Sarah Goslee’s reconstructed codex…

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A few years ago, Sarah Goslee (who I believe has her own blog here) gradually become more and more interested in medieval / Renaissance history, specifically (in accordance with her science background) with cosmology, astrology, botany, and cryptography. I doubt any Cipher Mysteries regular would be hugely surprised to find out that, somewhere along in the way, she ended up “hooked” on the Voynich Manuscript. 🙂

Her VMs research has mainly concentrated on PCA (Principle Coordinate Analysis) of the VMs’ text: which I think is a bit of a shame, given that the text was apparently constructed in an anti-analytical way to render that kind of approach largely useless. Oh well!

However, infinitii recently emailed me (thanks!) with a link to Sarah’s fascinating description of the late medieval manuscript simulacrum she constructed. Inspired by a fifteenth century Italian herbal and a fifteenth century Austrian alchemy notebook (MS LJS419 and MS LJS382), she set out to create her own SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism)-style astronomical notebook. Structurally, this has limp vellum binding, rag paper, oak gall ink, quill pens, and writing patterned after a fifteenth century herbal: contents-wise, it has a calendar, the metonic cycle, Domenical letters, location of the sun, etc.

It’s a nice, brief description of a well-contained project: recommended! 🙂

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 Illustrated Herbal”…

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It’s an oldie, but a goodie: first published in 1979, Wilfrid Blunt and Sandra Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal” (particularly the revised 1994 edition) is a must-buy first read for any Voynich Manuscript would-be herbal decipherer – if only to make plain by how much its herbal pages differ from other contemporary herbals.

Of course, Blunt has sneaked a few pictures from the VMs in there (pp. 88-91); and though he cites Alfred Werner’s (1963) observation that one page in the water section is like “a plumber’s dream“, he quickly cautions that “…’Heath Robinson nightmare’ might seem more appropriate” (which is fair enough). But as for commenting on the plants themselves, Blunt is content to pass them by at some speed, in much the same way that Eric Sams fled from the ciphertext. You’ll just have to find your own answers, I guess.

What did I learn? A new way of looking at plants began to emerge from around 1380, which a handful of artists were plugged into – but which most plainly weren’t. For example, even Giotto wasn’t au fait with it (though he “painted birds and other animals with a tolerable naturalism, [he] still made trees like outsize herbs”, p.57), but Leonardo (circa 1500) certainly was (and I would add Van Eyck too). As far as herbals go, if you look at Rinio’s Liber de Simplicibus (1419) [which John Ruskin adored], or even Serapion the Younger’s Herbolario volgare (better known as the Carrara herbal, MS Egerton 2020) (1390-1400), I think there’s something ‘graphic’ about the rendering, that we might today recognise as a “draughtsman-like aesthetic”. But far, far beneath the soaring flights of these stunning, draw-what-you-see masterpieces, the pedestrian copy-what-you-know world of medieval herbals stumbled on regardless.

Voynich Manuscript f17r and f17v, side-by-side
Medieval and modern, on the front and back of the same folio!

In the big scheme of things, I would say that what we see in the Voynich herbal pages is annoying because it fails to fit in either of these two easy pigeonholes – neither the high flyers nor the low achievers. And so the VMs actually has a chasm on each side: and because it contains occasional flashes of both medievalism and modernity, it – doubly annoyingly – lets people read either (or indeed both!) of those into what they see. Yet in order for those flashes of modernity to be present at all, it has to postdate 1380, and must have had an author who was at least aware of both levels: while its overall drawing style matches 15th century stylistic conventions far, far more closely than it does 16th century ones. But there you go.

Blunt and Raphael’s work is built on two lifetimes’ worth of herbal scholarship and reflection: and, nicely, is happy to adopt a light tone when it suits the needs of the passage. This seems to happen particularly when quoting Charles Singer from the 1920s, such as Singer’s description of the Leiden manuscript as “a futile work, with its unrecognisable figures and incomprehensible vocabulary” (the VMs isn’t completely alone, then).

At the end of reading “The Illustrated Herbal”, I came away with my head buzzing with stuff, but none it about where the VMs’ herbals came from – Blunt’s Wittgensteinian “if you can’t say anything useful, stay silent” position on the VMs’ plants has a lot to commend it. No, what I was most inspired by was his discussion of the transmission of ideas about herbals during the 16th century: but I’ll have to return to that in another post (shortly)…

Voynich miscellany, once again…

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Do you fancy a little personal journal with a front cover loosely inspired by the VMs (the plant at the top of page f18r, to be precise)? If you do, someone called “Black Pepper” has put her design on CafePress… just in case you have $14 to burn. Alternatively, here’s a Voynich Manuscript-themed screensaver from Amaranth Publishing for a mere $2.

And here’s Thomas Maska’s Avallaen font, inspired by Voynichese lettering: he made it for his conlang [constructed language], also called Avallaen, supposedly “spoken by approximately 35 million people on the northern end of Escerna, a massive volcanic continent in the N’ra Teoi (Great North Sea).” I quite like the way the digits are formed from gallows with different numbers of bars. Oh, and don’t forget, ägloinniyüvoih pōvlen üevs erüs.

Onwards to the fine arts: and I’d have liked to show you an image of Danielle Rante’s mixed-media drawing called “Voynich Secret History” here (this won the 2008 Ohio Arts Council Professional Award), but she didn’t return my email. Oh well!

And there was a 2005 piece similarly called “Voynich Secret History” (though this was a 4-5 minute film by artist Katherine Parker). Her interests include:” the redemption of kitsch, archetypes, and Märchen (German fairytales)“. Yes, I’d say most of the stuff that’s written on the VMs does read like almost-unredeemably-kitsch German fairytales, so perhaps she’s touching on a deeper truth here. 🙂  Her description of the film is that “Dormant plants, winter snow, steam, and drawings based on the Voynich Manuscript are metaphors for latent, hidden and lost knowledge“. All of which sounds rather pleasant, & perhaps one day I’ll see that too…

Enjoy! 🙂

Edith Sherwood’s Voynich plants…

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A few years ago, people Googling for “Voynich” started to see a sponsored “AdWord” link on the right hand side provocatively posing the question of whether there might be some link between the Voynich Manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci, and pointing them to www.edithsherwood.com.

Naturally, I pointed out that this hypothesis was a load of rubbish, primarily because Leonardo was left-handed, and the VMs was written by someone right-handed – a pretty good prima facie reason to dismiss the claim. Edith also relied on a particularly partial reading of the month names in the zodiac section (one of them when mirrored looks a bit like “lionardo”): but failed to notice not only that they all read like Occitan month names (which there is absolutely no reason to think that a young Florentine like Leonardo would have used), but also that they were plainly written by someone else.

Still, unlike the majority of Voynich theory proponents out there, she is at least looking in the right century and (I believe) in the right physical milieu (and possibly even the right town, in a roundabout kind of way): and for that I am grateful. No, don’t be like that: I really am. honestly.

Since then, Edith’s website has had some ups and downs (of which being hacked by some kind of Russan spam harvester and having its mail inboxes overflow were probably some of the downs). But over the last month, she has returned to it and begun to fill it with many additional pages detailing her and her daughter’s thoughts on actual plants apparently matching the drawings in the VMs. They refer to some of Mr Dana Scott’s botanical identifications (but repeatedly refer to him as a her, which Dana doubtless finds irritating), though largely propose their own matches.

Unfortunately, at such a large historical distance, finding botanical equivalents is a hugely hazardous way of trying to move forward: and the secondary claim to have localized the VMs’ production to Italy and/or the Mediterranean from the resulting set of highly contentious / non-obvious plants is simply not methodologically sound, however they try to spin it.

Though many people have taken this same tack over the years, that doesn’t make it a sound methodology: in fact, the consistent lack of progress achieved by it is very probably a clear indicator that doing so is in fact brutally unsound.

What is going on? I think that what we see expressed in the herbal drawings is not metaphor (a symbolic equivalent to or conceptual parallel of an original object) so much as metonymy (where component parts stand in for the whole). One classic example linguists give of this is the way Cockney geezers call a car a motor (or, in its gloriously glottal-stopperish glory, a “mo’er”), where a key component (“the motor”) is sufficient to stand in for the whole (“the car”). You may also recall this from Alexei Sayle’s “‘‘allo John go’ a new mo’er… / I keep tropical fish / in my underpants” [etc etc]).

Despite all that, the possibility remains that Edith and Erica might have managed to make some good observations. As I’m not a botanist, all I can say is that I think their reading of colours in the VMs is once again codicologically naive (because there seem to be plenty of reasons to conclude that most of the strong “heavy” colours in the VMs were not added by the original author): which would unfortunately seem to point in the opposite direction.

Voynich f36r plant = geranium?

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A few days ago, my wife suggested that the plant depicted on f36r might be a variety of geranium: on a hunch, I thought I’d compare it with the plants in Fuchs’ famous herbal – and Google quite unexpectedly directed me to a museum in Tuscany.

You see, in 2002 the Aboca Museum in Sansepolcro embarked upon an ambitious programme to bring together, to document, and even to publish its own books on the history of herbal medicine in Tuscany. It even has an online virtual tour (in both English and Italian) of its various collections of herbal-/apothecary-related artefacts (such as maiolica, pestles and mortars, books), though I’d recommend broadband. (I can’t stand their background saxophone music, though, sorry!)

For history lovers, they have also put scans of a number of herbals. Here I’m interested in their online browsable copy of Leonhard Fuchs’ Great Herbal (“De historia stirpium”), though only in 72dpi resolution (boo!). Handily, though, this is searchable by keyword: and for “geranium”, you find that Fuchs included drawings of six varieties of geranium (“geranion” in Greek) on plates 204-209. I pasted the images side by side so that I could compare them properly: this is what it looks like (be warned if you click on it, it’s a 3000-pixel-wide image!)


I think that the best match by far is the third plate (plate 206, “Geranium Tertium”, or “Ruprechtskraut”), as this has a similar curious rootball and a hairy lump” (the crane’s bill, I believe!) just beneath each flower. I put this side-by-side along with a picture of the plant on my neighbour’s front step (thanks Alex!) and the Beinecke’s scan of f36r: and now I’m pretty sold on the idea that this is indeed a geranium (thanks Julie!)

There’s another version from the Biblioteca Riccardiana here, and also an uncoloured version of Fuchs’ plate in Yale’s medical library here (on the left).

It is thought that Fuchs’ “Geranium Tertium” corresponds to the “Geranion Eteron” in Book Three (Roots) of Dioscorides. There, Section 3-131 says:-

“Geranium has a jagged leaf similar to anemone but longer; a root somewhat round, sweet when eaten. A teaspoonful of a decoction (taken as a drink in wine) dissolves swellings of the vulva. It has slender little downy stalks two feet long; leaves like mallow; and on the tops of the wings certain abnormal growths looking upward (like the heads of cranes with the beaks, or the teeth of dogs), but there is no use for it in medicine. It is also called pelonitis, trica, or geranogeron, the Romans call it echinaster, the Africans iesce; it is also called alterum geranium by some, but others call it oxyphyllon, mertryx, myrrhis cardamomum, or origanum. The Magi call it hierobryncas, the Romans, pulmonia, some, cicotria, some, herba gruina, and the Africans, ienk.”

What do you think?

New Byzantium book…

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Over the years I’ve spent looking at the Voynich Manuscript, I’ve become progressively more accustomed to its ways, to the point that it is no longer an enciphered grimoire to me, but simply a book we cannot as yet read. When learning to juggle, the primary force which keeps the ball in the hand is not gravity but fear: all the while people see the VMs as a dark, Necronomicon-like repository of ancient evil (basically, confusing unreadable with unspeakable), their fears prevent them from grasping what it actually is.

Yet there’s still something odd about how the Voynich Manuscript is rooted, upon what it stands: specifically, it seems to my eyes to have one foot in early modern European (specifically Northern Italian, I would say) culture and the other in late medieval Byzantine culture. Though I’m still unable to satisfactorily express how this works, what I can say is that many of its herbal drawings have a structural quality that is neither medieval European (slavishly copied, overstylised, unrealistic) nor Renaissance European (emblematic rather than symbolic, abstract). The closest match I’ve found is in Byzantine herbals, many of which are drawn from life, but which have a kind of secret inner numericality: not Kabbalah, but topology / geometry.

I’m therefore always on the lookout for good stuff relating to Byzantium, but its 1000-year history is fascinating for many other reasons: the rich seam of inspiration the Romantic poets found in the marvellous decay of Venice was perhaps but a shadow of the irony and wonder to be discovered in Byzantium’s own history.

And so a book I’m looking forward to is “Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire” by Judith Herrin (Princeton, 2007), which seems to have exactly the kind of overall historical narrative all the fragments of Byzantine history I’ve ever read lacked. There’s a helpful review here: the hardback’s £25 RRP is a little hard to swallow, for sure, but what can you do? (Errrm, wait for the paperback?)

More & more Voynich books…

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Today, I stumbled across yet another Voynich book: which then led me to a whole cache of them, like a hidden nest of gremlin eggs high atop a mountain. Don’t give them any water, whatever you do…

First up was “Les Livres Maudits” (1971, J’ai Lu) by Jacques Bergier, chemical engineer and [al]chemist, French resistance fighter and spy, writer and journalist: in it, he painted a picture of the VMs as containing a secret so powerful that it could destroy the world. Could it have simply been an idea: like “being nice to people doesn’t work“? According to my old pal Jean-Yves Atero, Bergier was convinced this secret was so devastating that (basically) Men In Black will always track its progress, and will stop at nothing to keep the truth about it from being brought into the open. Errrm… hold on a minute, there’s someone at the door…

Rather more recently, there was “The Magician’s Death” (2004) [published in French as “Le livre du magicien” (2006)] by prolific historical mystery writer Paul C. Doherty, in his ‘Hugh Corbett’ series. This has Roger Bacon writing an unbreakable code, various English and French factions trying to crack it, and loads of people getting killed (or something along those lines).

Coming out in the same year was “Shattered Icon” (2004) (later re-released as “Splintered Icon” (2006), and published in German as “Der 77. Grad.” (2007)] by Bill Napier. As far as I can tell, this uses the deciphering of a Voynich-style 400-year-old journal / map to tease out a mystery thriller take on the Roanoke Island expedition.

Scarlett Thomas‘s novel PopCo (2004) also mentions the Voynich Manuscript (it claims on the German Wikipedia page), as part of a “richly allusive” [Independent on Sunday] pop-culture novelistic riff on cryptography. She now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Kent in Canterbury. I find this a bit worrying: it conjures up an image of a classful of uber-literate proto-writers, all looking at the VMs and thinking “Hmmm… an ‘unreadable book’, eh? An excellently ironic leitmotif for my postmodern anti-novel…” [*], which I will then have to laboriously add to the Big Fat List, and perhaps even to try to read (Lord, protect me from any more Generation X knockoffs). Blogging can be hell, I’ll have you know.

Other VMs-linked novels mentioned on various language Wikipedia sites include:

  • “L’intrigue de Il Romanzo Di Nostradamus” by Valerio Evangelisti apparently has Nostradamus battling the VMs and its black magic ilk;
  • Dan Simmons’ 832-page epic “Olympos” (2006) apparently namechecks the Voynich as having been bought in 1586 by Rudolph II (though how this gets fitted in to a story about Helen of Troy is a matter for wonder: I’m sure it all makes sense, really I do); and
  • “Datura tai harha jonka jokainen näkee” (2001) by Finnish writer Leena Krohn (published in German as “Stechapfel”) is centred on the hallucinogenic plant Datura (AKA jimsonweed, Magicians’ weed”, or Sorcerors’ weed), and it is an easy step from there to the Voynich Manuscript. Back in 2002, I posted to the VMs mailing list about various plants such as Datura: so this is no great surprise.

Oh well, back to my day job (whatever that is)…