategies. Specifically, Puck drops a tincture of “Love In Idleness” into the eyes of those asleep, confident in the knowledge that they will fall in love with the first person (or indeed donkey) they see when they wake up. With hilarious (and/or dramatic) consequences, etc.

Shakespeare is full of folksy herbal stuff like this: in fact, you don’t have to look very far these days to find academics who argue that the witches in Macbeth were talking about not literally about “eye of newt”, “toe of frog”, and “wool of bat”, but referentially to ‘eye’ plants (such as daisies!), buttercups, and holly leaves respectively, as a humorously winking aside to the audience. If correct, this pitches the witches closer to pantomime dames (such as Nana Knickerbocker, my son’s favourite) than to Cruella De Vil… but I digress!

gigglebiz_nanaknicker_150

Anyway, it turns out that ‘Love In Idleness’ is actually viola tricolor, the purple wild pansy (from which modern pansies were cultivated in the 19th century), A.K.A. ‘heartsease’ and hundreds of other names. Which, of course, is the cue for a picture of the plant on Voynich Manuscript page f9v, for which numerous people have suggested viola tricolor as a good match:-

f9v-viola-detail

As normal, the unsympathetically-applied blue paint looks as though it was added by a later owner’s young child: yet what is strange here is why three of the leaves seems to have had yellow paint added instead (which is what my annoying red arrows are pointing at). If you contrast-enhance the bottom-right flower, you can see this quite clearly:-

f9v-viola-closeup-enhanced

Why was this so? I don’t know, but perhaps that’s not a bad question to be asking. Is that enough random digressions for one day? Probably! 🙂

Square #1 & wife #8…

by ⋅ 23 Comments

I remember when I first saw the “Roger Bacon Manuscript”: Wilfrid Voynich brought it with him to Philadelphia for his lecture back in 1921 – my old friend Bill Newbold was there, taking in every word, nodding like the crazy-but-brilliant spiritualist and Antioch-obsessed nutter he was. So it just had to be Bacon behind it all, right? I sat at the back, laughing quietly: but all the same, I couldn’t help but notice that there was something rather disconcerting about the whole thing that demanded being checked out at a convenient point…

My big break came in late 1929, in a chance visit to New York: though charming as ever, Voynich was already sickly, well along the path to his own deathbed. Though he was unwilling at first, I convinced him to let me take a closer look at his manuscript’s oh-so-boring quire 13 – why not, what could a lowly UPhil Italian academic possibly find of interest there? Yet behind the scenes, I’d had help from Johnny Manly and Edith Rickerts: though they’d initially tried to dissuade me from looking closely, I’d carefully zoomed in on the bits they were most intrigued by – and with stunning results. They’d been so utterly wrong to think it was Latin (hardly surprising, given that they were arch-Latinists), when I’d instead worked out it was mostly an abbreviated Italian scribal shorthand…

But honestly – how could I not remember the day when Hans Kraus pitched up to Yale with the 1428 Albergati bible ($204,000, and worth every cent) along with Wilfrid’s “ugly duckling” manuscript. Old man Beinecke had come along for the ride, too: everyone there was trembling with excitement – but I swear nobody could have been sweating like me. If only they knew how I felt! Once dear old Annie Nill had sold it to HPK, I’d worked out where things were leading and had networked my way into the position as Beinecke curator – so my first unofficial job was to remove it from the stacks, to give myself the opportunity of making sense of quire 20‘s recipes for myself. But sad to say, I never quite did, and so my last job there was to retire.

All the same, I have to give a big hooray for the Beinecke’s hi-res scans: though I’d really thought my second act was over (and so did wife #7), with a bit of help from Steve Ekwall I finally managed to get Voynich’s other fountain working. Whoever it was that said that diligence has its own rewards was really onto something – it certainly works for me!

And so here I am once again, back to square #1 and wife #8. Sure, I do my best to prevent anyone on the Voynich mailing list from coming even close to reproducing what I found: but everyone thinks I’m just some kind of ultra-informed troll, and they back off from the truth. Which suits me 100%.

Here’s to wife #9!

The VMs in ten words…

by ⋅ 6 Comments

I just posted up a ten-word description of the VMs on the cool-website-du-jour TenWordWiki:

Unreadable Quattrocento cipher manuscript. Maddening trollbait for PhDs, but cool!

OK, it’s a fairly reasonable first attempt, though perhaps not quite achingly ironic enough for today’s ADD generation. Far hipper bloggers than me would probably have smirkingly jirked:-

Secretly reads: “All your Renaissance base are belong to us”

If you can vaguely remember shorthand advertisements of the 1980s, there’s also an extremely strong argument for:-

If u cn rd ths, u r a fkn genius!

…except that it could be read purely self-referentially. Still, if you’re looking for a high irony factor gag, you’d probably prefer my #2 definition, which I rejected only on the grounds that it wasn’t actually true:-

Proof that bored scribes can obfuscate “Squeamish ossifrage” countless ways.

Of course, with the web being the way it is, there will probably be 200 edits of the page before tomorrow night. But at least you know now what I was thinking! 🙂

The birds, the birds…

by ⋅ 7 Comments

Just a quick Voynich thought for you (I’ve been typing all day and my fingers are tired, so apologies for keeping it very brief) .

On f86v3, have you noticed how the two spotty, side-profile beak, wings-outstretched birds are almost identical? Apart from the fact the one on the right here (which is in the bottom right corner of the actual page) has some kind of heavily-inked line in front of it, and that there’s a faint line behind and to the left of its right wing. (Click on the picture for a full-resolution version.)

f86v3-birds

Furthermore, the vertical lines just to the right of the second bird are in a much fainter ink, which is a bit reminiscent of some of the balneo section drawings I’ve discussed here before. This leaves me with a lingering suspicion that this page may (once again) have been executed in two passes – a first layout pass, and a second obfuscatory pass. Don’t know what it all means, but it’s interesting all the same. 🙂

Rene Z’s bifolio surprise…

by ⋅ 91 Comments

Here’s something neat and slightly unexpected from long-time Voynich Manuscript researcher (and Voynich theory über-skeptic) Rene Zandbergen I think you’ll probably appreciate.

Arguably the least-discussed subject in the VMs is the set of tiny plant drawings in the two ‘pharma’ (pharmacological) sections, which somehow usually manage to fly beneath most researchers’ radars. Yet it has been known for decades that a good number of these plant drawings recapitulate or copy plant drawings in the main herbal sections (though as I recall these are more or less all Herbal A plants, please correct me if I’m wrong) – mapping these correspondences properly is an interesting challenge in its own right, but one to which nobody (as far as I can see) has really stepped up in the last decade.

And so it is that the general indifference to the pharma section forms the backdrop to Rene’s latest observation, which is this: that the pair of roots depicted on the two (now separated) halves of the Herbal A f18v-f23r bifolio recur side-by-side at the bottom of f102r2 in the pharma section. Here’s what the f18v-f23r bifolio would look like if you took out the bifolios currently bound between them (ignore the green mark in the middle from f22v, that’s just my lazy editing):-

f18v-f23r-bifolio-small

…and here’s what the pair of roots at the bottom of f102r2 look like. Somewhat familiar, eh?

f102r2-detail-small

Actually, I think it’s fair to say that this is extremely familar.

Now, it should be obvious that that you can (depending on how strong a piece of evidence you think the above amounts to, and what other observations you think are relevant) build all kinds of inferential chains on top of this. Cautious soul that he is, Rene concludes: “the colours of the two herbal pages were perhaps not applied when the bifolio was laying open like this“, basically because the two green paints are so different, which is similar to my observation in yesterday’s post about the two blues in Q9. He continues: “I don’t even think that the colours were applied by the same person who made the outline drawings, not deriving from these drawings though.”

Regardless, the pretty-much-unavoidable codicological starting point would seem to be that f18v and f23r originally sat side-by-side, and hence almost certainly sat at the centre of a herbal gathering / quire. It also seems likely that the two green paints were applied after other bifolios had been inserted between f18v and f23r (though not necessarily in their final binding order, or at the same time).

Furthermore, if you look at f23v (i.e. the verso side of f23r), you can see where the tails of the “39” quire number’s two long downstrokes have gone over from the bottom of f24v (the last page of the quire). This indicates to me that the f18v / f23r bifolio was already nested just inside the f17 / f24 bifolio when the quire numbers were added: and when combined with the new idea that f18v-f23r was probably the central bifolio of its original gathering, I think the implication is that (unless Q3 was originally composed of just two bifolios, which seems somewhat unlikely) Q3’s quire number was added after the bifolios had been reordered / scrambled / misordered. OK, it’s pretty much the same thing I argued in “The Curse” (pp.62-68): but it’s nice to see the same ideas coming out from a different angle.

q3-quire-mark

However, the range of green paints is a bit troubling. Even though I’ve just now looked at all the greens in Q3, I’m struggling to reconstruct a sensible codicological sequence: but perhaps the reason for this will turn out to be that there isn’t one to be found. Could it be that a significant amount of Herbal grouping data could be inferred simply by spectroscopically analysing the various green paints used, and looking for recto/verso matches? Glen Claston will doubtless argue otherwise, but the chances that a verso page and a recto page with precisely the same green paint were facing each other at the time they were painted must surely be pretty good, right?

So, Rene: another good find, cheers! 🙂

MS Coislin 338 & the Voynich Manuscript…?

by ⋅ 52 Comments

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…

by ⋅ 18 Comments

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…

by ⋅ 18 Comments

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…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

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…