Voynich and PhD people…

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I recently stumbled upon an active Voynich researcher I’d never heard of: Angela Catalina Ghionea (note that, even though Internet Explorer throws up lots of warnings for her website, it’s basically OK), who is a teaching assistant and 3rd year PhD student in the History Department at Purdue University.

She’s “currently focused on the most mysterious manuscript in the world, The ‘Voynich Manuscript’ “, and is preparing an article called “Understanding the Voynich Manuscript. New Evidence for a Genuine Alphabet, Shamanic Imagery, and Magical Plants“. Her recent presentations at various conferences include:-

  • “Voynich Manuscript and its Genuine Alphabet” (12 April, HGSA 2008 Conference, Purdue)
  • “Understanding the “Voynich”, the Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World. American Shamanism and Exotic Plants” (29 March at the OAH 2008 Annual Meeting, New York, Hilton Hotel)
  • “Contributions to Voynich Manuscript’s Mystery” (24 March 2008, MARS Conference, Purdue)
  • “Voynich Manuscript is not a Hoax. Uncovering New Evidence” (Purdue, 29 January 2008)

All of which I hope to see very soon (and to review here). But this set me wondering: how many other people with PhD’s have looked at the Voynich? I drew up a quick list (let me know if there are more), but there are plenty of familiar faces…

  • William Romaine Newbold
  • John Manly (love the cigar story!)
  • Leonell Strong (love that facial hair / collar combination)
  • Derek de Solla Price
  • Jim Reeds
  • Jacques Guy
  • Gabriel Landini
  • Jorge Stolfi
  • Gordon Rugg
  • Edith Sherwood

Though according to Dr C. S. Lewis Barrie PhD, the Voynich Manuscript is a medieval blog, which is why it makes no sense. Ah, bless.

Navigating Voynich Manuscript f1r…

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Seeing the Voynich Manuscript for the first time is quite an intimidating experience: you’re looking at something which is so uncertain in so many different ways – how should you try to “read” it?

In general, when you look at a page of text, you do two different types of reading: (1) you work out how everything is laid out (you navigate the page) and (2) you read what is contained within it (you read the text). In computer science terms, you could describe the layout conventions and text conventions as having two quite separate ‘grammars’.

For instance, if you picked up a Hungarian newspaper, I would predict that you would stand a good chance of being able to work out its structure, even though you may not be able to understand a single word. It’s perfectly reasonable, then, to be able to navigate a page without being able to read it.

What’s not widely known about the Voynich Manuscript is that researchers have identified many of the navigational elements that structure the text (even though they cannot actually read them). I thought it might be helpful to post about these (oh, and I’m getting emails mildly berated me for posting too much about the wrong ‘v’, i.e. that it’s not “Vampire News“).

As a practical example, let’s look at the very first page of the manuscript proper: this has the name “f1r” (which means “the recto [front] side of folio [double-sided page] #1″). You may also see this referred to as “f001r” (some people use this naming style so that their image files get sorted nicely), or even as “1006076.sid” (this is the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s internal database reference for the high-resolution scan of f1r, which they store as a kind of highly compressed image). This is what f1r looks like:-

Note that the green splodges aren’t actually part of the page itself – they’re green leaves painted onto the reverse side of the folio (that is, on f1v, “folio #1 verso [back]“) that happen to be visible through the vellum. I’ll leave the issue of whether this is because the paint is too thick or the vellum is too thin to another day…

If we use a tricky colour filter written by Jon Grove (more on it here), we can make a passable attempt at removing the green splodges: and if we then bump up the contrast to make everything a little clearer, we can get a revised image of f1r:-


Red areas: these form the first four paragraphs of the text. These often start with one of four large vertical characters (known as “gallows characters”), and appear to have been written from top-left down to bottom-right, as you would English, French, Latin etc.

Blue areas: these are known as “titles”, and are typically right-aligned words or short phrases added to the end of paragraphs. It has been proposed that the text contained in these might actually be section titles (which seems fairly reasonable). There’s a brief discussion on this by (a differently spelled!) John Grove here, who first suggested the term.

Yellow area: this is a cipher key arranged vertically down the right hand side of the page that someone has written in (and only partially filled before giving up) in a 16th century hand. Though a bit indistinct, you can still make out “a b c d e” at the top left and a few other letters besides.

Bright green areas: these odd shapes appear nowhere else, and are generally referred to as “weirdoes” (for want of a better name). Interestingly, these are picked out in bright red: f67r2 is the only other place with red text that I can think of (the page that was originally on the front of what is now Quire 9).

Dull green area: this is where the earliest proven owner wrote his signature (something like “Jacobus de Tepenecz, Prag”, though it is very hard to make out), which a subsequent owner appears to have (quite literally) scrubbed off the page (if you look carefully, you can see what appears to be two or more watermarks at the edges of the area). The question of why someone would want to do this is a matter for another day…

Pink area: hidden in the top right corner next to some wormholes and the folio number (“1”, in a sixteenth century hand) is a very faint picture, possibly of a bird. Surprisingly, this subtle piece of marginalia doesn’t appear in GC’s otherwise-very-good gallery of Voynich marginalia: so here’s an enhanced picture of it so you can see what I’m talking about:-.

So, even if we can’t yet read f1r’s text, can we navigate its layout? I believe we can! From the presence of red text, I’m fairly certain it was the first page of a quire: and from the signature and weathering, I don’t see any reason to think this was ever bound anywhere apart from at the front of the manuscript. This leads me to predict that the set of four paragraphs forms an index to the manuscript as a whole, and so very probably describe four separate “books” or “works”, where the “title” (appended to the end of the paragraph) is indeed the title of that book.

If you were looking for cribs to crack the titles 🙂 , my best guess is that the first book (section) is a herbal, the second book is on the stars (astronomy and astrology), the third book is on water, while the fourth book comprises recipes and secrets. I also suspect that this index page was composed about three-quarters of the way through the project, and that the (really quite strange) Herbal-B pages were added in a subsequent phase. But, once again, that’s another story entirely…

Dee, Lovecraft, Voynich – An Eternal Triangle?

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I’ve just started reading Colin Wilson’s “The Philosopher’s Stone“, so I thought it might be a good idea to blog about an article from the Metromagick blog where he also plays a role.

The piece is called “Dr. John Dee, the Necronomicon & the Cleansing of the World“, and was written by Colin Low in 1996-2000. It’s basically an extended riff on H.P.Lovecraft, John Dee, the Voynich Manuscript, Aleister Crowley and the Necronomicon, and how much they do (or don’t) relate to each other.

The problem with Lovecraft fans is that they often enjoy emulating what their gloomy hero liked to do: mix fantasy with history until they both blur together into one great big glob of either historicised fiction or fictionalised history (whichever you prefer, it doesn’t matter much).

And so it was that in 1978, a book called “Necronomicon” appeared edited by George Hay (reprinted in 1995), containing a claim by David Langford and Robert Turner that Lovecraft’s fabled Necronomicon was not only real but “had been preserved by Alkindi in his treatise The Book of the Essence of the Soul“, parts of which had in turn been enciphered by John Dee in his Liber Loagaeth. With an introduction by Colin Wilson, it looked convincingly like real historical research… but (as you’ve probably guessed by now) it was merely faux Lovecraftian nonsense.

Colin Low’s article then goes on to collect together various strands apparently connecting Dee (via Enochian and Choronzon) to Crowley and his well-documented adventures with demon summoning. It’s all entertaining stuff, but the possible presence at the ball of a Lovecraftian mischief-making poltergeist tends to rather reduce its reliability for the reader. So in the end, does Low’s account amount to something special or to something of nothing? Basically, I think you’ll have to make your own call.

However, I do find Low’s summing-up of the Necronomicon fiercely attuned to much that has been said about the Voynich Manuscript: “The Necronomicon is a hollow vessel – it booms resoundingly, but has nothing in it but the projections of our own fantasies.” Which is a shame.

Voynich linguistic disproof!

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Possibly as a byproduct of all the philosophy of science lectures I once endured, I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Karl Popper. Basically, a Popperian approach to science involves constructing cunning weapons of disproof to chop down falsifiable hypotheses, where the “last man standing” is your current best bet at the truth. This is not unlike a somewhat formalized version of Conan Doyle’s “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth“.

To be honest, Conan Doyle’s version is a tad sucky, as it assumes (to allow Sherlock Holmes to ever solve anything) that you are able to generate all possible explanations, in order that your process of elimination-by-disproof can ultimately iterate to the One True Truth. In the real world, however, an imaginative scientist should be able to conjure up candidate explanations at a faster rate than they could ever practically be tested.

Another very significant problem is the economic cost of constructing cunning weapons of disproof that will demonstrate that hypothesis X cannot be true. Doing this for even a single case can be very hard, let alone for situations where there are hundreds of possibilities.

Yet the scientific method typically works to an abysmally lower level of proof, looking merely for persuasive mental models and correlative statistics to back it up. Basically, the scientific method makes Bad Science easy to do because you haven’t got Karl Popper peering over your shoulder saying there are no proofs, only disproofs, you haven’t disproved anything.

All of which is simply to help paint a picture of the lamentable situation in which studies of the Voynich Manuscript have been for so long, where there are not only countless imaginative hypotheses to deal with, but also few if any Popperian tools of disproof. This has meant that people can (and do) make pretty much any pseudo-scientific assertion about the VMs they like and nobody can (without invoking particularly arcane statistical arguments which only a tiny minority can easily understand) tell them they’re definitively wrong.

Until now.

Voynich researcher Marke Fincher has long been fascinated by Voynichese words’ strange behaviour, and how it differs from the behaviour of words in real languages (such as Latin, French, Swahili, etc). Yet nobody had devised a way of making this difference visible.

But recently Marke developed a programme called WPPA which allows a lot of this structure to be made visible. In particular, Marke showed that real languages have an implicit word association structure whereby recurring pairs of words can be found not only next to each other, but at a certain distance from each other as well. Word pairs also largely prefer a particular order: Marke points out that “and the” is very much frequent in English than “the and“.

His paper shows plots taken from a number of languages, which (when taken together) show what you might call a meta-linguistic curve, a statistical behaviour shape that is followed by basically all the real languages he had tried – an expression of languageness, in terms of the patterns of behaviour you’d fully expect to see in texts written in real-world languages.

But Voynichese does not display these curves: and so isn’t a simple language.

Any, errrm, cunning linguist who thinks they have a sample of a little-known language which somehow bucks this trend is free to email Marke Fincher for a copy of his WPPA program (or you can just send him a copy of the text). But you know, I think he’s not going to be dreadfully surprised by his inbox any day soon.

And not only is Voynichese not a simple language, it also is not a simple language written right-to-left, nor a simple substitution cipher of any sort (including simple verbose ciphers), nor a consistent intra-word transposition cipher (like a reverse anagram cipher), because none of these would alter Voynichese’s basic linguistic curve.

For years, people have endlessly debated whether the nature of Voynichese is that of a cipher or that of a unknown language – cryptology vs linguistics. Well, Marke Fincher has now given us all his cunning Popperian machinery of disproof to rule out basically all simple language conjectures and a lot of simple cipher theories too.

This is great, because if someone now tries to convince you (for whatever reason) that the VMs is in High Middle German, Hebrew, Celtic, Shelta Thari or whatever but written in a funny way, you can wholeheartedly say – sorry, but no. Voynichese words don’t work like any known language in several key ways, and that’s that.

Moving ever forward, there is one thing I suspect that Marke should perhaps now consider: whether the fact that Voynichese word pairs appear pretty much as often forward as reversed (which isn’t true of languages at all) is part of the “specification” (as it were) of Voynichese, or whether some lines (say, even-numbered lines within paragraphs?) might be word-ordered from right-to-left (i.e. some kind of boustrophedon word-ordering). That is, whether Voynichese’s symmetrical reversibility might actually have a word-transpositional explanation.

Some people may think that being able to disprove things is no big deal: but I think it’s actually a very big deal indeed. Karl Popper would be proud!

Voynich-related novel reviews…

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In much the same way that the Voynich Manuscript has provided a blank screen for generations of amateur cryptologists to project their code-breaking desires onto, it has in recent years provided a rich loam for writers to plant their novelistic seeds into.

In the bad old days of novel-writing, the VMs would simply have been treated as an interchangeable cipher-based Macguffin, a time capsule mechanically carrying [powerful / occult / heretical] ideas forward from the [insert bygone era name here] to satisfy the present-tense needs of the plot. Plenty of old-fashioned writers continue to hammer out such formulaic Victorian penny-dreadful tat even now: what kind of barrier could ever hold back such a tide?

Thankfully, contemporary writers have begun to engage with other ideas in the cloud of ideas surrounding the VMs. Though I personally don’t think it will turn out to be delusional nonsense, channelled writing, off-world DNA-creation technology, or even a deliberate hoax, I think these are interesting angles far more worthy of being explored in fiction.

With this in mind, here’s a list of the novel reviews on my site:-

(1) It’s brutally old-fashioned, but Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone [review] by Max McCoy presses all the right buttons. It knows it’s a piece of junk but simply doesn’t care: it’s having too much fun. Recommended!

(2) I had high hopes for “PopCo” [review] by Scarlett Thomas, but it just ended up like a creative writing collage. If you can cope with the crypto-geeky Gen-X No-Logo buzzwordiness of the whole concept, you’ll probably enjoy it: but for me it fails to work on most levels.

(3) Rather than engage with the VMs directly, “Vellum” [review] by Matt Rubinstein creates an Australian doppelganger of it, and has a lot of fun exploring a would-be decipherer’s descent into madness and/or confusion. Recommended!

(4) “Enoch’s Portal” [review] by A.W.Hill boils up a heady stew of alchemy, cultishness and quantum pretension, where Leo Levitov’s Cathar hypothesis about the Voynich Manuscript is merely one of many spices sloshed into the mixing bowl. No Michelin stars, sorry.

"Verifying" the Verifier Method…

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John Sweat’s “The Anthropogene” is a nice ‘lost history’ blog I recently stumbled upon: what caught my eye was a post of his that mentioned the Voynich Manuscript and tried out Gordon Rugg’s seven-step “Verifier Method”. As this is what Rugg allegedly used when he made his famous “VMS is a hoax” claims in 2003/2004, I thought it perhaps should be examined in more detail. Sweat summarises Rugg’s 7 steps as:-

  1. “Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.
  2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.
  3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.
  4. Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.
  5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.
  6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.
  7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.”

All of which can, I think, be summarised even more brutally:-

  1. Engage with so-called “experts” and their writings
  2. Decide if those “experts” are indeed actually experts
  3. Do those experts have a particular agenda?
  4. Do the words they use get in the way?
  5. Are their theories basically built on sand?
  6. See how their errors beget other errors
  7. Work out the biggest issues, and continue until you’ve had enough

This seems to be describing intellectual history, which I would characterise as a thinky, “Florentine humanist”-style knowledge-critiquing methodology based around herding all the arguers in a field together, logically dismantling their arguments, and then using whatever is left standing to construct tentative explanations. Technically, the difference between intellectual history and the history of ideas is that the former tends to see ideas as actively shaped by agendas and as flowing between cultural frames of reference, while the latter tends to try to engage with ideas-in-themselves. (Having said that, the Wikipedia entry for history of ideas cites Michel Foucault as a sympathetic practitioner, yet he sees everything as a product of the agendas implicit in cultural frames of reference. But I digress!)

At its best, intellectual history throws up dazzling insights: in the hands of a master (such as the extraordinary Anthony Grafton), it can be a virtuoso performance of brain over matter, not unlike a QC’s persuasive mastery of his or her brief. Yet at its worst, it can be a sterile exercise in intellectual futility, divorced from the world by its shallow insistence on examining only the participants and their claims, not the validity of the evidence expressed in the ideas, and so ending up in a kind of over-finessed, intricate superficiality.

As an example, even though Grafton’s generally excellent book on Leon Battista Alberti shows precisely how Alberti’s form and ideas flowed from classical topoi, I think Grafton perhaps takes the whole humanist conceit (that if we all wrote as well as Cicero the world would be a better place) a little bit too literally – whereas humanism was by and large more like a courtly Latinistic game of patronage – and as a result his book never really engages with Alberti the person.

If we bear this kind of thing in mind, it should be reasonably clear that Rugg’s “Verifier Method” looks to verify not evidence qua contents but instead expert opinions qua methodology: a kind of faux legalistic framework, with the investigator as self-appointed armchair judge in his/her own kangaroo court, and with no power or desire to step outside into the real world.

In the case of the Voynich Manuscript (in case you were wondering when I’d ever mention it), I think the Verifier Method falls right at steps (1) and (2). Because Rugg’s conceptual framework had no mechanism to critique evidence (in particular the various transcriptions of the text), and what separates experts in such an uncertain field is by and large their conception of what constitutes relevant evidence, Rugg has no intrinsic way of deciding who is (and who is not) an expert, let alone trying to infer their agendas (3) or to diagnose any linguistic/semantic difficulties (4)

Essentially, it seems to me that the Verifier Method relies so heavily on the underlying field being regular that it fails to be a satisfactory tool to apply to such irregular areas of study as the Voynich Manuscript. But the problem then is that regular fields of study tend not to need exploratory methods such as the Verifier Method to help traverse them.

Finally, I think that “Verifying” is such a weak aim of any knowledge methodology as to be virtually useless: as a strategy, all it really tries to elicit is some kind of limp correlation. The “Cardan Grille” nonsense that Rugg concocted to “verify” that the Dee/Kelley hoax hypothesis was “possible” is precisely such a thing: of course the hypothesis was possible, that’s why it was a hypothesis, duh. Come on: when dealing with an uncertain field, when would the Verifier Method ever be preferable to Popper’s Falsificationism, where you collect together plausible hypotheses and actively design experiments to try to kill them? Now that’s what I call proper Popper science…

Thorndike on the Voynich Manuscript!

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I’ve often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich’s cipher manuscript mania/hype was at its peak. As a well-known writer on alchemy, magic and science, my guess is that Thorndike would surely have been one of those distinguished American academics and historians whom Voynich tried so hard to court after his move from Europe to New York.

One of my ongoing projects is to work my way through all of Thorndike’s works, as it seems to me that his science/magic research programme carved a trail through the jungle of mostly-unread proto-scientific manuscripts that probably falls close to where the Voynich Manuscript is situated: and few historians since him have felt any pressing need to build on his work except in generally quite specific ways. All of which is why I happened to be reading Chapter VII “Nicholas of Cusa and the Triple Motion of the Earth” in Thorndike’s “Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century” (1929).

Firstly, you need to understand that Thorndike thought that the whole Burckhardtian notion of the (supposedly fabulous and extraordinary) Renaissance was plain ridiculous: there were countless examples of ingenuity, invention, and insight throughout the Middle Ages (and, indeed, throughout all history) to be found, if you just bothered to take the time and effort to place events and writings within their own context.

Furthermore, Thorndike believed that lazy historians, having set up this false opposition between (high) Renaissance culture and (low) medieval scholasticism, then went looking for exceptional individuals who somehow bucked that trend, “forerunners, predictors, or martyrs of the glorious age of modern science that was to come.” (p.133) The list of usual suspects Thorndike suggests – “Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Peurbach and Regiomontanus, Leonardo da Vinci” – appears to me not far from how the fake table of Priory of Sion Grand Masters would have looked, if Pierre Plantard been a tad more receptive to non-French history.

Of course, Thorndike – being Thorndike – then goes on to demonstrate precisely how the whole myth around Nicholas of Cusa arose: basically, German historians looking out for a German ‘forerunner, predictor, or martyr‘ plucked three marginal fragments from Nicholas’s work and wove them together to tell a story that was, frankly, not there to be told. Then you can almost feel the fever rising in Thorndike’s genuinely angry brow when he continues:

“Could anything, even the most childish of medieval superstitions, be more unscientific, unhistorical, and lacking in common sense than this absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation, by modern investigators and historians of science?” (p.137)

Punchy (and grouchy) stuff: but he’s far from finished yet. He has an example of something even more scandalous which he feels compelled to share with us:-

“When are we ever going to come out of it? To stop approaching the study of medieval science by such occult methods as the scrutiny of a manuscript supposed to have been written by Roger Bacon in cipher, instead of by reading the numerous scientific manuscripts that are expressed in straightforward and coherent, albeit somewhat abbreviated, Latin?” (p.137)

So there you have it. In 1929, while Wilfrid Voynich was still alive, Thorndike took a measured look at Voynich’s and Newbold’s “Roger Bacon Manuscript” nonsense, and placed it straight in the category of “absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation“.

John Manly may have been more dismissive of Newboldian cryptography in his article in Speculum 6 (July 1931), but Thorndike was no less dismissive of Newboldian history in print in 1929. Just so you know!

Adam McLean and Voynich baths…

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On 12th April 2008, artist and well-respected alchemy expert Adam McLean posted up a fascinating picture of the baths of Pozzuoli he had found from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and commented on its many strong similarities with the Voynich Manuscript’s water section. Excellent research, I thought… but how come I hadn’t seen it before?

Though Adam didn’t mention his source, a little detective work revealed that the image is entitled “Balneum Sulphatara“, folio 4 of Valencia Bibl. Universitaria MS 860 (formerly 138). And I had seen it before: an extremely over-exposed black-and-white version appears as plate 62 of C. M. Kauffmann’s classic 1959 “The Baths of Pozzuoli: A Study of the Medieval Illuminations of Peter of Eboli’s Poems“. But really, you’d barely recognize them as the same.

Unusually, Valencia MS 860 has good date and provenance information for it. Kauffman (p.82) says that De Marinis dates it between 1455 and 1458: and that it stayed in the “Aragonese royal library in Naples until the Franco-Spanish conquest of 1501“, when it moved to Spain until the present day. Kauffman also asserts that it was derived from the Bodmer (Geneva, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana) De Balneis MS, which he dates to the “third quarter of the fourteenth century”, and placed as “Southern Italian”.

If you compare the Bodmer Balneum Sulphatara drawing (f.3, Kauffman plate 21) with the Valencia one (f.4, Kauffman plate 62), you can see the reasons why the former was very probably the source of the latter: every figure is reproduced between the two MSS, each with extremely similar size and orientation. Their differences are merely ornamental: the wooden bath sides got upgraded with a fancy fish-like motif in the Valencia MS, while the top edge of the cave has taken on a stone-like ‘wolkenband’ appearance there.

But the big question: was either of these also a source for the Voynich Manuscript? I’ve gone through all the plates in Kauffman really closely, and I have to say that on that evidence I really don’t think that the water section of the VMs is an enciphered De Balneis. However, I am quite sure that the VMs’ author had definitely seen a copy of De Balneis and was influenced by it when constructing his pictures, in the same way that Rene Zandbergen persuasively argues that the author must have seen the manuscript now known as MS Vat. Gr. 1291 before drawing the zodiac section.

In fact, I interpret this in terms of steganography, in that I believe the style used for Vat. Gr. 1291 was appropriated as the cover cipher for the VMs’ zodiac section, while the style used for the Bodmer MS and Valencia MS 860 formed the cover cipher for its water section. Whereas the particular drawing similarities between the VMs and Valencia MS 860 simply arose from having been drawn in the same general period: correlation, but not causation.

I should close by noting that Adam McLean made his own in-depth art history study of the Voynich Manuscript, posting his results on the set of pages here. One of the most compelling similarities comes from his comparison of the lozenge-shaped tiles in the picture here: but that’s a discussion for another day…

Secret Histories and "The Lie Agreed Upon"…

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Here’s a nice two-page article (here and here) by Timothy Doyle from the BookThink site on the role ‘Secret History’ plays in SciFi fantasy literature: it’s titled “The Lie Agreed Upon” because that was how Napoleon famously characterised history. (Though he actually used the words “A fable agreed upon“, which [according to Wikipedia] he probably took from Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle‘s Mélanges de Littérature (1804), while the basic phrase is also widely attributed to Voltaire).

Anyway… Doyle’s theme is that in a secret history novel, all the surface details of historical fact remain basically the same, but the reader is invited to peek behind the curtain at all the political and technical machinations and intrigue that keep that lie propped up. As opposed to an ‘alternate history’ novel, where both surface and undercurrents diverge from the historical record.

It’s a nice piece, which leaps deftly from SF to The X-Files, to the Da Vinci Code, to the many parallels with the Voynich Manuscript (basically because most VMs theories seem to start from a secret history or a similar novelistic premise), to Neal Stephenson’s wonderful Cryptonomicon, to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (and a couple of works of his I didn’t know), to Tim Powers, and so forth: Lev Grossman’s Codex even gets a honourable mention in the also-rans list at the end. All of which are riffs probably familiar to most Voynich News readers.

My favourite sentence from the article is this:-

“What is really interesting about Secret Histories is the shifts in historical meaning that occur, much like the optical illusion where a slight shift in perspective suddenly changes the beautiful girl into an ugly witch.”

I think Doyle comes splendidly close here to capturing the essence of Voynich theories: each seek to violate and redirect the currents beneath the historical record, with the theorist all the while using the keen magicry of the illusionist to silently cover up the implicit shift in meaning. Naturally, theory proponents see themselves as ‘unliars’, truth-tellers: but all (possibly bar one) are closer to novelists than they would like to admit. Ultimately, shouldn’t we agree with Napoleon/de Fontenelle/Voltaire that history is little more than a story we agree to accept? (…or is that a story in itself?)

"Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages"…

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I happened upon the following post a few days ago here, and thought I ought to reproduce it here for anyone that’s interested (the cryptography history lane tends to be filled with caravans, and as a result is somewhat slow-moving). When the volume finally appears (in 2009?), I’ll be just as interested in the paper on the Voynich Manuscript as the rest of it. Having said that, I’m a bit concerned that Kahn is not only misspelt but a little bit misrepresented (for instance, Kahn discusses medieval Arabic cryptology on pp.89-99) in the blurb.

Oh, and they’re not interested in publishing two papers on the VMs in the same volume. Just so you know not to offer them one (like I did, *sigh*).

* * * * * * * *

Call for contributions for a volume of collected essays:

Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages

This call is designed to expand and enhance an essay collection that is based on two panels entitled “Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages,” which took place at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo MI, in 2006 and 2007.
It seeks to fill a major gap in the study of codes and ciphers in the medieval world. The codes and ciphers of the Middle Ages have received little or no modern scholarly attention. David Khan’s 1181-page volume _The Code-Breakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet_, for example, devotes a mere thirty-four pages to the ancient and classical world, and little more than one sentence to the Middle Ages, claiming that “ciphers, of course, had been used by monks throughout the Middle Ages for scribal amusement” (106). But the construction and use of codes, ciphers, secret languages and mathematical secrets in the Middle Ages were much more than amusement: they were central to intellectual culture as modes of concealing dangerous, magical or secret information, and as a means of connecting oneself to the divine. As such, they appear in the writings of major figures ranging from Isidore of Seville to Hrabanus Maurus, Alcuin and Hildegard of Bingen. They also figure in the manuscripts of lesser known students of magic in Heidelberg, and numerous anonymous texts and manuscripts including Anglo-Saxon riddles, Old Norse literature and runes, and the computus. Clearly, codes and ciphers were a multilingual, cross-period, inter-cultural phenomenon in the Middle Ages; they warrant more scholarly attention. Given current emphases on “security,” and the proliferation of forms of encryption on the internet, fostering scholarly discussion of history of cryptography seems especially relevant to the 21st century. Current contributions address the uses of codes, ciphers, secret languages and mathematics in the writings of Hildegard, the Voynich Manuscript, Anglo-Saxon riddles, Hrabanus Maurus’ _In honorem sanctae crucis_, the Pseudo-Bedan _Propositiones_ and the _Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes_ attributed to Alcuin. While we welcome contributions on any aspect of codes and ciphers in any period of the Middle Ages, we are especially interested in essays that will widen the scope and increase the depth of the collection.

Please submit detailed abstracts or drafts of essays (style: CMS 14th edition) by 1 July 2008 to: Sharon M. Rowley at [email protected] or [email protected]