New Leonardo + Voynich Ms + Tarot article…

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Edith Sherwood, everyone’s favourite Leonardo-wrote-the-Voynich-so-he-did theorist, has posted up an extensive (and fascinating) new article focusing mainly on the depictions of the sun, moon and stars in the Voynich Manuscript: the starting point of her journey is the striking similarity between suns and moons in the VMs’ “astronomical” Quire 9 and a sun/moon pair on a particular Afro-Portuguese ivory horn (#101) carved between 1495 and 1521. Essentially, the question she tries to tackle is: what on earth connects these two very disparate objects?

afro-portuguese-horn-101Afro-Portuguese Horn #101 (from Edith Sherwood’s site)

Unsurprisingly, she starts by linking the sun with the Visconti raza symbol (as per p.61 of my “The Curse of the Voynich”): but, even better, continues by connecting the sun/moon pair to two copies of Dante’s Commedia, as posted up by long-time Tarot researcher Robert V. O’Neill in Chapter 14 of his online article “Dante’s Commedia and the Tarot”.  O’Neill suggests connections between the Commedia manuscript illustrations (Sherwood describes these as 14th century “woodcuts”, probably a typo) and the designs found on early Tarot cards, in particular his Figure 37 (“late 14th century”) and Figure 39 (“mid 14th century”), though unfortunately he doesn’t give MS references for them. To all of which I would also add the probable connection between the circular arrays of VMs zodiac nymphs and Dante’s description of concentric rows of angels in Heaven (as per pp.36-37 of “The Curse”).

At first glance, Sherwood’s proposed iconographic connection between the Visconti-Sforza Tarot sun/moon, the carved ivory sun/moon, and the VMs sun/moon (essentially, though the carved ivory and the VMs were unlikely to be directly connected, they both had the Visconti-Sforza Tarot as a shared ancestor) seems perfectly reasonable. In fact, it almost amounts to an excellent example of the kind of “Voynich Research 2.0” 14th-century-centred art history I blogged about recently.

commedia-links

The problem with this is that it presupposes  a circa 1500 (basically, Leonardo-friendly) date for the VMs, without noting that there is an alternative  (and, given the 15th century quire numbers, I would say more likely) diffusion sequence that doesn’t rely on the Tarot at all. Remember, the similarities noted were between the VMs and the Commedia illustrations, not the Visconti-Sforza Tarot per se:-

commedia-links-v2

In her article, Edith Sherwood also makes a number of other fascinating observations and comparisons (to do with Apollo, with the water nymphs, and with the parallel hatching) which I’d really like to blog about in more detail, but quite frankly those will have to wait for another day.

Finally, Leonardo was anything but a child when he reached Milan in 1481 (when Sherwood suggests he probably first saw the Tarot), so her parallel claim that Leonardo can only have made the VMs as a (brilliant) child doesn’t really seem to stack up with her proposed Tarot connection anyway.

If you look at the VMs with truly open art historical eyes (as Sherwood set out to do), I think you will almost inevitably reach a certain position: it’s mid-Quattrocento Northern Italian, with its cryptographic roots in Milan, its intellectual roots in Florence, its stylistic roots in Venice, and its philosophical roots in Dante. Oh, and it was written by a secrets-obsessed right-hander with a far greater command of cryptography than Leonardo da Vinci ever had (Chapter 6 of “The Curse” has a detailed critique of Leonardo’s limited cryptography).

PS: I found Sherwood’s article through Google Adwords “Voynich written by a lefty?“: but if you want me to look at your Voynich site, please just email a link to me, it’s much cheaper (and quicker). 🙂

Ukrainian Voynich theory…

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In the good old days, we seemed to be in a “long boom”, blessed by an apparently unlimited supply of fringe Voynich theories, like so many babies’ socks effortlessly churned out by a deranged knitter. Oh yes, we’ve definitely seen plenty of knitters over the years. 🙂

But of late, it’s hard to avoid noticing that a Voynich theory drought has apparently taken hold. It’s not that all the good theories have already been nabbed: the nature of most Voynich theories is they are intrinsically bad but non-trivial to disprove, while simultaneously playing out a subtle wish-fulfilment role in the theorist’s personal psychodrama. A bit like an Action Man toy for intellectual introverts. 🙂

But why should this ‘silence of the flim-flams’ be happening now? My suspicion is that the VMs cultural meme has subtly drifted over the last few years  into a kind of no man’s land. Whereas it used to be something for everybody, I think that the ‘analysis paralysis’ of the Wikipedia Voynich page has spread, virus-like, through mainstream culture: and that the VMs’ status as a wacky para-historical mystery has been displaced by a kind of diffused epistemological ennui, as if the very need to understand it is somehow misjudged – that it’s not that kind of girl.

However, here’s a tolerably recent Voynich theory I’d missed, courtesy of “Michael the friend of D.” (who appears to be from the Ukraine), first posted to sci.lang in 2007. By plucking characters from a rotating sequence of three lines, Michael is able to pluck out a single non-word (“gracieg”) from the VMs. Where less than three lines are available, he suggests that stuff is hidden (Trithemius-style) in every other word. Of course, he’s not actually using the VMs for this, but a cleaned-up page of VMs text from omniglot.com: which isn’t so very different from Gordon Rugg relying on the statistical properties of the transcription. On the bright side, Michael is at least self-aware enough to notice that that he’s probably falling into a trap. 🙂

The secret of “aiin” and “aiir” revealed…

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Here’s a novel explanation for the curious “aiin” and “aiir” pattern found throughout the Voynich Manuscript’s curious text (AKA Voynichese) that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

In my 2006 book, I pointed out that the Voynichese stroke conventionally transcribed as “n” (in EVA) is actually far closer to a “v” with an embellished right stroke: I then went on to suggest that these lettergroups might well be pretending to be page numbers: “iiiv” for “2v” (i.e. folio 3 verso), “iir” for “2r” (i.e. folio 2 recto), etc. Yet however appealing an idea this might be, it fails to explain the preceding “a” sign (“i”-groups are almost always preceded by “a”). And so the follow-on question is this: why do “iiv” and “iir” appear as “aiiv” and “aiir” in the text?

The answer I now propose is brutally simple, and (dare I say it) possibly even obvious to anyone who has seen my recently posted page on the Voynich Manuscript’s own unusual quire numbers. Though quires were usually “signed” (i.e. they had signs added to them to allow a binder to be able to bind them together in the correct order) with quire numbers in the late Middle Ages, these quire signatures normally used quire letters in the early Middle Ages – a, b, c, etc. And so what “aiiv” would have most strongly resembled to a would-be reader circa 1450 is simply a rather old-fashioned reference to “quire a, folio ii verso“.

Having said that, not for a minute do I think that this kind of page reference is what the lettergroup actually represents – instead, I strongly believe that this is all part of the slightly convoluted rationale for the VMs’ cover cipher (i.e. what the cipher is pretending to be, rather than what it actually is), a deceptive surface arrangement of faux-historical letter shapes that attempts to tell/sell a misleading story to the casual observer.

All the same, I should mention that I did briefly wonder whether lettergroups such as “aiiv” apparently highlighting a page might simply be standing in for a letter hidden in plain sight on that very page, encoded (for example) as the shape of the plant or root there. In this manner, f1v could just about be read as “t” or “f” or “v”; f2r might conceivably be “m” or “e” (in the roots); f2v  “p” or “o” or “q”; f3r “v”; and so on. What is so intellectually appealing about this is that it would make the first quire nothing more than a huge one-page-per-letter steganographic cipher dictionary. Though this isn’t something I could myself accept, I thought I ought to flag it as a novel idea: errrm… neat, but rubbish. 🙂

New page on Voynich Quire Numbers…

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I’ve just added a new page to the Cipher Mysteries site that looks at the (historical) mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbers. This is an aspect of the VMs that has had relatively little coverage (apart from pp.15-18 of my book, *sigh*), yet which should form one of the key dating data.

Should be plenty there both (a) to pique the interest of any passing mainstream historians and (b) to annoy late Renaissance hoax theorists. Enjoy! 🙂

Review of “The Curse of the Voynich”…

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I suppose this is the review I’ve spent two years steeling myself for. No matter what book critics may say, reviewing other people’s books is an easy word-game to play (typically revolving around inserting themselves into the commentary): whereas putting your own writing under the same spotlight is something closer to therapy. What, with the benefit of hindsight, do I now make of “The Curse of the Voynich“?

"The Curse of the Voynich", by Nick Pelling
“The Curse of the Voynich”, by Nick Pelling

Firstly, the title didn’t work. To an avowedly rationalist commentator such as myself, a “curse” is merely a kind of game a community plays with itself when its members all willfully look away from the ball while wondering why nothing is moving. Fair enough: but the Voynich’s own mythology is so close to fiction that the word’s far stronger associations with literary curses (the Curse of Blackadder, for example) predominates. This means that people’s first reaction is normally to wonder whether the book is some kind of curious historical fiction: so, a bit of an own-goal there.

Secondly, the cover didn’t work: Alian Design did an excellent job of interpreting the brief I sent them, and produced something that was evocative and uncertain in all the ways I intended. But, again, people have a low tolerance for uncertainty: and typically “read” the cover as somehow implying that the book lacks focus. Cover art has a rigidly defined set of conventions, which publishers (even small ones) can only pragmatically subvert, not replace: the absence of a picture of the VMs on the cover (quite literally) sent out the wrong message to buyers. This was own-goal #2.

Thirdly, the editing didn’t work. Though my friend Tabby Magas splendidly subedited my clausally-complex original draft, the overwhelming pay-per-page commercial model for digital print meant that I was forced to squeeze the whole thing into under 240 pages to keep the final price under £10 – roughly a hundred less pages than the content dictated. More pictures to support the visual arguments would have been nice, but these too used up too much of my limited page budget. And so the writing suffered.

Fourthly, the content didn’t work. Even though modern historians now routinely make use of a hugely multi(ple-)media set of influences / evidences when forming their arguments and discussions, few would dare to take on the Voynich Manuscript as a subject because of the overwhelming variety of strands that would need tackling and integrating (let alone try to draw a conclusion based on such a multi-disciplinary approach). “The Curse” set out to build an entirely new research field: while it is true that many elements of “forensic codicology” had been carried out before, I was trying to bring them all together in perhaps the most concerted way yet attempted. Essentially, I was trying to do to the many historical methodologies what mechatronics did for mechanical engineering and electronics – bring them together in parallel and direct their focus on a tangible problem. But, almost inevitably, this was too ambitious a project – to do this properly would require an entire history department, not some baldy bloke in his second bedroom with a wallful of old books, no matter how persistent he happens to be.

Finally, nobody wanted an answer. People inside the Voynich research field seem blissfully content with the irascible status quo that lays upon everything like a stifling smog: feathers get hugely ruffled if anyone so much as suggests a century for the manuscript, let alone a country, town, or (heaven forfend) an individual, never mind if they try to back it up with anything approaching an argument. At the same time, few VMs outsiders have any great interest in such questions: to most people, it’s just a historical curiosity (if, indeed, it is anything at all).

I also received some hostility about my openness to Steve Ekwall’s claims: yet only three people had written anything particularly cogent about the VMs (Rene Zandbergen and Mary D’Imperio were the other two). To me, Steve Ekwall poses a greater mystery then the VMs itself: while I have a rational explanation for everything in the VMs, I have no such explanation for Steve Ekwall. All I can do is observe that his claims about what the VMs actually is do chime to a remarkable degree with what it took me years to grasp, despite the fact that he apparently has no useful art historical grasp of the object at all. And your own rationalization for all that is… what, exactly? Of course, I could (just like everyone else does) simply pretend Steve doesn’t exist: but what is there to be scared of?

No matter: probably the biggest single criticism of my book project is that I exceeded the amount that readers could accept all in one go – it was all too much, all too soon. Yet even if (as is always possible in historical research) the whole Averlino hypothesis is somehow proven wrong, I’m pretty sure I will turn out to be at least “the right kind of wrong” – looking in the right place for the right evidence for the right reasons should be nothing to be ashamed of. In time, people will doubtless catch up and overtake me, to the point that everything in “The Curse” will stop looking like some kind of mad hallucinatory multi-dimensional take on an enigmatic Renaissance curio, and instead become high historical orthodoxy. When you’re ready, I’ll still be here.

Anyway, here’s the first punchline of the day: a brief appendix to “The Curse” that you probably weren’t expecting.

Following my recent post on Giovanni Fontana, Augusto Buonafalce kindly pointed me towards a recent single-page note he wrote for Cryptologia, suggesting that a memory machine called a “speculum” (resembling a set of concentric disks with alphabets on) designed by Giovanni Fontana might well have somehow inspired Leon Battista Alberti’s famous code wheel. But how did that idea travel? In the Quattrocento, hardly anybody knew about Giovanni Fontana’s secret works – even his encyclopedia (composed around 1450) didn’t appear in print for a further century.

In my book, I argued that when Antonio Averlino left Milan in 1465, he went to Rome, and was there when Alberti was researching and writing his little book on ciphers. I further argued that Alberti’s book has a dialogue-like summary of his debate with a different cryptographer (who, like Averlino, favoured transposition ciphers over substitution ciphers), which I argued was probably Averlino. That is to say, I concluded that the two men were probably looking at revolving cipher machinery at the same time and place. In much the same way that I don’t believe three Dutchmen independently invented the telescope at the same time, I don’t believe that Averlino and Alberti both happened to invent revolving cipher machinery at the same time and place – I believe that they were at least aware of each other, if not actually working in some kind of edgy collaboration.

But how might the idea of a “speculum” have travelled to Rome? Fontana lived until 1454, probably in Padua or nearby Venice – yet we can directly place Averlino in Venice and Padua in 1450 and 1461. What are the odds that the secrets-hungry Averlino, broadly the same kind of freelance “travelling master” as Andrea Mantegna, learned of Fontana’s mnemonic wheel directly from Fontana himself in Padua, and then brought the idea with him to Alberti in Rome? In the absence of any better information, this is now what I believe probably happened.

The odds that the secretive (and secrets-obsessed) Averlino was the person behind the VMs have already been shortened, thanks to my recent discovery (from a brief mention by Lynn Thorndike) that Averlino showed off his elegant (but now lost) herbal written in the vulgar tongue in Bergamo – and if there is a better candidate for the plaintext of the VMs’ herbal pages, I have yet to find it.

So now, here’s the second punchline of the day, which is, frankly, as hallucinatory as anything I’ve encountered.

One thing Steve Ekwall repeats over and over is the VMs’ enciphered text’s reliance on the “mirror”. The problem is that Steve has no idea what that actually means – basically, what could a “mirror” be in this kind of context? Somewhat disturbingly, the Latin for mirror is “speculum“. Could it be that it is Fontana’s letter-rearranging “speculum” that Steve Ekwall has been referring to all these years? Myself, I wouldn’t really like to say – but it’s a coincidence that makes me shudder at the thought.

My final bombshell of the day is that all of this basically closes the loop for my whole research programme – that, within the limits of the evidence currently available, I feel I have performed as complete an intellectual pathology on the VMs as is currently possible, which sharply reduces my level of curiosity about it.

I’m therefore now taking a long-term break, both from the VMs and from the blog (though please stay subscribed, as I shall still occasionally post book reviews). I’ll leave my various research leads (on dating, on f57v, and on the zodiac section) open for another day, they’ll probably still be there when I return. 🙂

But all the same, let me know if you find anything good!

Voynich researcher of the week…

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A Quality Assurance auditor from Cross Plains, Wisconsin, Mark Sullivan has been thinking about the VMs since the 1970s… and now suspects he has possibly glimpsed at least part of the answer, putting his current notes on a newly-started blog.

The key to it all, he believes, lies in the vertical column of Voynichese letters down the left-hand edge of page f66r: he thinks that the “9” character falls where vowels lie in the Latin alphabet, though when that pattern breaks down (at “O”), his idea is that the plaintext alphabet is somehow reversed (i.e. Z, Y, X, etc), which I take to mean something broadly along the following lines:-

Voynich Manuscript f66r, vertical column rearranged
Voynich Manuscript f66r, vertical column rearranged

Furthermore, he believes that paragraph-initial gallows “reflect forms of hic and qui“; that there is “an underlying system” involving “three columns with multiple sequences of equivalent letter groups“; and that there is also a kind of (verbose) number system at play.

Is this any good? To me, it hinges on what you make of the f66r vertical column. Though A, E and O do indeed match up nicely to the three “9” (EVA <y>) characters in the list, and “K” is apparently mapped to a rotated K glyph, the rest is fairly wobbly: F, M and W all map to the same “8” (EVA <d>) glyph, as do D and N (to the EVA <sh> pair), and the B and X (EVA <o>). Yet once you start introducing a degree of interpretation into a Latin-like text, you almost inevitably end up with something not too dissimilar to Brumbaugh’s ARABYCCUS and PAPERYCUS – fragmentary motes of Latin, evanescently bubbling to the surface in a sea of syllables.

These days, I don’t really have any belief that someone is going to waltz in from the wings holding aloft anything resembling a monoalphabetic substitution key to the VMs: and as a possible source for such a key, the vertical column on f66r doesn’t really do it for me. Moreover, I don’t think “K” appeared in the Latin alphabet as used by Quattrocento cipher makers, which would rather throw this sequence out. But perhaps I’ve got all that wrong, and should instead heed the wisdom of sagacious songwriter George Michael, who back in 1987 sang “I gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith“. Oh, well!

Pseudo-science and The Curse of the Voynich…

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A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).

In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂

With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.

I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.

So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮

As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.

If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.

The wisdom of a crowded forum…

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On the one hand, “Linus’ Law” asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple – hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library’s scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, the overall level of discourse seems to have gone dramatically downhill over that same period.

I used to believe that everyone’s contribution was potentially worthwhile, because anyone might see a connection that helps to unlock a door: but this inclusive liberal viewpoint isn’t tenable any more, basically because you have to be able to read the VMs’ pictures in a pretty sophisticated way to get even close.

The curious rubbed-through hole on f34r/f34v of the Voynich Manuscript

Even for the very brightest, there are numerous traps to fall in: such as Sergio Toresella’s belief that the hole rubbed through the tree-trunk-like thing on f34r signals the mad scribe’s sexual frustration (it would require a great deal of work to rub such a neatly arranged hole through vellum). Perhaps Sergio is right (he’s extremely close in almost every other way): but this presumes a very specific kind of irrationality – and so the observation relies very heavily on the hypothesis to validate it, which is a kind of circular argument.

All of which colours my reaction to Zachary1392’s post on the Facepunch Studios forums: when looking at the same hole rubbed through on f34r/f34v, he sees it as a representation of female genitalia. Which (having then thought about it some more) he then concludes we should perhaps worship, as part of a Voynich religion.

In some ways, it’s an optimistic moment: a very sophisticated opinion informed by Sergio Toresella’s lifetime of studying medieval herbals, being duplicated by some amusing forum troll. But it’s also a pessimistic moment, because it gets us nowhere: “Greeman” on the same forum similarly points out:

Haha it was probably some shmuck from 600 years ago who thought;

“I bet if I write some crazy letters and draw some real fucked up stuff on a book someone will find it years later and totally freak out.”

It worked, you all got trolled from an Ancient Pothead.

Good Game.

While “Trogdon” helpfully suggested that, because one word looks like “crop” (EVA chol), the VMs might instead be a Photoshop tutorial. And Draicia thinks the whole thing might be a viral advertisement (but for what? Another Dan Brown novel? Have book publishers suddenly evolved?)

I think that all this forum chatter demonstrates something quite basic: that Linus’ Law sucks for things you can’t easily decompose. Reductionism is such a fundamental tenet of scientific thought that nobody even thinks to mention it these days – but the awkward dizzying truth is that to get started on difficult problems, scientists actually have to actively exercise their scientific imagination to generate novel decompositions (which may or may not be right), within which the hard slog of execution can be split up amongst a virtual cloud of volunteers / academics /  workers. Hence string theory, etc.

Linus’ Law fails for the VMs because nobody wants to sign up to any apparently mad theory before committing any serious amount of effort to testing it. But the truth underlying such an odd object will most likely appear somewhat alien (if not outright demented) to our present day minds – and so any person proposing the hypothesis is naturally expected to do all the hard work of proving it.

The sad thing about the VMs is that we do now have a collection of basic art historical facts and observations which tell us broadly where and when the VMs came from: but these point to so prosaic a subset of answers that almost nobody wants them to be true. Far more interesting to put your trust in David Icke’s, Dan Burisch’s, or Gordon Rugg’s brand of alternate history: they’re scientists, aren’t they? (Errrrrrrm…)

Put it all together, and I think the wisdom of the crowded forums perhaps points to the antithesis of Linus’ Law: that if enough people help to trample on every suggestion, nothing is simple. Or perhaps even simpler: given enough troll eyeballs, everything becomes worthless junk. Oh well. 🙁

A new VMs hypothesis…

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Halfway through Blunt and Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal”, a small lightbulb flickered briefly to life in my tired head. And it was to do with the VMs’ Occitan marginalia, something that has bugged me for years…

To my codicological eyes, the VMs appears to have had a busy time in the 15th century (with three or four inquisitive owners), a very quiet time for most of the 16th century, before an intense flurry of activity circa 1600 (when I think its folios were numbered and the “heavy paint” layer added), which is just about when its semi-documented life at the Rudolfine court begins.

But, like an alcoholic after a particularly mad binge, there’s a whole chunk of time missing in the middle – in fact, about a century’s worth. What happened then? Who owned it? How did the VMs apparently get from Occitania (probably Southern France) to Prague? And – most crucially of all – why did nobody think fit to mention such an intriguing object?

Now: even though in many ways I hate what I call “join-the-dots histories”, when evidence is completely lacking (as is the case here) you really don’t have much choice. Basically, pragmatic hypotheses (which historians need so as to be even remotely strategic about what they look to for evidence) have to come from somewhere: and so here is my (possibly new) suggestion for how the VMs travelled from Northern Italy to Southern France and onwards towards the Rudolfine Imperial court at Prague. It may be rubbish, but it is at least testable rubbish. 🙂

The dots I propose to conveniently join together in a line (along which the VMs might well have travelled) are:-

  • Guillaume Pellicier [or Pellissier, or Pelicier] (c. 1490–1568), Bishop of Montpellier, who was a French diplomat in Venice between 1539 and 1542, from where he brought back Greek, Hebrew and Syriac books. He was also interested in botany; was imprisoned for a while (it’s a long story…); and was a long-time patron and friend of….
  • Guillaume Rondelet [or Rondeletius] (1507-1566), who famously taught medicine and botany at the University of Montpellier, and wrote a definitive book on fish. Rondelet bequeathed his collection of manuscripts to his student…
  • Matthias [de] L’Obel (Lobelius), (1538-1616) a young (but soon to be famous) botanist; he travelled to the North, settling first in Holland, then England, then Holland, and then England again.

From there you can get the VMs to Prague in any number of ways, though many (of course) would like it to have been carried there by Dee & Kelley. While that last part is still in the realms of wishful thinking, I’m more interested here in working out if the Montpellier side of things might be true… but how?

Further reading-wise, here are the lowest hanging fruits of all: HTML text resources.

  • I’ve placed a copy of Rev. Charles Kingsley’s chapter 14 of “Health and Eduction” (1874) “Rondelet, The Huguenot Naturalist” on the Cipher Mysteries website here. By modern standards, the text is a bit cloying, let’s say: but an OK starting point nonetheless.
  • A relatively up-to-date summary of Guillaume Rondelet’s life (in French) is here.

For correspondence, all three men have stuff in various archives: Pellicier’s Venetian correspondence, Rondelet’s (mainly medical) letters were published in his “Opera Omnia Medica” (?), while L’Obel (from whose name we get “Lobelia”, incidentally) similarly has a few letters out there (his patron Baron Zouche, the 16th century apothecary Jean Mouton, etc).

As with most questions about French letters, Gallica has plenty of scans of creaky old books which may (or may not) be useful. Here are some quick links to start with, sorted by date (rather than by usefulness):-

  • 1554: Libri de piscibus marinis, in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt. Rondelet, Guillaume. Matthiam Bonhomme (Lugduni). Online here.
  • 1557: Histoire des plantes, en laquelle est contenue la description entière des herbes… non seulement de celles qui croissent en ce païs, mais aussi des autres estrangères qui viennent en usage de médecine. Dodoens, Rembert (1517-1585). Impr. de J. Loe (Anvers). Online here.
  • 1572: Illustrations de Commentaires de M. Pierre André Matthiole, médecin Senois, sur les six livres de Ped. Dioscoride anazarbeen de la matière médicinale. Mattioli, Pierandrea (1500-1577). Guillaume Rouillé (Lyon). Online here.
  • 1579: Nicolai Dortomanni Arnhemij Libri duo. De causis & effectibus thermarum belilucanarum. / Carmina G. Salmuth, C. Heintzelij, A. Widholtzii. Dortoman, Nicolas. Apud Carolum Pesnot (Lugduni). Online here.
  • 1581: Plantarum seu Stirpium icones. De Lobel, Matthias. C. Plantini (Antuerpiae). Online here.
  • 1841: Notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de Lyon, 1483-1546. T. 1.  Péricaud, Antoine (1782-1867). impr. de Mougin-Rusand (Lyon). Online here.
  • 1877: Étude historique sur l’École de droit de Montpellier, 1160-1793, d’après les documents originaux,…  Germain, Alexandre-Charles. Boehm et fils (Montpellier). Online here.
  • 1903: Les ambassadeurs français permanents au XVIe siècle. Vindry, Fleury. H. Champion (Paris). Online here. (Text starts on page 5)
  • 1911-1914 Bullaire de l’église de Maguelone. [Volume 1]. Rouquette, Julien (1871-1927). Online here.

Books to look at for Guillaume Pellicier (note the various spellings!) would seem to be:-

  1. 1886: Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pelicier évêque de Montpellier, ambassadeur de François Ier à Venise. Henri Auguste Omont. A. Picard, Paris. In the Internet Archive here.
  2. 1891: Inventaire de la bibliotheque de Guillaume Pelicier, eveque de Montpellier (1529-1568). Henri Omont, in Revue des Bibliotheques, I, pp. 161-172. “Inv. used. Montpellier. Clergy, booklist printed”, according to this page on French wills. Gallica has apparently not yet scanned the 1891 edition (while the earliest currently on Google Books is 1897), which is a huge shame as this is the first place I’d like to look… oh well. 🙁
  3. 1899: Correspondance politique de Guillaume Pellicier: ambassadeur de France à Venise 1540-1542. Tausserat-Radel, Alexandre (1858-1921). Paris, F. Alcan.
  4. 1969: La diplomatique francaise vers le milieu du XVIe siecle, d’apres la correspondance de Guillaume Pellicier, eveque de Montpellier, ambassadeur de Francois Ier a Venise 1539-1542. J. Zeller. Slatkine Reprints.
  5. 1986: Les copistes de Guillaume Pellicier, éveque de Montpellier <1490-1567>. Annaclara Cataldi Palau, in Scriptorium 40, pp. 225-237. According to this website, “The author’s research on the Greek manuscripts in the library of Guillaume Pélicier, the French ambassador to Venice between 1539-42, relied heavily upon analysis of the watermarks to supplement other palaeographical and documentary evidence“
  6. 1986: Les vicissitudes de la collection de manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pellicier. Annaclara Cataldi Palau, in Scriptorium 40 (1), pp.32-53
  7. ????: Manoscritti greci della collezione di Guillaume Pellicier, Vescovo di Montpellier (ca. 1490-1568) : “Disiecta membra”. (I don’t know where it’s from, but ULRLS has a copy).

(Incidentally, Annaclara Cataldi Palau is a Professor at King’s College London, whose research interests are “Greek palaeography and history of book production“: so I presume that the last article was placed in the University of London Library system directly by her, in case you can’t find it anywhere else.)

Books which tend to get cited on Guillaume Rondelet are:-

  1. 1582: Vita Gulielmi Rondeletti, L. Joubert [Rondelet’s first biographer], in Opera Latina, 2 (Lyon, 1582), pp. 186-93. [Nancy Siraisi briefly discusses Joubert’s account in her “History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning” (2007), pp.126-127]
  2. 1865: Rondelet et ses Disciples ou la botanique à Montpellier au XVIe siècle. Discours prononcé dans la séance solennelle de rentrée des Facultés et de l’École supérieure de pharmacie de Montpellier, le 15 novembre 1865 par J.-E. Planchon, directeur de l’École de pharmacie. If you’re interested, there’s a copy on AbeBooks for a paltry £363.04: or you can go to the Natural History Museum’s library instead (which is what I plan to do). 🙂
  3. 1899: La botanique en provence au XVIe siecle, II, Pierre Pena et Mathias de Lobel. L. Legré (Marseilles).
  4. 1926: Un manuscrit médical du XVIe siècle, contenant principalement des œuvres de Guillaume Rondelet: Notes bibliographique et biographiques, Suzanne Solente (with E. Jeanselme and Dr. M. Lanselle), in Bulletin de la Societe Francaise d’histoire de la Medecine, 20. pp. 3-36
  5. 1936: Guillaume Rondelet, J. M. Oppenheimer, in Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 4, pp. 817-34.
  6. 1965: Guillaume Rondelet, C. Dulieu, in Clio medica, 1, pp. 89-111.

I’ll return to Lobelius another day (I’m still reeling from all the above). As it is, I’ve already jeopardised my membership of the Bloggers Union by including too much useful information in a single post. :-O

Review of “The Source”…

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The view you take of the Voynich Manuscript’s text inevitably affects the view you take of its drawings: though you could construct scenarios where (for example) someone sane did all the writing and someone mad added all the pictures, they really wouldn’t be very likely. And so there are actually only three broad classes of Voynich theory that have attracted attention over the years:-

  1. It’s written in an unknown / synthetic language –> the pictures are representational
  2. It’s written in cipher or private shorthand –> the pictures are obscured / encrypted
  3. It’s meaningless / hoaxed nonsense –> the pictures are meaningless / nonsensical

\In “The Source”, bestselling novelist Michael Cordy takes option 1 as his starting point, and weaves a pacy yarn around the amazing South American secrets hidden in the text by a Jesuit missionary / priest called “Father Orlando Falcon”, holding a bizarre redemptive power which the Vatican itself feels threatened by, yet which might be able to save the lives of the atheist geologist hero’s decipherer wife and their unborn child, yada yada yada. But enough of the PR-speak.

By all rights, I should hate this book: right from the start, it pits the Superior General of the Society of Jesus (basically the uber-Jesuit) and his homicidal killer half-brother against a rationalist oil scientist and a not-very-convincing linguistics student, in a kind of 1940s cartoon propaganda take on Religion vs Science. And as regular blog readers will know, my heart normally sinks a mile whenever evil Jesuits’ crooked noses and gaunt faces pop up in a novel (it was a cliche 350 years ago, and even Dan Brown was smart enough to try to reinvent it as Opus Dei). And here we also have an added Big Oil vs Gaia wrestling bout awkwardly threaded through the narrative.

You can doubtless see where this is going: even though Michael Cordy’s craft has improved dramatically since his 1997 debut novel “The Messiah Code” (which I reviewed here), his Big Themes construction and Top Trumps who-will-win-as-if-you-don’t-already-know characterization really don’t work for me. And yet “The Source” still manages to comprise, despite its superabundance of traditionalist book-for-the-beach tropes, as good an introduction to the mystery of the VMs as anything out there. (The only bit of wishful thinking is the “Voynich Week” mini-conference at the Beinecke – as if!)

And finally: I think there is a lesson in there for Voynich theorists, too: if you take an Option 1 approach and try to read the drawings in the balneological (‘water’) section too literally, the nymphs will tie you in knots.