Kicked out of the Independent Researcher Guild…?

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Technically, I shouldn’t disclose that I was ever a member: but here’s the letter I received today kicking me out of the IR Guild:-

Dear Mr Pelling,

I am sorry to inform you that the Independent Researcher Guild’s Ethics and Behaviour Committee has recommended your honorary guild membership be withdrawn. The specific grounds cited are:-

  1. Treating facts as “useful stepping stones towards the truth“. This is wholly incompatible with Guild Article #2, which explicitly states that facts are to be viewed as “politically motivated deceptions designed to hide doubts“.
  2. Attempting to frame “research questions“. While it is acceptable for Guild members to grandstand using scientific-sounding phrases (particularly in TV interviews), actual use of the scientific method is expressly prohibited under Articles #18 and #19.
  3. Trying to actively falsify parallel research hypotheses, particularly those of fellow Guild Members. The committee suggests you meditate further upon the Guild’s founding principle of The Cornucopia of Truths: that history only makes sense as a church broad enough to accommodate everyone’s individual truth.
  4. Your reaching out to mainstream academics is plainly wrong-headed: their primary responsibility – even in the postmodernist wing – is to close down debate, the diametric opposite of what the IRG stands for.
  5. Preferring probability and human judgment over possibility – really, you should be fully aware that, as Guild Article #7 clearly states, probability is the primary tool used by academics to forcefully silence historical dissenters such as us. This is the line in the sand we draw to separate Them from Us: it seems that you are now on Their side.
  6. Finally: the committee notes that your proposing a bourgeois (even, dare we say it, ‘middle class’) reading of a mystery object (and with no heresy and no centuries-long political conspiracy behind it) is just plain ludicrous. ‘Lone gunmen’ should be the subjects of our collective derision, not of our individual research.

You now have 7 (seven) days to remove all the IRG logos and graphic devices concealed in your website graphics. Your invitation to our 2010 secret conference in Aldwych Underground Station has also been withdrawn. Your ability to use the IR Guild’s copyrighted phrase “independent researcher” in conjunction with your name has also been revoked. We now suggest you look to Academe for accreditation: certainly, you are no longer welcome here.

Yours in equal parts sadness and annoyance,

<scrawly signature>

Senior Membership Services Manager
Independent Researcher Guild

Honestly, could my year have got off to a worse start? I think not! 🙁

Pre-1450 German Voynich possibility…?

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The recent Austrian Voynich documentary gave a nice clear radiocarbon dating (1404-1438 at 95% confidence) for the vellum, and finished by suggesting (based on the swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle) a Northern Italian origin for the manuscript. But I have to say that as art history proofs go, that last bit is a little bit, ummm, lame: it’s a single detail on a single page, that might just as well be a copy of a previous drawing (or a drawing of a description, or an imaginary castle) as a real castle.

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of sensible art history reasons to suspect Northern Italy 1450-1470, for example:-

  1. Swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle are reminiscent of those on many Northern Italian (and Southern Italian, too) castles of the 14th and 15th centuries
  2. The rendering of the sun faces on f67v1 and f68v1 are reminiscent of the Visconti sun raza, most notably as per  in the Milan Duomo’s “Apocalypse” apse window (1420), so arguably point to a post-1420 dating
  3. Voynichese seems to be a more advanced version of those ciphers in Sforza / Urbino cipher ledgers that have the same verbose ‘4o’ character pair
  4. Handwriting is strongly reminiscent of Milanese “humanist” hands circa 1460-1470
  5. Dots on ‘pharma’ glassware (f89r1 and f89r2) are strongly reminiscent of post-1450 Murano glass decoration
  6. Decoration on barrels / albarelli is most reminiscent of 1450-1475 Islamic-influence maiolica
  7. The kind of baths apparently depicted in the balneo quire became most fashionable in Italy between 1450 and 1490
  8. The costumes and hair styles of the many Voynich ‘nymphs’ have been dated as belonging to the second half of the 15th century (and typically dated later rather than earlier)
  9. Parallel hatching only appeared in Florence in 1440, and in Venice (and elsewhere in Italy) from about 1450 onwards, before giving way to cross-hatching from about 1480 onwards.
  10. (etc)

But Northern Italy 1404-1438? Actually, apart from the first two above (which I have to say are probably the least persuasive of all), the evidence falls away to almost nothing, rather like an oddly disturbing dream fading away as you wake up in the morning.

But what about Germany circa 1404-1438? After all, Erwin Panofsky thought a German origin most likely (though perhaps he took a little bit too much notice of Richard Salomon’s readings of the marginalia), and there’s a touch of Germanic influence in the “augst” marginalia month name for the Leo zodiac page. Others have suggested Germany over the years, most recently Volkhard Huth (though I somehow doubt it’s Jim Child’s pronounceable early German, or Beatrice Gwynn’s left-right-mirrored Middle High German, while Huth’s 1480-1500 dating now seems a little adrift as well).

Art history links with Germany are thin on the ground in the Voynich Manuscript: it’s a (very) short list, comprising the general stylistic similarity between the VMs zodiac’s central rosettes and early German woodblock calendars, and the recent (but very tenuous) cisioianus comparison with f67r2: Panofsky also pointed to Richard Salomon’s reading of some clumps of marginalia as German, and to the fact the VMs eventually surfaced in Prague… but this is all pretty optimistic (if not actually hallucinatory) stuff. Basically, you’d need to do a lot better than that to build up any kind of plausible case. (Though I don’t know if Volkhard Huth added any new observations to this list).

But one thing that emerged since I wrote my parallel hatching history page is that the technique actually seems to have emerged in Germany before it appeared in Florence. I mentioned that there was a German master engraver known as “Master E.S.” (also known as the “Master of 1466”), who produced a number of hatched and cross-hatched pieces in the period 1450-1467: and I was content with the generally accepted art history notion that the technique probably spread northwards from Florence to Venice and Germany at roughly the same time (i.e. 1450).

However, the problem with this presumed ‘Italy → Germany’ model is that there was another German engraver (“Meister der Spielkarten”, “The Master of the Cards“) who was active (1425-1450) a generation or so before Master E.S., and who includes fine parallel lines in his work, most notably in the oldest known set of copperplate playing cards (1440). Anyone who wants to read up on this should probably rush to get themselves a copy of Martha Anne Wood Wolff’s 1979 Yale PhD thesis “The Master of the playing cards: an early engraver and his relationship to traditional media”. (Please let me know if you do!) Alternatively, you might well find things of interest in Martha Wolff’s paper “Some Manuscript Sources for the Playing Card Master’s Number Cards” , The Art Bulletin 64, Dec. 1982, p.587-600.

Of course, I don’t think for a moment that The Master of the Cards’ clear line and nuanced material rendering has anything directly to do with what we see in the VMs. Rather, it just seems worth noting that the existence of parallel hatching in the VMs is consistent with a post-1420 origin if German, with a post-1440 origin if from Florence , or a post-1450 origin if from elsewhere.

Voynich Cisioianus cipher crib…?

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When is Easter? A simple question, but one with quite a tricky answer: following the decision of the First Council of Nicaea in 325AD, it is the first Sunday after the full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is simplified to be 21st March): hence, Easter can fall anywhere between 22nd March and 25th April.

A moment’s reflection should be ample to reveal what a dog’s dinner of a calculation this entails: and when combined with leap years, calendrical uncertainty, and subsequent calendrical reform, what a practical mess it yielded in the centuries following. Even Carl Gauss got his own Easter-calculating algorithm wrong first time round (and he was no mathematical slouch).

From the early Middle Ages onwards, the awkward task of determining when Easter fell was known as computus – Latin for ‘computation’. In fact, you might (just about) argue that the Nicaean Council’s curious dating mix of pagan festivals, Metonic cycles, astrology and religion provided the original impetus for the modern digital computer – people in the Church had been computing Easter by hand for the previous millennium or so, and were doubtless thoroughly sick of the whole thing.

Given all the above, the obvious historical question to ask is: how on earth did anyone ever manage to calculate Easter? The answer lies in a motley bunch of tables, diagrams, and mnemonics devised, copied and adapted throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance that attempt to make the task do-able. For the most part, these are built upon the 19-year cycle of the moon (the Metonic cycle): this means that any time you find yourself looking at an unusual-looking table or diagram in a medieval manuscript that ‘just happens’ to be divided into nineteen columns or segments, there’s a fairly good chance it will turn out to be some kind of computus-based trickery.

The literature on computus is fairly spotty, because (I think) it tends to fall between two stools: basically, it’s too religious to be of interest to many historians of science, but also too scientific for many historians of religion. However, one decent starting point is a 1954 article in Speculum by Lynn Thorndike (one of my favourite historians, as long-time Cipher Mysteries readers will no doubt recall) called simply “Computus” (here’s the JSTOR page for it).

Thorndike had previously written a 1947 paper “Blasius the Franciscan and his Works on Computus” (again, here’s its JSTOR page), in which he discussed Blasius’ “circio” computus mnemonics and their reception in other manuscripts: for example, “CIRCIO” decomposes into CIR = “January 1st, circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision”, CI = “C, the third letter of the alphabet, which (I think) signifies the third section of the nineteen-year cycle”, O = “O, the 14th letter of the Latin alphabet, hence Easter falls on the 14th April”. Which is to say, in the thirteenth century (probably), Blasius constructed a tricksy Latin-sounding mnemonic that (it seems) replaced one of the computus tables (though note that I haven’t yet read either Thorndike article, so this is just a guess).

But this was not the only similar mnemonic from this time: what became far better known was the “Cisioianus” / “Cisiojanus” mnemonic. Because this spread mainly through 14th and 15th century German woodblock calendars, there’s a fair bit of German-language literature on this, and (for a nice change) the German Wikipedia page on Cisiojanus is actually quite helpful.

Basically, a Cisioianus mnemonic consists of 12 Latin-sounding (but nonsensical) couplets, padded out so that you step through the number of syllables to remember the saint’s days and feasts in that month. Here’s the couplet for January, from where you can see that the mnemonic got its name from the first two ‘words’:-

císio jánus epí ¦ sibi véndicat óc feli már an
prísca fab ág vincén ¦ ti páu po nóbile lúmen

(In case any passing pub quiz pop trivia fans are wondering, Carol Decker’s band “T’Pau” was named after a Vulcan priestess in Star Trek, not after the “ti pau” in the second line here. Just so you know.)

So: because January has 31 days, the couplet for it has 31 syllables, with the feast days highlighted:-

  1. cí → circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision
  2. si → (continuation)
  3. o → (continuation)
  4. ján → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  5. us → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  6. ep → epiphanias, Epiphany
  7. í → (continuation)
  8. si → (null)
  9. bi → (null)
  10. vén → (null)
  11. dic → (null)
  12. at → (null)
  13. óc → octava epiphaniae, the eighth day of the Epiphany
  14. fe → Felicis presbyteris
  15. li → (continuation)
  16. már → Marcelli papae
  17. an → Antoni abbatis
  18. prís → Priscae virginis martiris
  19. ca → (continuation)
  20. fab → Fabiani et Sebastiani
  21. ág → Agnetis virginis
  22. vin → Vincentii martiris
  23. cén → (continuation)
  24. ti → Timotei martiris und Titi martiris
  25. páu → conversio Pauli
  26. po → Polycarpi episcopi martiris
  27. nó → (null)
  28. bi → (null)
  29. le → (null)
  30. lú → lumen
  31. men → (continuation)

So, now you know a couplet to remember all the important medieval feast days in January. All you have to do is remember the other eleven couplets and you’ve got the whole year covered, right?

Incidentally, January was named after the two-headed gate-keeper Janus, god of doors and gates (though personally I would prefer it if we had stuck with the Anglo-Saxon “Wulfmonath”, the perishingly cold month when hungry wolves try to enter villages, the original ‘wolf from the door’). And also… Macrobius relates that Roman boys would play with a coin called the “as” (which had Janus on one side and a ship’s prow on the other), calling “capita aut navia?” – (‘heads or ships?’), which presumably morphed into the modern “heads or tails”… but I perhaps have digressed a tad too far here!

Of course, human nature being what it is, people then went on to construct rude and/or ridiculous versions of this basic cisioianus mnemonic that were easier to remember, but that’s a story for another day. 🙂

“Fascinating, Nick… but how on earth is this all linked to the Voynich Manuscript?“, I hear you (very reasonably) ask. Well… this all started with an intriguing email from Steve Herbelin, who got the online Voynich / historical research bug a while ago. He had been particularly intrigued by the circular picture on f67r2, which seems to be built around some kind of rational, 12-way division, presumably depicting something calendrical… but what?

f67r2-400x500-enhanced

Specifically, Steve wondered if this (or something similar) might reappear in other medieval manuscripts. After some protracted searching, he found this online image from a manuscript from Auxerre from circa 1400 which has plenty of circular computus diagrams (hence all the discussion of computus above), and the following 12-way circular diagram on fol. 9v:-

AuxerreMS240-fol9v-centre

Decoding this: the outer ring (#1) is a reminder of which cisioianus couplet to use, ring #2 is the month name (“januari9” is at about 8 o’clock), #3 is the kalends, #4 is the nones, #5 is the ides, and the innermost ring (#6) says whether the month belongs to the third (lunar regulars) or fifth (new moon calculation) cycle.

Basically, Steve wonders whether these two images might somehow be part of the same (cladistic / stemmatic) family-tree of manuscripts: that is, whether the text in f67r2’s twelve segments might encipher the same kind of information on the Auxerre MS’s fol. 9v.

Having thought about this for a few days, though the precise details probably don’t quite mesh as well as they at first appear, I really don’t think you can dismiss this comparison out of hand. Mnemonics were useful and not widely known (and so might well fall into the category of “secret practical knowledge“): and it has long been noted that the “medallions” in the centre of the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac pages do seem to hark back to the kind of illustration you’d find in early German woodblock-printed calendars, so there may well be some kind of reasonably direct influence there.

My own take on f67r2 (The Curse of the Voynich, pp.59-60) has long been that it seems to link a 12-way division around the outside with an 8-way division in the centre, and so (as astrology historian David Juste suggested to me several years ago) could very easily depict or signify some kind of calendrical conversion between a 12-way (lunar) zodiac/administrative calendar and an 8-way (solar) pagan/agricultural calendar. All of which is very neat: but fails to explain the 12 coloured moons or the structure of the text.

Of course, if we could only find the way in which any one ring of the f67r2 diagram enciphers the same information as a ring on the Auxerre MS fol. 9v, then we’d have an almost unbeatably good crib to crack the VMs’ cunning cryptography. However, nothing to do with the Voynich has ever proved to be that straightforward…

For a start, there don’t seem to be 30-31 syllables in each of the 12 segments (however you try to count them), so we can probably rule out a full cisioianus plaintext: so matching this in some abbreviated way would require a bit of thought. Also, I don’t (yet) know the details of Blasius’ “circius” mnemonic, but that might possibly be a better match (as long as it is a 12-part mnemonic rather than a 19-part mnemonic). Furthermore, I can’t see an obvious match with month names (which others have tried to do here for decades), and we don’t even know where the sequence of twelve segments start (or indeed end).

Interestingly, there’s a marginal mark at the top left of f69r2 which came out artificially sharply in the enhanced image above. At full resolution it looks rather messier, but might possibly include a left-to-right-flipped “J” at the bottom:-

f67r2-top-left-detail

Might this be indicating where to start on the diagram; or might it instead signify the start of the quire or chapter? (This was formerly the frontmost page of Quire 9, before it was rebound along the wrong fold, pace John Grove).

At this point, I have to call a halt on this (already far too long) post: once again, I don’t have all the answers, but perhaps I have managed to ask one or two reasonably good questions. All credit to Steve Herbelin!

Was vellum stored flat, folded or cut…?

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Sometimes the biggest issues can hinge on the smallest questions.

It seems that, from Rene Zandbergen’s recollection of this week’s press conference, the Voynich Manuscript’s inks and paints are merely consistent with its vellum’s radiocarbon dating. Naturally, for the ‘smoking gun’ brigade, that alone is insufficient proof to rule out any later dates for the creation of the VMs. The argument against consistency goes that the VMs could have been made decades later, if not centuries… as long as you are happy to accept the putative existence of a über-sophisticated and determined reconstructionist hoaxer producing a simulacrum of something that never actually existed in the first place, producing language-like text by means as yet unknown. 🙂

Even though I’m sometimes painted as the ‘solo voice of the Voynich mainstream’ (unpick that knot!) which would seem to place me in diametric opposition to such “Matrix”-like simulatory claims, I am actually sympathetic to many key aspects. For example, Barbara Barrett has argued passionately for a 12th century date for the VMs, and I can quite see how a lot of the VMs’ visual content does appear to her to match many of the tropes and techniques of the period: from my point of view (and taking the dating evidence into account), the VMs does seem to contain some kind of post-1400 “appeal to antiquity”, insofar as it appears older than it is.

But I came to that position for other reasons. For me, the key statistical and palaeographic evidence that independently led me there came from the “aiiv” and “aiir” letter-groups, which very closely resemble medieval [quire + folio + side] page references, but whose usage statistics are completely inconsistent with their being page references. I find it basically impossible to believe that this pattern arose simply by chance: in fact, in a tricksy (but logical) writing system as spare and tight as Voynichese, I strongly argue that this can only have been by deliberate design. And so I would say that there is an appeal to antiquity built right in to the cipher alphabet’s construction – a kind of “quasi-historical covertext conceit“, if you like.

Hence, I am receptive to the idea that the Voynich was in some way constructed to appear older than it actually was: and so the suggestion that the maker bought in old vellum to help “sell” that idea would fit naturally into this whole misdirection. So I can’t honestly say that this isn’t (to at least some degree) the case here – the whole furore over the Vinland Map is an example of how the same forensic science looking at an artefact from the same period can remain contested for decades.

Unfortunately, this means that radiocarbon dating is therefore only part of the codicological story, and we need to take a slightly wider view of the evidence in order to move things forward. I think the right question to be asking is: if the vellum was made [possibly much] earlier than it was used, what physical processes happened to it inbetween times… and can we test for those (either by their presence or their absence)?

For example, was vellum stored flat, folded, or cut?

  1. If vellum was stored cut, then we should test the age of the extremely unusually-shaped Q9 sexfolio or the nine-rosette page, because these would have had to have been made specially.
  2. If vellum was stored folded, then I suspect that this would leave stress lines along the fold marks that would be visible under X-ray on the larger sheets.
  3. If vellum was stored flat, then I suspect that this might lead to a difference in physical properties of the two sides – the uppermost might have “aged” more from greater physical exposure?

The issue here is that I strongly suspect that vellum was in almost all cases stored cut: whenever I have read about caches of old vellum appearing, it is in the form of cut sheets. This would seem to match the three-stage business process used to make leather in the later Middle Ages, for which my source is the account of the Barcelonan leather trades in p.97 of James Amelang’s fascinating “The Flight of Icarus” (1998):-

First […] were the blanquers (in Castilian, curtidores), who purchased raw hides from butchers or from livestock brokers in the countryside and took the initial steps to convert them into leather. The next stage of preparation was presided over by the assaonadors (Cast. zurradores), who curried or dressed the skins the blanquers partially processed. At the far end stood various individual trades which specialized in finished products ready for sale: cordwainers […], embossers, makers of saddles, harnesses, reins, gloves, and parchment, and, above, all, shoemakers and cobblers.

Amelang goes on to point out that the most economically powerful group were the blanquers, because of “the higher capital requirements of their wholesale dealings in hides and other supplies, including sumac, alum […] and other dressing products”.

To me, what this means is that medieval parchment makers had probably always eked out a fairly marginal existence: furthermore given that paper had become so affordable (and was becoming ever cheaper), the mid-Quattrocento parchment trade must have been pretty much dying on its feet. Hence, I really don’t see parchment makers themselves holding large stocks of uncut parchment for decades: rather, I would expect to see caches of cut parchment sitting around on shelves or cases in monasteries and administration centres.

Hence, I would argue that the key test here would be what the dating was for any of the unusually shaped pages, because these would most likely have had to have been made specially for the VMs. Hopefuly we will find out soon which particular four bifolios were tested…

Voynich Manuscript – the state of play…

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For decades, Voynich Manuscript research has languished in an all-too-familiar ocean of maybes, all of them swelling and fading with the tides of fashion. But now, thanks to the cooperation between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the documentary makers at Austrian pro omnia films gmbh, we have for the very first time a basic forensic framework for what the Voynich Manuscript actually is, vis-à-vis:-

  • The four pieces of vellum they had tested (at the University of Arizona / Tucson) all dated to 1420-1, or (to be precise) 1404-1438 with 95% confidence (“two sigma”).
  • The ink samples that were tested (by McCrone Associates, Inc.) were consistent with having been written onto fresh vellum (rather than being later additions), with the exception of the “cipher key” attempt on f1r which (consistent with its 16th century palaeography) came out as a 16th-17th century addition.
  • It seems highly likely, therefore, that the Voynich Manuscript is a genuine object (as opposed to some unspecified kind of hoax, fake or sham on old vellum).

f1r-abcde
The f1r cipher “key” now proven to have been added in the 16th/17th century 

The programme-makers conclude (from the ‘Ghibelline’ swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette page’s “castle”, which you can see clearly in the green Cipher Mysteries banner above!) that the VMs probably came from Northern Italy… but as you know, it’s art history proofs’ pliability that makes Voynich Theories so deliciously gelatinous, let’s say.

Anyway… with all this in mind, what is the real state of play for Voynich research as of now?

Firstly, striking through most of the list of Voynich theories, it seems that we can bid a fond farewell to:

  • Dee & Kelley as hoaxers (yes, Dee might have owned it… but he didn’t make it)
  • Both Roger Bacon (far too early) and Francis Bacon (far too late)
  • Knights Templars (far too early) and Rosicrucians (far too late)
  • Post-Columbus dating, such as Leonell Strong’s Anthony Askham theory (sorry, GC)

It also seems that my own favoured candidate Antonio Averlino (“Filarete”) is out of the running (at least, in his misadventures in Sforza Milan 1450-1465), though admittedly by only a whisker (radiocarbon-wise, that is).

In the short term, the interesting part will be examining how this dating stacks up with other classes of evidence, such as palaeography, codicology, art history, and cryptography:-

  • My identification of the nine-rosette castle as the Castello Sforzesco is now a bit suspect, because prior to 1451 it didn’t have swallowtail merlons (though it should be said that it’s not yet known whether the nine-rosette page itself was dated).
  • The geometric patterns on the VMs’ zodiac “barrels” seem consistent with early Islamic-inspired maiolica – but are there any known examples from before 1450?
  • The “feet” on some of the pharmacological “jars” seem more likely to be from the end of the 15th century than from its start – so what is going on there?
  • The dot pattern on the (apparent) glassware in the pharma section seems to be a post-1450 Murano design motif – so what is going on there?
  • The shared “4o” token that also appears in the Urbino and Sforza Milan cipher ledgers – might Voynichese have somehow been (closer to) the source for these, rather than a development out of them?
  • When did the “humanist hand” first appear, and what is the relationship between that and the VMs’ script?
  • Why have all the “nymph” clothing & hairstyle comparisons pointed to the end of the fifteenth century rather than to the beginning?

Longer-term, I have every confidence that the majority of long-standing Voynich researchers will treat this as a statistical glitch against their own pet theory, i.e. yet another non-fitting piece of evidence to explain away – for example, it’s true that dating is never 100% certain. But if so, more fool them: hopefully, this will instead give properly open-minded researchers the opportunity to enter the field and write some crackingly good papers. There is still much to be learnt about the VMs, I’m sure.

As for me, I’m going to be carefully revisiting the art history evidence that gave me such confidence in a 1450-1470 dating, to try to understand why it is that the art history and the radiocarbon dating disagree. History is a strange thing: even though thirty years isn’t much in the big scheme of things, fashions and ideas change with each year, which is what gives both art history and intellectual history their traction on time. So why didn’t that work here?

Anyway, my heartiest congratulations go out to Andreas Sulzer and his team for taking the time and effort to get the science and history right for their “DAS VOYNICH-RÄTSEL” documentary, which I very much look forward to seeing on the Austrian channel ORF2 on Monday 10th December 2009!

UPDATE: see the follow-up post “Was Vellum Stored Flat, Folded, or Cut?” for more discussion on what the dating means for Voynich research going forward…

More early modern correspondence sources…

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Further to the recent (and much-commented-upon) post on Godefridus Aloysius Kinner’s correspondence, I had a snoop around to see what other early modern correspondence roadkill I could scrape off the infobahn’s oh-so-narrow historical lane. The most useful page I found was from the Warburg’s Scaliger Research Project (kindly established by Professor Anthony Grafton): this contained a long-ish list of (mainly printed) correspondence collections (and the like).

Might one of these contain a mention (however fleeting or marginal) of the VMs as it (appears to have) trolled around Europe in the 16th Century, travelling to Prague via south-east France? Even though we can probably eliminate most of them (unfortunately), a couple do stand out as, ummm, “vague maybes”:

ARLIER: J. N. Pendergrass (ed.), Correspondance d’Antoine Arlier, humaniste Languedocien 1527-1545, Genève 1990.

LIPSIUS: Aloïs Gerlo and Hendrik D.L. Vervliet, Inventaire de la correspondance de Juste Lipse 1564-1606, Anvers 1968.

Might Antoine Arlier or Lipsius have noted the VMs as something of contemporary interest? It’s possible… but the odds are against it. Still, mustn’t grumble: one slim research lead (never mind two!) is always better than none at all.

Another nice thing from the Warburg page was a link to the CAMENA / CERA letter digitization project:-

CERA contains 90 printed collections (55,000 pages) of letters written from ca. 1520 through 1770 in Germany and neighbouring countries.

Make of that what you will (I didn’t get very far, perhaps you’ll do better than me).

There are some other leads listed there… so… if you are a history-mad masochist with an interest in the VMs who just happens to find themselves with a day to spare at the Universitätsbibliothek at Erlangen, at the Rare Books & Manuscripts Department (Dousa) at Leiden, or with access to a copy of Krüger’s printed catalogue of Hamburg’s Uffenbach-Wolfsche Briefsammlung, then I guess you’ll know what to do. Good luck! 🙂

Richard Rogers’ Voynich theory…

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Earlier this year, I was contacted by a 58-year-old US Army / Navy computer programmer from North Carolina: he claimed to have solved the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, and wanted me to post details on my Cipher Mysteries blog, but without revealing his identity.

Yesterday, however, Richard Rogers went public with his claims (which is why I can now say his name): here’s a picture of him (from the same Havelock News article):-

RichardRogers-small

With degrees (it says here) in “ancient history, languages and computer science”, he originally used Voynichese to benchmark some anti-fraud pattern recognition software he had been developing, believing (courtesy of Gordon Rugg’s various publications, I’d guess) that it was what he calls “manufactured” (i.e. hoaxed) text. As an aside, his software was built around Benford’s Law (specifically, Hal Varian’s 1972 take on it), a logarithmic distribution law which has similarities with (the rather more familiar) Zipf’s Law.

However, when (to his great surprise) the software reported back that the Voynich Manuscript did actually seem to contain meaningful information, he found himself being rapidly drawn into the VMs’ tangled research web.

So far, this is all a straightforward techy “call to adventure” narrative: but where it goes from here is a bit odd. It took me ages to even begin to understand what he thinks he can see in the VMs – and I’m still miles off understanding why it might be so, as well as how he made the leap from (a) grasping that there is meaningful content, to (b) seeing how that meaningful content actually works. Which is why every time I tried to post about this, I’ve ended up giving up halfway through: but now he’s gone public, I guess I’ll have to complete the job as best I can…

Here’s how it all starts.

Rogers believes that Voynichese letters express a kind of symbolic language (which he calls “proto-sentential logic” or “sententional propositional calculus”) for encoding secret shapes (which he calls “runes” or “runic glyphs”), a bit like an encrypted Renaissance Logo driving a turtle trapped inside a 5×5 grid. He calls this system “Runus”.

Runus-Part-1

He calls double-leg gallows “staves” (red text in the diagram) and single-leg gallows “stakes” (blue background in the diagram): these are “key to navigating the manuscript”, insofar as (if I’ve understood it properly) Runus expressions always contain these staves/stakes (or sometimes [EVA d]) in the middle.

Finally, here are the seven specific Runus rules Rogers believes Voynichese expresses (his descriptions not mine):-

  • “RULE 1: Each line is an independent, stand-alone action. There is no punctuation because none is needed.
  • RULE 2: All Rule-Oriented Expressions (ROE) are non-mathematical algebraic ‘draw & copy’ operations based on a 5X5 numbered solution grid.
  • RULE 3: Draw operations always assume a horizontal top to bottom, left to right sequence unless modified by a functional character (i.e. a shape flag, left, right, top, bottom, etc.
  • RULE 4: ALL ROA encapsulate one of eight turnstiles (sometimes 8 is applied as a turnstile)
  • RULE 5: The eight turnstile shapes are broken into positional sets of functions. These are:
  1.  
    1. Two stave turnstiles and two stake turnstiles in the left set.
    2. Four stave turnstiles and two stake turnstiles in the right set.
  • RULE 6: Runus is a Rule-Oriented Expression (denoted by a the Greek rho, below). It is a coordinate system used to build a Rune character.
  • RULE 7: The meaning, interpretation, and function of Runa – and the shapes they describe(RO), are very dependent.”

Here’s another of Rogers’ diagrams that might possibly help explain this:-

Runus-Part-2

Just in case you glazed over halfway through the above (I’m not saying you actually did, but you certainly might have done), we should perhaps move swiftly on to look at a specific example of how Rogers thinks Voynichese works:-

[EVA odaiin] is translated as “Focus on the 3X3 square immediately adjacent to the left of the center position”.

From his Runus diagrams…

  • [EVA o] = “left side”
  • [EVA d] = “centre position”
  • [EVA a] = “right side”
  • [EVA ii] = “a count of 2”
  • [EVA n] =”horizontal grid line counter”

According to his Runus rules, this appears to denotes a horizontal line drawn from the left side of the centre position across to the right side with a horizontal grid line count of two. But that’s about as far as I can usefully take this.

Here’s how Rogers annotates the first line of f1r into five individual Runus expressions. The “turnstiles” are red, “directional modifiers” are blue, while numbers (“grid coordinates”) are in pink:-

Runus-Part-3

Here, ROE 1 says “Starting in Quadrant 1, in the DIRECTION Of the Right Half, DRAW a DEEP CURVED LINE from top to bottom“, while ROE 2 says “DRAW a SHALLOW CURVE from BOTTOM TO TOP, facing the RIGHT“. Put these two together and you get a “moon”. Rogers believes that the mysterious shape at the top right of f1r is the image described by the the first few Voynichese lines of f1r – and hence this acts as a kind of enciphering test.

Just as with the biliteral cipher I discussed yesterday, there’s certainly elements of steganography and verbose cipher at play here, lending an air of cryptographic plausibility. However, “Runus” does seem an enormously complicated piece of symbolic machinery to encrypt what are ultimately just shapes – a bit like using a Difference Engine as a shop till. And given that I personally don’t buy into the notion (however breathlessly expressed by conspiratorial iconologists) that any shapes are intrinsically heretical, or even that any particular shapes were intrinsically believed to be heretical, the whole proposed exercise of encrypting heretical shapes would seem to me to be both futile and improbable. Sorry, but that’s how it looks from here.

Also: I simply can’t see how Rogers got from pattern matching software to Runus – to my mind, there’s an inherent “chalk and cheese”-style gulf between the two. Though I can see the start-point and the end-point, I can’t see any logical reasoning that might step between the two. Yes, I can see that the “i” / “ii” / “iii” characters might in fact be Roman numbers (though even that I somewhat doubt, given that they resemble medieval page numbers so closely): but that’s about as close as I can get.

Rogers has tried to back up his “Runus” research with more conventional historical research, and “speculates that the manuscript was written by three generations of the Longhi Family in Italy, Martino Longhi the Elder (1534-1591), Onorio Longhi (1569-1619) and Martino Longhi the Younger (1602-1660).” However, I’m also somewhat skeptical of this, given that (a) the VMs appears to have 15th century marginalia, (b) the VMs appears to have had an Occitan owner in South-West France circa 1500, and (c) if the VMs was indeed bought by Rudolf II, that would have been prior to 1612, at which point Martino Longhi the Younger was 10 years old.

Of course, in the absence of any widely agreed decryption of even a single word, it’s almost impossible to disprove any assertion anyone makes about the Voynich Manuscript: and naturally, it is this rich loam of uncertainty that helps Voynich Theories to flourish so much. But now I have to go and lie down – my head’s hurting from all that proto-sentential calculus, just like it did every other time I tried to write it up. 🙁

“Decoding the lost symbols” mini-conference…

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Next Sunday (8th November 2009), $99 should get you into a one-day mini-conference in LA focusing on “hidden history, signs, symbols, and secrets”, hosted by Simon Cox, author of the brand new book “Decoding The Lost Symbol”…

OK, I’m sure you’ve rumbled the secret already: that it’s basically a one-day press launch for Simon Cox’s book, with a load of sort-of-relevant speakers doing their thing (and not a cipher mystery in sight, as far as I could see). I’m sure there are plenty of people who would enjoy this, but I personally won’t be red-eyeing over to the West Coast for this. (But please leave a comment here if you do happen to go.)

All of which does raise the question of whether I should organize my own proper cipher mysteries / secret histories conference (not to promote a book, but just to have some fun) and where. After all, there are plenty of nicely evocative places in Ye Quainte Olde Londonne Towne that I could hire for the day at less than staggering expense, and finding places to put speakers up should be straightforward. The kind of stuff I’d expect it to cover should come as no big surprise:-

  • The Voynich Manuscript
  • The Rohonc Codex
  • John Dee’s secret history (a perennial favourite!)
  • Rosicrucianism and Alchemy
  • Historical code-breaking – a practical guide
  • Armchair treasure-hunting / Treasure maps / The greatest (real) treasures never found
  • Panel: “Renaissance Symbolism – True or False?”
  • The Secret History of Renaissance Astrology
  • The Phaistos Disc (possibly)
  • (…and so on)

Would that be your idea of a perfect day out? Feel free to tell me what’s missing from the agenda!

1926 Budapest crossword suicide…?

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Here’s a blog I found today (“Alan’s Mysterious World”) with an odd story embedded in a brief history of crossword puzzles.

Apparently, in 1926 a Budapest coffee house waiter committed suicide, leaving a blank crossword puzzle as an explanation. According to this page, a note with it said: “The solution will give you the exact reasons for my suicide and also the names of the people interested.” The police asked the public if they could help solve it, but I can’t find any reference to anyone’s having solved it.

Honestly, am I really the only person who wants to see that crossword puzzle?

Update: we now know that this really happened – here’s a 2013 update on the whole crossword suicide story.