Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

Diane O’Donovan recently stumbled across a reference to a relatively little-known Italian-Jewish engineer / cryptographer / magician called Abraham Colorni (Abramo Colorni) who was for a short while at Rudolf II’s court: and wondered aloud (in some comments to Cipher Mysteries) what we might learn from his 1593 book on cryptography.

“Scotographia etc etc”

As you might expect, Colorni’s book title is badly afflicted by the prolixity so typical of the age: “Scotographia, ouero, Scienza di scriuere oscuro, facilissima, & sicurissima, per qual si voglia lingua : le cui diuerse inuentioni diuisi in tre libri, seruiranno in più modi, & per cifra, & per contra cifra : le quali, se ben saranno communi a tutti, potranno nondimeno usarsi da ogn’uno, senza pericolo d’essere inteso da altri, che dal proprio corrispondente”. That is, “Scotography, or the science of concealed writing, most easily and most securely, etc etc etc“.

Various physical copies exist: MIT Library, in the Cryptology Collection of UPenn’s Van Pelt Library (I always wondered what happened to Lucy), Harvard Library, BnF, the British Library, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Library, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Klau Library at Hebrew Union College in Cincinatti to name but eight. There are also microfilm copies at Herzog August Bibliothek and the British Library, if squinting into dusty old back-lit magnifying boxes floats your boat.

Obviously, what you’d actually like to know is what online versions exist. The BNCF website includes only a ragged copy of the first couple of folios of MAGL.3.8.24, which is not that impressive:

The Museo Galileo’s website has a complete set of scans of the BNCF MS, though (perhaps because the whole book has an unusual aspect ratio, i.e. it’s much wider than it is tall), all the Museo’s scans have come out vertically stretched by a factor of three in their reader (the “Reader” icon at the top of the page). This is also true of the PDF download option, e.g. how it is (left) and how it ought to be (right):

Alternatively, you can read the same pages from the index webpage, though only one at a time, and the (unstretched) image goes off the right hand edge of the web page unless you really widen the size of the browser window, which is annoying in a quite different way.

Having said that, none of this is fin du monde etc.

The Book’s Contents

As normal, the book starts with a seven-page laudatory preamble praising Colorni’s most magnificent patron, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and explaining the symbolic meaning behind the four specific zodiac signs chosen for the frontispiece (Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, Leo):

The book continues with three main chapters (though the middle chapter is tiny), and then finishes up with an enormous enciphering table (more than half the remainder of the book). It also includes some interesting cryptographic figures which I don’t recall seeing elsewhere.

From what I have read, it seems to me (and feel free to correct this impression) that Colorni was not a theoretical codemaker or codebreaker. Though his cipher history account starts with the normal SCYTALE (long thin message wrapped around a stick) cipher yarn, his writing doesn’t seem informed by the work of contemporary crypto theoreticians such as Bellaso.

Rather, I suspect what happened was that Colorni collected together a series of cryptographic tricks (such as nulls, verbose cipher, etc) and then adapted and extended them into something cunning and ingenious which he believed to be practically impregnable. So I think his book (to answer one of Diane’s questions) documents various cunning “peasant ciphers” rather than being part of a theoretical crypto mainstream.

Incidentally, just about the only ciphertext given in Colorni’s book (there are no challenge ciphers) is:

GWGHPCXKGBEDMMYWOPWQPWO
HMAAHXNAYLPKOOBPXKFFLTGWYIXG

Feel free to try to crack it if you wish. 🙂

Colorni and the Voynich Manuscript?

But, Diane continues, might it have been Abraham Colorni who brought the Voynich Manuscript to Rudolf II’s Golden Court in Prague? Superficially, Colorni would certainly seem to tick many of the boxes, and there’s unlikely to be evidence out there that explicitly proves that he didn’t bring it. (After all, what are the chances a letter now turns up saying “It wasn’t me, Abraham Colorni, who sold that scandalous naked women cipher book to the Emperor, it was that blasted John Dee“?)

All the same, I don’t believe that Colorni’s book’s introductory dedication to Rudolf II (written in 1593) mentions anything sounding at all like the Voynich Manuscript (as always, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). It does namecheck Oedipus, but presumably for broadly the same reasons that Georg Baresch also (independently) namechecked Oedipus several decades later.

Perhaps a more productive route to take would be to look at Colorni’s correspondence, and see if that casts any light on the subject. And, very helpfully, there are (at least) two freely downloadable 19th century articles by Professor Giuseppe Jarè that might assist us in this regard:

• Abramo Colorni : ingegnere Mantovano del secolo XVI. ; con documenti ined.
• Abramo Colorni : ingegnere i Alfonso II. d’Este ; memoria letta nell’ adunanza 30 marzo 1890

Both articles include transcriptions of a number of letters (in both Latin and Italian) culled from numerous archives. In fact, the second article contains so many that I suspect that Jarè must have had Colorni as an ongoing research interest for some twenty years or more.

Though some of these definitely mention Colorni’s Scotographia, I didn’t notice anything related to the Voynich Manuscript in there. However, others more observant and diligent than me may have more luck: and wouldn’t that be nice? 😉

Secondary Literature on Abraham Colorni

Though I’ve tried to limit my discussion here of Abraham Colorni to primary evidence, there is also a pretty good modern literature on him if you’re interested:

• The age of secrecy : Jews, Christians, and the economy of secrets, 1400-1800 – Daniel Jütte
• Or, in German: Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses : Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen, (1400-1800) – Daniel Jütte
• Trading in secrets : Jews and early modern quest for clandestine knowledge (Isis, Vol. 103 (2012), p. 668-68)
• Il prestigiatore di Dio : avventure e miracoli di un alchimista ebreo nelle corti del Rinascimento – Ari’el To’af – Milano : Rizzoli, 2010
• Rene Zandbergen also points out there is a chapter on Colorni by Vladimir Karpenko in:Alchemy and Rudolf II, Exploring the Secrets of Nature in Central Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, edited by Ivo Purš and Vladimír Karpenko, Artefactum, Prague (2016), though probably building on Daniel Jütte’s book.

A Needle In A Haystack?

For twenty-plus years, Rene Zandbergen and a whole host of others have invested a lot of time into trying to dig up references / historical evidence relating to the Voynich Manuscript’s (probable) time at Rudolf II’s court: but have so far found nothing.

From what I know, I don’t currently believe that Abraham Colorni will turn out to be the missing link, the “Herald” (in Joseph Campbell / Hero’s Journey terms): rather I think that if it did make its way to Rudolf II’s court, it was very much towards the end of his rule (notionally at Rudolf II’s death in 1612, but he was under a kind of house arrest by his brother Matthias for the last few years – families, eh, who’d have ’em?). And with Colorni dying in 1599, the two therefore probably didn’t overlap in Prague.

All the same, I find Professor Giuseppe Jarè’s articles hugely heartening, because he was able to collect together from a whole list of archives all manner of correspondence relating to Colorni: and that gives us access to a evidential slice cutting through Colorni’s life.

So perhaps the right thing to do, Voynich-wise, is to stop looking for a needle in a haystack – i.e. a single perfect piece of evidence – and to instead start looking for a sewing box in a haystack. By this I mean collections of diligently-collected letters and documents not unlike Jarè’s collection of Colorni’s correspondence, but for technical-minded court insiders who were at Rudolf II’s court nearer the end.

The best attempt at doing this so far has been by looking at the correspondence between Duditius and Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who was Rudolf II’s Imperial Astronomer, as studied by Josef Smolka (with help from Rene Zandbergen). I previously discussed their lack of (Voynich-related) success here, and concluded that the 1600-1612 period might be more fruitful.

But do we have a list of people who we might even consider as candidates for this kind of search? One would have thought that the 15 volumes of Tyco Brahe’s correspondence (in Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera omnia) to 1601 would have been thoroughly mined by Voynich researchers by now. Christoph Rothmann (of Kassel) similarly died in 1600, while Caspar Peucer died in 1602. Even so, I suspect we are likely to have no luck with any of them.

Has anyone trawled through Kepler’s correspondence looking for partial or indirect references to the Voynich Manuscript? I’m thinking that perhaps the best way forward would be to look at the network of correspondents linked to Kepler in the 1600-1615 period. The letters between Kepler and Galileo are well-known, but they surely can’t make up even 25% of Kepler’s correspondence, right?

Perhaps one of these letter writers will have heard mention of the Voynich Manuscript: and perhaps this is how the first big piece in the Voynich jigsaw will be found, who can say? 🙂

Logistically, it might be just too late for Santa to swoosh these under your Christmas tree, but I found out yesterday that Italian perfume house Pinalli has just started selling a range of perfumes and related products under the brand “Voynich Botanica 1-66“.

If you hadn’t already guessed (and I must admit it wasn’t immediately obvious to me), the “1-66” in the name actually refers to the folios of the Voynich Manuscript containing the first large herbal section (well… Herbal A and Herbal B, to be precise). Here’s what their fragrant PR flacks have to say about it (translated from the Italian):

Voynich is an advanced cosmetic brand that combines naturalness with high performance to bring to life formulations strictly free of Silicones, Parabens, Peg, Sles, Mineral Oils, Artificial Colors, with over 98% of natural ingredients. Voynich uses a scientific laboratory that for over 30 years has been studying, developing and producing cutting-edge formulas using the most advanced technologies and the highest quality standards.

The Voynich manuscript is an ancient illustrated code from the fifteenth century. Section I (folios 1-66) called “Botanica” contains countless illustrations of plants and flowers. Voynich products are inspired by the charm that surrounds this book, the passion for botanical research and respect for what Nature gives us.

So what do these look like? There are currently three to choose from:

You can even buy them all in a nice Christmas gift box:

Obviously they’re leaving the plants in the Pharma section for next year’s wave of products, and maybe the bathing nymphs of Q13 for a future spa range of shower and bath products. 😉

Well, they are what they are, I guess. But regardless, may Father Christmas fill your stockings with fine mysteries this year!

Every couple of years, I wake up in the middle of the night with an all-new version of The Big Idea – you know, the one that’s finally going to unlock the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets. These unstoppable small-hours plans are normally formed from the soup of things slooshing around in my head, but arranged in a pincer movement attacking the problem on two fronts (i.e. with the idea of trapping it in the middle).

As an aside, it would be a bit of a shock to me if the Voynich Manuscript’s contents turn out to be something wildly unexpected, like a 200-page Swahili ant-summoning ritual, or a book about various weird vegetables that magically cure diabetes (as if anyone would randomly send emails about that, ho hum). :-/ Similarly, I would find it a big surprise if the writing / enciphering system were to turn out to be something we hadn’t collectively considered at length and in detail already, though in some cunning combination that we hadn’t quite grasped.

More generally, I would summarize my overall position as being that, without much doubt, there is a high probability that we are much closer than we think to the Voynichian chequered flag. Even though there are many nuttier-than-a-fruitcake researchers out there (no, I’m not referring to you, dear reader, that would be quite absurd), a huge amount of excellent research has been done, a very large part of which will almost certainly be correct.

And so, swimming against the pessimistic epistemological tide that seems to prevail these days, my overall judgement is that we shouldn’t – very probably – need to know much more than we already do in order to crack through the Voynich’s walls: just a little more may well do the trick. In fact, it may even be that a single solid fact might be enough to open the floodgates. 🙂

This Week’s Big Idea

And so it was that I woke up at 2am a few nights ago with (inevitably) a new Big Idea for cracking the Voynich. And given that my last post was about the diffusion of vernacular Cisiojanus mnemonics, I guess few readers here will be surprised that the main part of the idea was that the 30-odd labels per zodiac sign might well be the syllables of a vernacular Cisiojanus.

Why vernacular? Well, even though Latin Cisiojani had been known since the 12th century or so, vernacular Cisiojani were novel and unknown even in the mid-fifteenth century, and so one might well be a good candidate for something someone compiling a book of secrets might well want to conceal / hide / obfuscate / encrypt (delete as appropriate).

At the same time, I don’t believe that Voynichese can be enciphered or obfuscated Latin, because the way Voynichese seems abbreviated / truncated seems incompatible with Latin (where endings contain so much of the meaning). But if we are instead looking at a linguistically diffused Cisiojanus (such as Italian or French), it’s perhaps a different kettle of (cray)fish.

In parallel, the Voynich zodiac section offers us numerous more interesting clues to work with: for instance, the three crowned nymphs, of which the red-crowned nymph on the Leo page is arguably the earliest.

I’ve previously proposed that one or more of these crowns might be flagging a feast day with personal significance to the author. (For example, for a Florentine such as Antonio Averlino, the most important day in the calendar was the Festa di San Giovanni, the Feast of St John the Baptist.) As such, we might also look at the Voynich zodiac page for Cancer, which also has a crowned nymph, but where the crown looks to have been added later:

I previously mused whether this Cancer crown might have been a fake, designed to draw attention away from the real crown in Leo, but in retrospect this was a bit too harsh and reductive, even if the codicology is sound. Rather, these two crowns (and indeed the crowned nymph in Libra) may well have had different types of significance, added in separate codicological layers for separate reasons. Even if the idea of Antonio Averlino’s connection to Firenze is too strong for some of you, the connection between Italian Cisiojani and St John the Baptist may still be worth pursuing, as we’ll see next.

Nicola De Nisco’s Cisiojanus

In the same way that Jesus’ birthday is celebrated near the Winter Solstice (the shortest day of the year), St John the Baptist’s birthday is celebrated near the Summer Solstice (the longest day). And so it has been widely suggested that both attributed birthdays offered Christian hooks to hang pagan festivals from (and there seems to be no obvious reason in the Bible why John’s birthday should be celebrated then). Hence in many places in Europe (not just Firenze), the Feast of St John the Baptist was a three- or four-day long affair, arguably more akin to a pagan summer festival.

Hence if we suspect that the labelese text in the Voynich’s zodiac section is some kind of vernacular Cisiojanus, there should be plenty of good reasons why we should look for the Feast of St John the Baptist.

For June (which German calendars typically link with Cancer), De Nisco transcribes one 15th century Italian Cisiojanus as follows:

Nic.mar.cel.qui.bo.ni.dat.me.pri.mi.bar.na.an.ton.
Vi.ti.que.mar.pro.ta.si.san.ctus.io.bap.io.do.le.pe.pau

If we add in De Nisco’s corrections in square brackets, plus additional saints’ names courtesy of that most indispensable of publications, The American Ecclsiastical Review (1901), Vol. 24, plus an 1886 French book which gave me St Dorothy of Prussia), we get:

1. Nic — Nicomedes [original document has “Vic”]
2/3. mar.cel — Marcellus / Marcellinus
4. qui — St Quirino, Bishop of Sisak
5/6. bo.ni — Bonifacius
7. dat — ???
8. me — Medardus
9/10. pri.mi — Primus
11/12. bar.na — Barnabas
13/14. an.ton — Sant’Antonio da Padova
15/16. Vi.ti — Vitus
17. que —
18. mar — Marcus et Marcellianus [original document has “Nar”]
19/20/21. pro.ta.si — Protasius (et Gervasius)
22/23/24/25. san.ctus.io.bap — St John the Baptist
26. io — Johannes (et Paulus)
27. do — (if this isn’t St Dorothy of Montau (Prussia), patron saint of the Teutonic Knights (from 1390) whose actual feast day should be 25th June, who was it? Thanks Helmut Winkler for pointing this out.)
28. le — Leo
29. pe — Petrus et Paulus
30. pau — Commemoratio Pauli

The presence of the much-contested St Dorothy of Prussia (a chronically-self-harming widow from near Gdansk, who was adopted in the 20th century by Catholics for Hitler, if you really want to know) gives us a hint not only to the German origins of this particular Cisiojanus, but also an earliest date (1390). Yet the presence of St Quirino perhaps hints at an itinerary via Hungary (the St Quirino with a 4th June feast died in Szombathely, whereas the St Quirino of Rome had an entirely different feast day): while, as De Nisco points out, the presence of the Feast of Sant’Antonio da Padova points very strongly to a Paduan Ciosiojanus adapter.

More importantly, you can see “san.ctus.io.bap” taking up four consecutive syllables in the Cisiojanus, a fragment of (almost-)plain text peeking through the jumble of syllable fragments that make up the rest. Moreover, the next syllable along is also “io” (for the feast of St John and St Paul), which might also be there for the finding.

All of which could offer an excellent crib for the plaintext lurking somewhere beneath Voynich’s labelese: so might we be able to find some echo of this in the Cancer labelese? Even more remarkably, might we be able to line up this phrase’s syllables with the labelese close to the crowned nymph in Cancer?

(As an aside, I hope you can see that this is the kind of connection that not only wakes Voynich researchers up in the night but also stops them from getting back to sleep.)

The “san.ctus.io.bap” Crib

Firstly, I offer up my own EVA transcription of the Voynich Cancer labels:

Outer ring (from 10:00 clockwise, just around from a gap at the left)

ykalairol
olkylaiin
olalsy
or.aiin.am
os.as.sheeen
otosaiin
opoiinoin.al.ain
ypaiin.aloly
oteey.daiin
oeeodaiin
ofsholdy
opoeey.okaiin

Central ring (from 10:00 clockwise)

olfsheoral
or.alkam
ytairal
oeeesaiin
ory
ochey.fydy
ofais.oeeesaly
ykairaiin.airal
okalar
orary
olaiin.olackhy

Inner ring (from 09:00 clockwise)

oletal
opalal
yfary
osaiisal
ytoar.shar
actho
aral

And then I offer up my thoughts: much as this whole idea got between me and my comfortable bed, I just can’t construct a sensible mapping (even with verbose cipher) between these labels and any of the Cisiojani I’ve seen, whether Latin, Italian, French or whatever.

But then again, I can’t sensibly map these labels to just about anything, language-wise: there’s no structure, or grammar, or variational consistency that offers a way of systematically parsing these labels into a system, let alone reading them. Even the characteristically labelese-like “oletal” / “opalal” / “okalar” / “olalsy” words (I’d perhaps also include “osaiisal”, “otosaiin”, “oeeesaiin” and “ytairal” in this group, and maybe even “ykalairol” and “olkylaiin” too) are only a minority of the thirty labels.

All of which isn’t to imply (as Richard SantaColoma is wont to say) that ‘this can only be a hoax’ (*sigh*), but rather that I think we’re missing something really big here, a rational connecting principle that would give these kind of labels a mutual structure and explanatory context that our theoretical crossbow bolts are flying a mile both over and past. For example, what is the way that we see “es” (411) much more than “er” (28), or “ir” (724) much more than “is” (62) really telling us? Why is almost every single instance of “ssh” not only at the start of a word, but also either at the start of a line or immediately to the right of an illustration in the text?

The recent surge of Voynich research interest in Diebold Lauber’s workshop has come about thanks to Koen Gheuen’s research. Koen’s focus was on the series of drawings in the centre of Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundels: and he began by tracing the unusual hand-clasping going on in the Voynich Gemini roundel (which I discussed here previously):

The similarity Koen highlighted between the Voynich Gemini roundel figures and the two frontmost figures in the following drawing from Diebold Lauber’s workshop is striking:

The parallels between the Voynich zodiac roundels and elements in Diebold Lauber’s workshop’s output are both qualitatively and quantitatively striking, not least of which is the crayfish (also highlighted by Koen) which – to the best of our collective knowledge – only appears misdrawn in a particular way (with the crayfish’s legs incorrectly attached to its tail rather than to its body) (a) in a Lauber-illustrated Buch der Natur, and (b) in the Voynich Manuscript’s Cancer zodiac roundel.

Knotty Problems

But there are problems of historical logic to untangle here. The first problem concerns the arms: the two hand-clasping Voynich Gemini figures have their arms crossed over (which is a correct depiction of the medieval ceremony), whereas the figures in Lauber’s drawing (dated 1448-1450) do not have their arms crossed over (which is incorrect). Koen dug up an image from the Werkstatt von 1418 (a different manuscript workshop, but from the same general area) that he suggests might well have been a predecessor to one or both of the other two:

Here, we can see the arms crossed over (which is correct) and a simple neckline (which is the same as we see in the Voynich Gemini roundel). Yet the arms are uncrossed, which is what we see in the Lauber drawing.

Koen proposes that this would make it difficult for the Voynich Gemini figures to have been derived from the Werkstatt von 1418 image, because the arms there were uncrossed, and it would be a little bit odd for the arms to have been recrossed.

Yet at the same time, given that the image depicts a man and a monk, this too is problematic for anyone trying to trace out a line of direct transmission.

It seems likely to me that the plain necklines depicted in all the Voynich roundel drawings that include a clothed human neck are systematic copies of a series of zodiac roundels from a single predecessor German manuscript (which was most likely a calendar). So we can tentatively date the predecessor document as being, say, closer to 1420-1430 (the date of the Werkstatt von 1418 drawing) than to 1448-1450 (the date of the Diebold Lauber drawing).

This gives us, I suspect, a sequence tree something broadly like this:

However, is this lineage compatible with the strangely misdrawn crayfish, which seems to suggest that Lauber’s workshop was somehow involved?

All I can say is that it is possible that the unknown document on the right (that I suspect was the predecessor for both the Voynich Gemini and the 1448-1450 Diebold Lauber drawing) was also from the Diebold Lauber workshop. The earliest known Lauber document is dated 1427 (Köln, Hist. Archiv der Stadt, Best. 7010 (W) 251, signed “Diebold de Dachstein”), and a number of Lauber’s early illustrations may have been by Hans Ott (whose work, the Heidelberg site says, can be found in Strasbourg documents between 1427 and 1449).

I (eventually) managed to track down some drawings from this 1427 Lauber document:

And yes, there are certainly a fair few simple necklines there. So the proposed sequence is still entirely possible, I think. Unless you know better? 🙂

“Among other revelations, he discovers it was a treatise on Spacesynth“, says the author of the following video, Hagar Hogan. I’m not sure if that actually helps explain it, but it may possibly be some kind of starting point. For some people.

This has taught me a lot about the relationship between Mario and Luigi and the Voynich Manuscript. But probably more about where the volume dial is on my speakers.

Of course, readers might consider that the above is a waste of time, and that I should instead use my blog as a platform for discussing serious-minded Voynich videos by earnest researchers.

Here, it has to be said that I’m specifically thinking of “Mystical Voynich Manuscript Interpretation – Part 1” on the ‘High Elven Wisdom And Love’ YouTube channel. Its author is “an empath […] an elvenkin […] a soul that expresses themself as an elf in this lifetime”, and who wants to post 45-minute videos on the powerful energy behind the Voynich Manuscript.

Me, I’ll stick with Mario, if that’s ok with you. 😉

For more than forty years, the late historian Gustina Scaglia researched 15th and 16th manuscripts containing drawings of machines. This led to her writing (some with Frank D. Prager) a number of highly regarded books, a good number of which I can afford (and have copies of) and a fair few my budget cannot easily stretch to. :-/ The list of her machine-related papers stretches back at least to her 1960 NYU thesis Studies in the “Zibaldone” of Buonaccorso Ghiberti (Advisor: Richard Krautheimer).

Overall, I think what emerged can be fairly described as a decades-long research programme to work out how these technical books and drawings fitted together into an larger inventive tradition – i.e. to determine where machine ideas really came from, and how they flowed from manuscript to manuscript, being adapted and adjusted as they went.

In many ways, Scaglia achieved just about everything she aimed to do: her accounts of Brunelleschi, Mariano Taccola, and Francesco di Giorgio’s books (and all their copybooks and derivative works, sprawling through the 16th century and beyond) in many ways exemplify the best of historical scholarship – despite covering such a large area, they are well researched, well thought through, and lucidly presented. And yet…

The Hole At The Centre: The Machine Complex Authors

It’s hard not to notice that there is a hole at the centre of Scaglia’s account, one which never seems to have been resolved (at least, not in those papers and books of hers that I’ve read). Although a very large number of machine drawings in Francesco di Giorgio’s books were derived directly from Mariano Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio also had a second major source for his machine drawings, a source which Scaglia was able to track only indirectly: she called these sources “the Machine Complex Authors“.

(Note that her 15th century Machine Complex Author(s) are different from the quite separate 16th century person she calls The “Machine Complex Artist”, who she concludes was active in Siena, and whose works Oreste Vannucci Biringucci copied into his books of drawings. I thought I’d mention this as it’s easy to get confused by these two similar names.)

Scaglia talks a little about the Machine Complex authors in her “Francesco di Giorgio: Checklist and History of Manuscripts and Drawings in Autographs and Copies from ca. 1470 to 1687 and Renewed Copies (1764-1839)”, in an early section devoted to Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de Architectura (British Museum 197.b.21, formerly MS Harley 3281):

Francesco’s other engine designs in the Opusculum, which may be briefly designated as the Machine Complexes, and fort plans had all been composed by anonymous artisans in 1450-1470 or earlier, none of which appear in Taccola’s sets […] These Machine Complex designs, largely formed in the artisans’ imaginations, are often inoperable, greatly constricted by the box frame in which the components are fitted […] [p.43]

Essentially, by the time sixteenth century engineers began to look with a more experienced eye at these 15th century drawings, it was clear that they were almost all impractical (and indeed occasionally fantastical): that if they were to be built, they would inevitably “move slowly”, as the architect Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane put it.

To the best of my knowledge, if Scaglia ever had an inkling of who might have been the “anonymous artisans” who conjured up those additional Machine Complex drawings that Francesco di Giorgio used, she never wrote it down. This was the hole in her history she never managed to fill: Scaglia’s unfinished business, as it were.

Was Filarete a Machine Complex Author?

In “The Curse of the Voynich” (2006), I explored the idea that the Voynich Manuscript might have been (in some way) a version of the little books of secrets mentioned many times by architect Antonio Averlino, scattered through his libro architettonico. According to Averlino, they contained secrets related to agriculture, water, machines, bees and so forth (though he never actually included a formal list).

Opinions are sharply divided about these little books, allegedly composed during Averlino’s time as ducal architect in Milan (1450-1465): some historians think they never existed at all (i.e. that they were just a literary conceit in Averlino’s part-factual / part-fictional libro architettonico), while others think that they did exist and that trying to make money out of them was one of the reasons Averlino wrote his libro at all. Either way, there is currently no known evidence outside the four walls of the libro architettonico that supports or refutes either account: so all we really have to go on is what Averlino tells us.

However, since 2006, I have further speculated that Averlino might have been the author of some of the Machine Complex drawings. This is historically compatible based on what we know of both: the period when Averlino claimed to have written / invented / compiled his book of machine secrets was within exactly the same period Scaglia concluded the Machine Complex Authors were active in Italy, after Taccola’s works (-1449) and before Francesco di Giorgio’s early works (1470-1475). And Averlino’s death (probably in Rome sometime between 1465 and 1469) would be about the right time for some or all of his books of secrets to make their way out into the world.

Did Scaglia consider the possibility that Averlino may have been one of the mid-Quattrocento Machine Complex Authors? Scaglia did, in 1974, write a glowing review in Isis of Finoli and Grassi’s scholarly edition of Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico (a review I’ve only read the first page of, sadly), so would have been well aware that Filarete had claimed authorshop of a book of machines, something that fell squarely within her long-term research programme. But perhaps the lack of corroborating external evidence for this meant that positing a link to the Machine Complex Authors would perhaps have been more openly speculative than she was comfortable with: perhaps someone more familiar with her work than me will be able to say.

Machines Hidden In Plain Sight?

If, for the sake of argument, we temporarily accept the premise that Averlino’s book of machine secrets did end up concealed in the Voynich Manuscript, the obvious question is: where are they? When I was researching Curse, it was very easy to see how a book on “agriculture” could be behind the Voynich Manuscript’s herbal pages, and also to see how a book on “water” could be behind the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘balneological’ quire (with its drawings of baths, and even possibly a rainbow at the end): so the absence of machine drawings was an issue that vexed me a great deal.

Though still just as hypothetical as it was more than a decade ago, the prediction this led me to remains controversial, simply because it is both simple and outrageous: that if Averlino’s book on machines (and it would inevitably be, like Taccola’s drawings that went before it, very visually oriented) is somehow hidden in the Voynich Manuscript’s pages, I concluded that the only place it could be hidden in plain sight was in the Voynich Manuscript’s “Herbal B” pages.

The text on (what Prescott Currier famously called) Herbal A pages was written by a larger, more open hand than the scratchy, smaller hand that wrote Herbal B pages: and despite superficial similarities, the two sets of pages have significantly different statistical profiles. Even though Herbal A bifolios have ended up (partially) mixed in with Herbal B bifolios, there seems little doubt that the two were originally composed in separate writing phases, and perhaps even written by different scribes.

Hence: even though both groups of pages are made up of plant drawings (normally one per page) accompanied by blocks of text (sometimes interleaved through the drawings), there seems very strong grounds for concluding that the two groups could well be quite different at heart. One of the things that distinguished Curse was that it proposed that these two groups of pages might well contain two different books – a book on agriculture, and a book of machines.

“Sunflowers” or Gears?

Since writing Curse, I’ve read a lot more of the 15th century machine drawing literature than I was able to before. And even now (in 2018), the systematic set of visual parallels I draw in 2006 seem no less strong: I still don’t see Brumbaugh’s supposed “sunflowers”, but wind-powered mills (and even wind-powered cars, something that had already been invented – though not built – by the early 15th century)

I also don’t see implausible plants, but rather obfuscated details that I suspect represent the racks and pinions that appear in 15th century machine drawings:

Additionally, I see what appear to be concealed versions of the horse-powered (or ox-powered) hoists that were such a mainstay of the 15th century machine drawing tradition (i.e. in Buonaccorso Ghiberti, Taccola, and elsewhere):

Finally: given Filarete’s love of fountains, it’s also easy (once you get to this point in the whole train of thought) to wonder whether some Herbal B Pages depict fountains:

As always, your mileage may vary: make of it all what you will.

Weak vs Strong Research Questions

The research brick wall I ran into with Curse was that Averlino’s books of secrets are – as far as anyone can say – entirely internal to his libro architettonico, making them virtual, unproven, implicit, or even absent: no-one can tell. And as for whether Gustina Scaglia ever considered (or even pursued) the idea of Averlino as a possible Machine Complex Author, she passed away 15 years ago, so that’s not really an avenue that can be followed.

However: what struck me in the last few days is that even though individually both are weak (i.e. untestable) research questions, if you put the two together you get a strong research question – by which I mean a question that can be tested against actual evidence, and perhaps falsified or proved. The point is that whatever trying to answer the question reveals, it should be possible to use the result to learn something new.

That is, even though the following claims have proven almost impossible to individually test (i.e. they are weak research questions)…

* that Averlino wrote the Voynich Manuscript
* that Averlino wrote books of secrets including a book of machines
* that the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal B pages contain encrypted or obfuscated versions of his machine drawings
* that Averlino was one of Scaglia’s Machine Complex Authors whose drawings were copied by Francesco di Giorgio in 1470-1475

…if you put all of them together into a single composite claim…

* that Averlino’s drawings appear both in the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal B pages and in Francesco di Giorgio’s machine drawings

…you get a strong research question, i.e. something that can actually be tested. So my next step is obviously going to be working out precisely which of Francesco di Giorgio’s drawings came not from Mariano Taccola but from the Machine Complex authors, and then comparing those with the Voynich’s Herbal B page drawings to see if anything connects the two.

However, apart from some references by the British Museum’s curators to figures in an unnamed book by someone called “Mancini” (presumably Girolamo Mancini?), I don’t know if there is a facsimile reproduction of the Opusculum de Architectura – if anyone happens to know a facsimile of the Opusculum or what the name of Mancini’s book is, please let me know, thanks!

More generally, what I find interesting here is that for many years I have spent a lot of time trying to break down big research questions into smaller questions that can be researched and tested atomically. Yet here I’m having to work in quite the opposite direction, simply because the individual smaller research questions are each too weak to be answered. And that makes me wonder whether we as historical researchers are sometimes hamstrung for lack of larger vision: that we can spend too much time on tiny questions that we can only partially answer, when we should (at least some of the time) also try to construct larger, more daring problematiques (as the Annales historians liked to put it), which would be testable in quite different (and perhaps far more revealing) ways. Just something to think about, anyway.

It is both interesting and intriguing that Voynich f116v – the final page of the Voynich Manuscript – contains several lines of as-yet-unaccounted-for text. What is interesting is that these lines are almost entirely unlike the “Voynichese” text that fills the rest of the manuscript, and are written in a recognizably European gothic hand typical of the 14th, 15th and indeed early 16th century. Hence they really ought to be easily readable – but what is intriguing is that this seems not to be the case at all.

As with all cipher mysteries, their unreadability has spawned a myriad of dubious readings, starting in the 1920s with Newbold’s “Michiton oladabas multos te tccr cerc portas” (which he squinterpreted as “Michi dabas multas portas”), through the 1970s with Brumbaugh’s “MICHI CON OLADA BA” (which Brumbaugh thought somehow referred to Roger BACON, *sigh*), and onwards and downwards from there. Even Rene Zandbergen, tongue firmly in cheek, once proposed that because the main f116v text block begins with “mich” and ends with “nich”, it can surely only be a veiled reference to Mich[ael Voy]nich himself. (As if Rich SantaColoma needs any more hoaxoline to hurl on his fire, *sigh*.)

Objectively, though, the text on f116v really ought to be the most obvious ‘way in’ to understanding the Voynich Manuscript’s physical history, simply because there’s no obvious reason why it would be enciphered or encoded: and hence careful codicological examination should normally be sufficient to work out not only what was originally written here, but also – as I carefully described back in 2006 – what emendations later owners made (presumably in the name of ‘preservation’) to leave it in such a parlously unreadable state.

Some multispectral imaging has been carried out at the Beinecke, but (unless you know better) only low-quality images leaked out and no paper was ever written. Here’s what the f116v text looks like at (“MB570AM_027_F”), which – I think – shows that there were at least two codicological layers that need to be separated:

Yet here we are, more than a decade after “The Curse of the Voynich” and not obviously any further forward. 🙁 But perhaps there are ways we can make progress… 🙂

A Closer Look At The Top Line

Rather than getting hung up on the bottom three lines, I’d like to focus purely on the top line.

I’ve previously proposed (in 2009) that the ‘^’ shape at the beginning of two of the words might be an ‘s’ shape, e.g. “simon sint (something)”:

Looking at this line in one of the multispectral scans (“MB625RD_006_F”), we can see that there is also evidence of emendation in the letters, but that the base codicological layer is different to that of the “a+hia + maria” layer (which I suspect was the earliest layer):

I think this provides strong evidence – though far from definitive, of course, because of the low quality of the images – that we are looking at at least three codicological layers of text on this page.

What Is That ^ Shape?

Over the last decade, I’ve looked at loads of palaeography books; I’ve read Derolez’s “The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books”; and I just haven’t founf anything that looks like the ‘^’ shape on this line.

I’m not really comfortable with J.K.Petersen’s 2013 claim that “The first letter might be a ‘u'”. And similarly, though I understand where he’s coming from, David Jackson’s reading of this whole line as “Por seber vm cn autentico afecto” seems a little premature, given the codicological difficulties I think we continue to face with almost every letter.

I happily concede that it is possible (as Anton Alipov suggested in a 2015 comment, and also in a post on his blog) the two ^ shapes are the heads of two ‘p’ shape, where the descenders have disappeared. However, given that there seems to be not a hint of this in the multispectral scans, it is far from my preferred explanation. Johannes Albus’ rendering of this line as “poxleber umen[do] putriter” is an example of a reading that requires the second ^ shape to have been a ‘p’.

The alternative remains that this ^ shape is a rare way of writing a Gothic ‘s’ shape, albeit one I’ve not yet managed to find anywhere. But if someone does, I suspect that it will probably be in a mid-fifteenth century document that was written not too far from Konstanz, just so you know. 😉

Has any Voynich researcher already tried hunting for this particular Gothic letter shape in the archives? If yes, then did you find anything? (I know about CSG 754 that Anton mentioned in the context of its spell blocks.)

I’m cautiously optimistic that a breakthrough has just emerged to do with the Art History origins of the Voynich Manuscript’s puzzling zodiac pages, that would appear to connect them with Diebold Lauber’s fifteenth century manuscript copying house. Errrm… who he? I’ll explain…

The Voynich Zodiac section

Even though we cannot decrypt the Voynich Manuscript’s text, researchers have long noted that its illustrations strongly suggest that the manuscript isn’t just random, but is instead composed of a number of thematically-connected sections.

The Voynich zodiac section contains a series of roundels depicting the signs of the zodiac (though the folio at the end containing Capricorn and Aquarius has without any real doubt been removed). Each roundel is surrounded by 15 or 30 small naked women (‘zodiac nymphs’, though Pisces has only 29) posed somewhat awkwardly, each of whom is linked to a small fragment of text (‘zodiac labels’). Here’s Pisces:

[Note that one early owner seems to have added month names to its roundels (e.g. March to Pisces, April to Aries, etc) in a somewhat rough and ready hand, but that’s another matter entirely.]

I’ve argued for years (and the idea certainly wasn’t mine) that the central drawings were probably loosely copied from an astronomical calendar or hausbuch, of the type entirely typical of late 14th or early 15th century Germany, a good number of which had strikingly similar circular astrological or astronomical roundels.

But despite Voynich researchers’ Herculean efforts in recent years to cross-reference these medical/astronomical hausbuch drawings to the Voynich’s zodiac drawings, results have been mixed at best: a zodiac sequence with a good Pisces or Sagittarius match would for the other zodiac signs typically be accompanied by drawings that shared practically no similarities with the Voynich’s roundels. And so things, after a huge burst of collective enthusiasm a couple of years back, stalled somewhat.

Enter Koen Gheuens

In 2016, researcher Koen Gheuens was looking at the Voynich zodiac Gemini roundel drawing, and wondered what the curious double-handed handshake gesture depicted there might signify or mean.

After the usual long sequence of dead-ends, he discovered that in fact it was a pose used in some medieval weddings, and that it even had its own literature. He describes it as follows:

The type of medieval marriage we’re interested in is as follows: the man and woman hold one hand (in cross, so left to left or right to right) and with his free hand, the man puts a ring on a finger of the woman’s free hand. This results in the “double handshake” look. The “passive” set of hands is usually pictured below, while the putting on of the ring is above.

Koen found a number of depictions of the double-handed marriage – very ably documented on his Voynich Temple website – which progressively led him to the manuscript workshop of Diebold Lauber.

Diebold Lauber

In the days before printing, manuscript workshops had to find ways of churning out work for clients that was cost-effective: drawings in particular were time-consuming. The particular ‘hack’ Diebold Lauber’s workshop seems to have made most use of was to have a set of pre-drawn generic exemplar poses which were then lightly adapted (presumably by less skilled illustrators) multiple times. In this way, drawings were reused and recycled multiple times: the connections between these recycled drawings gives plenty of grist for Art Historians’ mills to grind.

Koen put forward the idea that there seems to be a connection between a particular Diebold Lauber crossed-hands-marriage drawing dated to 1448 and the Voynich zodiac crossed-hands Gemini roundel:

And once you see how the details parallel each other, it is indeed a very persuasive visual argument (Koen’s composite image):

Putting all the pieces of the historical puzzle together, it would therefore seem a perfectly reasonable inference that the Voynich zodiac roundel drawings were roughly copied from a zodiac sequence that appeared in an medical-astronomical hausbuch commissioned from Diebold Lauber’s manuscript workshop, where the Gemini pose had been recycled from an earlier Diebold Lauber crossed-hands marriage stock drawing exemplar.

Diebold Lauber References

For a German-language description of Lauber’s prolific workshop in Hagenau (just North of Strasbourg), the Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg has put together a nice page here. From this we learn that researchers have collected together about 80 examples of the workshop’s output dating from 1427 to 1467 (lists here): and that the illustrators worked as long-standing teams, with the so-called “Gruppe A” active from about 1425 to 1450. Lauber was effectively a bookseller, and even included a handwritten advertisement in some of his manuscripts, such as this one (from Cod. Pal. germ. 314, fol. 4ar) from 1443-1449:

A transcription and translation of this would be much appreciated! 🙂

A Diebold Lauber Calendar

What might a Diebold Lauber medical/astronomical calendar look like? Luckily, we don’t need to wonder: there was one in the library of Colonel David McCandless McKell in Lexington, Kentucky, that Rosy Schilling wrote two short books about (one a facsimile of the MS, the other a transcription and English translation).

* Rosy Schilling: A facsimile of an Astronomical medical calendar in German (Studio of Diebolt Lauber at Hagenau, about 1430 – 1450): from the Library of Colonel David McC. McKell, Lexington, Ky., 1958
* Rosy Schilling: Astronomical medical calendar: German, studio of Diebolt Lauber at Hagenau, 15th century, c. 1430 – 50, Lexington, 1958

Here’s what January looks like (i.e. Aquarius):

And – because I know you’re going to ask – here are all twelve zodiac signs from the McKell Ms (click for a larger version):

McKell’s extensive library was bequeathed to the Ross County Historical Society, though according to the Handschriftcensus entry, it was sold by Bloomsbury Auctions (8th July 2015, Sale No. 36180) to Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books AG. So anyone suitably rich who wants to own this can very probably do so. Which is nice.

So… What Next?

Personally, I’m not convinced every extant Diebold Lauber workshop drawing has been collected together yet. For example, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1370 has been mentioned before by Voynich researchers on one of Stephen Bax’s pages (it was written in Strasbourg in the mid-15th century, certainly before 1467): and I would be unsurprised if it was connected with Lauber. Here is its Sagittarius roundel:

I’m also far from convinced – given that medical/astronomical hausbuchen don’t have a huge literature – that there aren’t other Diebold Lauber calendars out there that haven’t yet been recognized for what they are. Perhaps this should be a good direction to pursue next? Something to consider, anyway.