Voynich project at the Big Walnut Science Fair…?

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Jacob Collard, a sophomore at Big Walnut High School (in Delaware County, Ohio), put together a Science Fair project entitled “Comparison of Grapheme Frequencies and Locations in Undeciphered Voynich Script and Geographically Similar Languages“. This so impressed the judges that he was asked to take it forward to the Central District Science Day at Columbus State Community College, where he won the “Best Linguistics Project for a High School Student Award” (according to this page). Congratulations to him!

Jacob now has four weeks before the “60th Annual State Science Day […] on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University” – if he’d like someone to cast a Voynichological eye over his work and perhaps suggest some fixes or improvements before May 9th, I’m sure I could find a ready volunteer. 🙂

Hmmm… how long before teachers start using the Voynich Manuscript in junior school to teach children how not to do history? It can be more valuable to know what to avoid, wouldn’t you say? 😮

The Oera Linda Book: a right proper hoax, I say…

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I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough to cover both historians posing as outsiders and outsiders posing as historians. 🙂

Yet probably the most dispiriting thing about nearly all the novel freethinking theories thus constructed (by either camp) is how boringly similar they tend to be, oxymoronifying the phrase “free thinker”. Did Alberti really write the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili? [Hint: no.] Was Leonardo da Vinci really a Grand Master of the [insert made-up name] Secret Society? [Hint: also no.] Read (as I have done) a fair few of these and you’d rapidly come to the conclusion that most trains of thought out there run along well-oiled rails, with nary a point in sight. Point-less stuff, indeed.

Of course, if you try to revisit something / someone particularly well-documented, you face a dauntingly uphill challenge from the start: which is why oddly nebulous objects and obscure people attract the most attention (from both revisionist camps) – because for these, there’s that much less that needs to be explained away from the start before you can really go to town & have some fun.

In this general vein, here’s a nice (2000) article by Mark Newbrook from The Skeptic magazine (it’s on pp.42-47), which brings together literally dozens of fringe historical revisionist communities (Velikovskyists, Saturnists, Afrocentrists, Dravidian- / Mayan- / Latvian- / Hungarian- / Basque-/ Etruscan-centred histories of language, Dogon, etc) to highlight their common traits – most of which seem to centre on a misplaced faith in the fallacies of eighteenth-century linguistic / etymological thought. It has to be admitted that the devotion shown to following through these mad ideas is sometimes quite extraordinary. Did Jesus on the Cross really cry out in Mayan? [Hint: don’t even go there.]

It’s no great secret that most hypotheses floated to explain the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex, and the Phaistos Disc match this overall template (i.e. of a simple linguistic misunderstanding taken to massive lengths). Even when top-drawer outsiders (David Icke, Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna etc) throw their lizard-skin top hats into the ring, the same tired old rabbits limp out… ‘Roger Bacon‘, ‘it’s the aliens wot dunnit‘, ‘hoax!’ and so forth.

Of all these , though, it is the “hoax” theorists that are stupendously annoying – not because they happen to be right or wrong (which is another question entirely), but because for the most part they use the idea as a kind of intellectual trick to sidestep the entire evidence corpus, preferring instead to revel in schadenfreude, poking fun at other researchers as they lock intellectual horns with the mute rhinoceros of meaninglessness (and lose the battle, of course).

In all these cases, the correct question to be asking is simply what kind of material, physical evidence would amply demonstrate the presence of a hoax – merely proving the possibility of a hoax (as Gordon Rugg famously tried to do for the Voynich Manuscript in 2004) is both hard work and vacuous. Or, if you prefer to stick with Popperian falsification, how can we actively disprove the notion that artefact X is ancient?

And so it all swings round to a resoundingly 19th century hoax, the Frisian Oera Linda Book (which I picked up on from Lady Goodman’s blog page). This describes all kinds of odd things (such as “Atland”, a 17th century revisionist Atlantis), and claims to have been written in 1256, but copied from texts some of which dated back as early as 2194 BC. Errrrm… “zeker niet, mevrouw“, methinks.

If you absolutely have to sample its purple faux historical prose, there’s an English translation here. To me, it all reads like a ‘worst-of‘ compilation of creative writing courses’ historical modules: but perhaps you’ll find some hidden depths there to which I’m blind. But is this a hoax? [Hint: for sure!]

Secrets of Herbiculture or of Herbal Medicine?

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As should be apparent from recent posts, for the last few weeks I’ve had Glen Claston bouncing a number of his Voynich ideas, observations and hypotheses off me. In many ways, he and I are like conjoined research twins – though truth be told, if I happen to say “poe-tay-toe”, he’ll go out of his way to say “tuh-may-duh“. 🙂

But now something a bit, well, unnerving has begun to happen.

I hate to say it, but… we’re actually starting to agree on lots of things. In fact, the formerly vast ocean between what we each see in the Voynich Manuscript is gradually narrowing, if not to a trickle (don’t be ridiculous, tcha!) then certainly to only a small sea. On the one hand, Glen is bringing his characteristically intense eye for detail to bear on the kind of codicology I’ve been harping on about for years: while on the other hand, I’m growing increasingly comfortable with his take on the probable content of various sections of the manuscript.

In many cases, it turns out that we’re seeing basically the same thing but from wildly different angles, and using quite different kinds of evidence and chains of reasoning. And if we perpetually feuding twins can form a broad consensus, it’s hard not to conclude that the beginning of a new period of Voynich research might well be at hand… exciting times, indeed.

One fascinating example of this is the question of what the Herbal drawings encode. In “The Curse”, I put forward a lengthy, textual argument about why I thought the Herbal-A pages were actually Antonio Averlino’s (lost) secret book of agriculture: but without any useful idea how the two were connected, it was somewhat hard to take forward. Glen, however, has been reading an entirely different literature: and sees the Herbal drawings as encoding secrets of herbiculture – that is, he believes that particular details of the drawings show where best to prune the plants in question, along with (presumably in the text) various other tricks to grow them most effectively.

Are these two readings so very far apart? Personally, I think not: and believe they will turn out to be two very different sides of the same thing – as always, individual details may well turn out to be wrong (history is like that, basically), but the overall sense of ineluctable convergence I get from all this is hugely powerful.

For further reading, I’ve added a page to the site which discusses secret books of agriculture in the fifteenth century (mainly culled from fleeting references in Lynn Thorndike’s many books). Averlino’s book is perhaps the most notorious, but there are a few others too… Enjoy! 🙂

Rushkoff: Capitalism vs The Middle Ages…?

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First things first: I loved Douglas Rushkoff’s book “Coercion” (2000), and so have been looking forward to his upcoming take on corporatism “Life Inc” (due June 2009). But when I read his recent blog entry on the economy, I have to admit that my heart sank somewhat.

Rushkoff’s starting point there is that we working peons been playing a lose-lose game for the last five hundred years – that from the Renaissance onwards, capitalism was a Ponzi scheme expressly designed to make the rich richer while keeping the poor in their place.

Well, duh. This should only really be revelatory to those who have spent no time at all thinking about what money does, or who have perhaps spent too much time in the toxic companionship of economists (who studiously ignore the whole socio-political aspect of capital, preferring instead to look at flows of numbers). It’s why debasing the coinage has always been such a heinous crime – only kings and queens (oh, and central banks now) are allowed to do anything as foolish as that. And all of this is an issue that has been going on not just since 1500 or so, but for millennia.

OK, so control over money is perhaps the most raw expression of power going: but why try to pin the blame for all that on the Renaissance? Well… perhaps I ought to let you into a secret. To every modern historian’s ears, there are certain keywords and keyphrases that are a dead giveaway that someone has no real idea what they are talking about. My own list:-

  • Dark Ages (this was when, exactly? It depends who you ask, basically)
  • Middle Ages (a fiction humanists concocted to make themselves seem cool)
  • Renaissance (a fiction Jacob Burckhardt concocted to justify his research programme)
  • Leonardo da Vinci (a few good pictures but basically zero influence for centuries)
  • Rise and fall of civilizations (Spengler’s historical cycles that don’t really exist)
  • La longue duree (Braudel’s neat macrohistorical notion that doesn’t really exist)
  • Nazi (comparisons with the Nazis normally show that someone has lost an argument)

These are all historiographical cargo cults, too frequently venerated by historians simply by dint of the amount of historical graft that has been applied to them – and all too frequently appropriated by cultural writers in the way gullible Victorian historians all too often did to rig their own moral evidential votes, to falsely justify their pre-formed conclusions.

So when I hear Rushkoff talk of “a centralized economic plan [that] ravaged the real world over the past 500 years“, and that exclusive royal charters distorted the marketplace leading directly to modern hypercapitalism, please excuse me if I just don’t buy into it. Yes, such charters very probably fanned the flames of the War of Independence: but did they lead to Bear Stearns? No, I don’t think so.

And can it be true (as Rushkoff claims) that the cathedrals of the Middle Ages form some kind of glaring ‘elephant-in-the-room’ counter-example to modern global capitalism, in that many such cathedrals were financed by local merchants rather than by proto-robber-barons?

Actually, no again. These constructions are relics of what some might argue is the greatest Ponzi scheme ever confected: Purgatory. Many of these (literally) awe-ful monstrosities, then, were financed by the sale of indulgences to redeem yourself or your recently-deceased (but sinful) relatives: many were also built with tithed labour (as I recall). Basically, it was not some unspecified Renaissance financial model that killed them off, it was the Reformation, which saw selling indulgences in this way as morally depraved.

[As an aside, Pope John Paul II declared in 1999 that Purgatory was not actually a physical place, but rather a “condition of existence” – nice to see the Church moving with the times. Would Saatchi & Saatchi have instead suggested rebranding it as “Hell Lite”?]

Rushkoff also goes on about local currencies, the kind of thing anti-capitalists and collectives have been using for decades. What… like the pound, then? The US Dollar only has its place as a world trading currency because Far East countries have collectively made it so – and the day when that particular monetary ‘hegemony’ ceases can surely not be that far away. The view from outside New York is quite different, I’d say.

Just because I disagree with Rushkoff and I’ve got an MBA doesn’t make me an apologist for the system. In my opinion, the fundamental distortion in the system is the investment banks – how can you get sound advice from someone who benefits from any upsides to your trades but which has no exposure to any downsides? Future returns on investment get valued in the present relative to each other in terms of risk and reward (and investor appetite): but the investment banks gamed that system to the point that all that was important was volume. And let’s not even talk about the chillingly mad economics of IPOs either, or venture capitalists’ über-bubble economics.

Rushkoff loves the hacker counter-culture ethic, and plainly wants to catalyse other people into applying it to ever more mainstream parts of society: he wants us all to be culture hackers, which is not a bad thing. Yet I think the big question here is how corporates (our pension funds, basically) can get by without investment banks’ ever-morphing range of financial products – not hacking the markets, but hacking the marketplace. Get that right, and we all stand a bit more of a chance.

Voynich herbal page order…

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Another day, another provocative (but good) question from my fellow contrarian Glen Claston (we’re both part of the Contraria diaspora):-

So Nick, since you’re one of those who think that the book was dropped and put back together haphazardly, you’d be the one to ask for evidence that the various quires you think are misordered are actually misordered.

[…] What about the first three quires? What do we consider physical evidence, and if a page is thought to be moved, what is the timeline evidence for that?

Now, being “moved” or “out of order” are subjective assignments, I realize. I prefer to look not for what might be supposed as the original collation, since we don’t really have much physical evidence on that, and it’s hard sometimes to tell what happened between one binding and another. “Order of construction” is a topic that most observations fit into, so perhaps that’s what I’m looking for here.

Given that we now have plenty of solid evidence elsewhere in the Voynich Manuscript of bifolios that are reversed, misbound, and rebound, I think we should start from a position of uncertainty – that is, rather than assuming that the current page order is basically correct, we should view that as a hypothesis and consider evidence both for and against it.

Yet as Glen knows well, the problem with the first three quires (Q1 to Q3) is that codicological evidence pointing back right to the original collation (and even to the original intention!) is decidedly thin on the ground. And he has presumably chosen these three quires because they are less problematic than Q5 to Q7 (which have both Currier Hand 1 and Currier Hand 2 bifolios mixed in together) and Q8 (which we agree seems to have been back to front when the quire number was added), though what he’s got against Q4 I don’t know. 🙂

So, let’s look at the codicological evidence (such as it is) relating to this hypothesis…

Pro #1: the light paint transfer and the stem ink transfer from f2v to f3r. These appear to be wet contact transfers without water damage. This seems to imply that those two pages have faced each other right from Day One. The similar handwriting supports this.

Con #1:  in Q2, the quire number downstroke overruns the bottom edge of the page but reappears at the bottom of  f46v (I checked this for myself at the Beinecke). This seems to imply that f46v was probably in either Q1 or Q2 at the time the first set of quire numbers were added (though it has ended up in a very much later quire).  The similar handwriting supports this.

Disputed #1: the heavy red paint transfers from f3r to f2v (which are aligned differently to the light paint transfer in the opposite direction), and from f5v to f6r. The dispute is over whether these paints (a) were added later [Stolfi, Pelling], or (b) were original but were transferred between pages later probably by water damage [Claston].

Disputed #2: the blue paint transfers from f3v to f4r, from f5v to f6r, and from f19v to f20r. Again, the dispute here is over whether these paints (a) were added later [Stolfi, Pelling], or (b) were original but were transferred later by an unknown bacterial mechanism triggered by minor water damage [Claston].

Disputed #3: there is (what appears to be) a diagonal line of red paint spatters crossing the central fold running between f10v and f15r, which makes it look as though this was the middle bifolio of a quire / gathering. However, what apparently conflicts with this is the set of contact transfers of the same red paint going from f15r to f14v.

Disputed #4: I also put forward a hypothesis (Curse, pp.52-57) that four or five of the bifolios with similar-looking vellum flaws might have come from a single skin – if this turns out to be correct, then because the bifolios involved ended up in different quires, it would go very strongly against the whole current-page-order-is-as-intended hypothesis.

[There are numerous other minor paint transfers which seem to coincide with water damaged areas; and there is also the minor matter of the wormhole in the first few folios of Q1; but for the sake of brevity I’ve omitted these.]

So, the current tally is that one piece of evidence seems to point to two bifolios’ having stayed together, while another piece of evidence seems to point to two bifolios’ being out of order – basically, an honourable draw. But could a few of the bifolios have stayed together even though many of the rest were basically scrambled? Yes – and that is the kind of fit-all-the-data “Middle Way”  intellectual historian’s answer I’ve been proposing for ages. 🙂

But really, I have to say that the bulk of  my impression of non-orderedness comes from a very different (but really quite hard to quantify) source – the writing itself. A good exercise is to print out all the herbal quires as bifolios and to then compare the various handwritings on them, to see which ones do / don’t match (particularly for all the Herbal-A pages). I contend that these only occasionally (such as in Q1) seem to flow at all in their current page order, even though the handwriting across both sides of any given bifolio is usually reasonably consistent with itself.

When I was writing the Curse, I believed that the original gatherings would have contained 5 or 6 bifolios: but three years on, I now suspect that 3 or 4 bifolios per gathering is a much more likely figure. Perhaps I should now revisit this whole puzzle and have another go at solving that particular “corner” of the million piece jigsaw?

Glen Claston on binding…

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Nick: here’s another full-on guest post from Glen Claston, with a little bit of friendly banter from me in blue…

The different ways some little detail can be viewed is so much of the fun we have with the VMS.  Until supporting [or refuting] information can be found for either view, neither is more valid than the other; and indeed, we weigh the validity of one over the other based on common perception.

My view on the binding had to do with the placement of the quire mark, and as you see, I used a minimal amount of information to formulate an hypothetical scenario that may or may not be wrong.  I didn’t do this to be contrary, I did it to explain some of the things I’m seeing, and of course this may not be the right explanation, or only portions of it may be correct.  That’s sort of why it’s only an hypothesis.
 
What I need to do next is to search these pages for some evidence that either supports or refutes this hypothesis, and this is usually where one of my hypotheses falls out of my own favor and gets replaced with something else, something like Ernie’s common sense idea, which is the one I originally held until I had problems with the placement of both the foldout and the quire mark.  The good thing about it is that there is usually more information to be gathered from the pages – as Nick said, a million fragmentary clues…..

Nick: for example, I think we can still see some tiny original sewing holes along Glen’s secondary vertical fold on the nine-rosette page. Further, if you reorder Q8 with its astronomical pages at the back and insert the nine-rosette section, you rejoin the “magic circle” on f57v with the two other “magic circle”-like pages on the back of the nine-rosette sexfolio. And it may possibly be no coincidence that doing this happens to move the very similar marginalia / doodlings / signatures on f86v3 and f66v closer together.

But herein lies one of the major problems with this sort of research (and it’s only a problem to those who don’t recognize that everyone, including themselves, is prone to this type of thinking) – we tend to reason out large scenarios based on a minimal set of information, and when something doesn’t exactly agree with that scenario, we don’t modify it or throw it out.  I am no different in that when necessary, I tend to modify before discarding, but I admit that in 23 years of research, I’ve discarded almost everything but the most basic concepts numerous times.  It was only after the MrSids images were made available that I was able to revisit some old ideas and gain substantial ground in this endeavor… and even now, some things are still in the hypothetical stage.  But when you change one leg of an hypothesis that stands on only two or three, the whole thing usually comes crashing down with a thunderous sound – I can hear that sound from clear across the ocean on occasion. 🙂

Nick: that’s strange, I get to hear that same noise too from time to time, also coming across the same ocean. 🙂

To me it’s rather easy to demonstrate through parallel texts that the rosettes page is firmly a part of the astronomical discussion, and should be placed before the celestial part of that discussion, and I have a good deal of professional opinion, (historical and contemporary) that agrees.  The Astronomical discussion falls appropriately just before the astrological discussion and begins with the terrestrial portion of the astronomical discussion, so when the rosettes is placed back into its proper place, the terrestrial discussion precedes the celestial discussion and then transitions into astrology, as it should.  The book then falls into an order that is in line with the order of presentation given in the parallel texts and commentaries.  The book transitions from herbs to astronomical, and astronomical to astrological, on mixed bifolios, physical codicological information that establishes within reason that this particular order was chosen by the author him/herself.  This is the higher level of argument, since this is part of a theory that encompasses the entire content and original purpose of the manuscript.  That’s the general theory of relativity, but some other source of information is required to extract a specialized theory of relativity.  This requires a gathering and interpretation of the physical codicological information, not as easy as it appears.
 
We’re faced with the obvious fact that some bifolios and foldouts in this book are currently bound out of order, and some students have gone so far as to suggest that it looks like the pages were dropped on the floor and recollated randomly.

Nick: to be precise, I’d say that a few bifolios did probably manage to cling together despite being dropped 🙂 , but for the greatest part I don’t see much retained structure in Quires 2 through 7, in Q13, Q15, Q19 and even Q20 (if Elmar is right), while Q8 seems back to front and Q9 and Q14 are misbound. And I’m not 100% convinced by Q1 either!

To me it’s not that drastic, most things are in their category, if not their proper order, but the question of original collation has so much bearing on so many aspects of this study that it needs to be addressed in a very serious manner, and by that I mean the gathering of codicological evidence that can be molded into a working hypothesis or theory regarding the original construction and collation of the book.  Historical scenarios that are based on a great deal of codicological information have many legs to stand on, so they don’t topple simply because one ‘fact’ or observation changes or gets reinterpreted.  Ergo, collect all the codicological information possible, and collect it in one place so it can be easily referenced when trying to formulate hypotheses.  No, no one after D’Imperio has done that – Rene has tried on one level of the manuscript, but no one has collected all the physical observations into a single database.  Is this a task too large to be accomplished?  It’s done routinely in other scientific disciplines, why not here?

Nick: well… I did try to do precisely this in the ‘Jumbled Jigsaws’ chapter of “The Curse” to a far greater degree than D’Imperio was ever able to, but I would certainly agree that it would take 500 fairly specialized pages to begin to do the topic justice. 🙂

I give you an example of how much codicological evidence matters, and I’ll provide an example that only requires a slight modification in Nick’s hypothesis of multiple painters, an hypothesis I don’t accept on other evidence, but I’ll give an example that buys into his hypothesis nonetheless, just so I’m not viewed entirely as a “contrarian”.  There are three fresh-paint transfer marks near the bottom of f87v that come from the upper middle portion of f16v.  Don’t get all worked up at the distance between these pages, because we know (or at least I know) that the herbals and the pharmaceuticals were once connected.  The point of discussion here is that these offset transfers could not have taken place if these pages were bound before this red paint was applied.  Nick is able to modify his hypothesis to say that the binding was only at the quirization stage, and that these outside folios can lay on top of one another at this stage of binding when the paint transfer occurred.  That’s correct, that’s one scenario, and Nick only has to remove one leg of his hypothesis in order to accommodate this information – instead of being entirely pre-bound, now it’s bound only in quires.   That works for Nick, and frankly works for me until I find something that says it doesn’t.
 
But I draw something else from this that Nick doesn’t address, and that is that the same red pigment is present on the two pages, as well as on the foldout which contains f87r.  That leads me to a one-legged hypothesis that the guy went through his pages and painted one color, then went through again to apply another color, as opposed to our modern view of an artist who would paint in various colors simultaneously.  We’re not on different wavelengths in our thinking, Nick and I, we’re just liable to reach different conclusions based on the same information, and that because we filter the information differently.   You see, I have another category of research which includes unfinished drawings and paintings, and I see this through a different filter than Nick sees it.

Nick: I have no huge problem with the idea of someone applying paints one at a time. It would be consistent with my view that (for example) the heavy blue painter mixed his/her blue paint suitable for painting on paper (rather than on vellum) and rushed through the (already finally-bound) manuscript daubing it wherever he/she saw fit… only realising later that it hadn’t dried quickly enough, leaving a mess all over the facing pages.

The answer to such a simple question as to when and how the paints were applied may be more complicated than either Nick or I presently presume, and no matter what, we will both be modifying our opinions when the information is finally gathered and tabulated.  I assume at present that because so much of the painting falls into gutters, it was done unbound.  Nick thinks it was done pre-bound.  I see now that some specialized paints were an after-work, possibly quire-bound, possibly not, while the common watercolors had to have been applied in an unbound state.  Neither of us are entirely right, neither of us are entirely wrong, and there is more to be learned before the final tally can be made.  Choose this red pigment, is there at least one place where it could not have been applied after the manuscript was bound?  I don’t know, I haven’t done that study yet, the question has only recently arisen.  And what frakking bit of difference does this make anyway?  ;-{
 
It’s that hypothesis with only two or three legs thing again, that’s where this makes a big difference.  I get so irritated with the “multiple painter” thing I simply want to scream, simply because it introduces multiple and extraneous unproven human elements into an hitherto unresolved picture, without first following evidentiary procedure.  This particular fresh-paint transfer is in the A-herbal range, simply another connection between the pharmaceutical section and the herbal section, something I’ve been quite clear about – these were once connected.  Post-bound painting as Nick suggests means that I should find evidence that this red pigment was also applied to pages that are written in the B script, and applied at a time where the A’s and B’s were already bound together.  Does that evidence exist?  I’m good at lists of codicological evidence, we’ll see if it does or not.  And does Nick’s ‘quirized binding’ approach hold water against other evidence?  We’ll find out, and these things will be discovered through gathering and collating the codicological evidence available to us.  It’s a wonderful thing, that we have at our fingertips the information to do this in scientific fashion.
 
I remember the reaction on the old list when Nick and I went to logger-heads over something as apparently meaningless as blue paint, and that for me was what separated Nick from the pack in many ways.  It wasn’t the love of argument or the basic disagreement, but the fact that Nick was willing to study and research in support of his claim.  He was not a simple defender of his stance, he was an active participant in the argument, and though we both still disagree on this one point, the amount of new codicological information and rational thought generated in the course of this simple argument has never been exceeded in the history of VMS research.
 
I hope that this gives Emily and others some idea of why the simplest of observations can have the most profound impact in this line of research, and I welcome anyone that wishes to add to our base of knowledge, no matter how small.  Collaboration can be a great deal of fun, and it’s guaranteed to hone your perception skills.  When you start you’re going to get shot down a lot, just like a video game, but as you progress your impact will be much greater, just like a video game.  This is your chance to hone a set of skills you didn’t think you had.

Caravaggio’s crushed fireflies…?!?!?

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The art world has recently been astonished (OK, “bemused and confused” might be a little more accurate) by a new claim emerging from the David Hockney / Secret Knowledge camp. Florentine art historian Roberta Lapucci has proposed not only that Caravaggio used lenses in a darkened basement room to project scenes onto his canvas (Hockney’s basic claim), but also that he applied a luminescent paste formed from crushed fireflies and white lead to the canvas to form a primitive kind of image fixing agent – a Renaissance precursor to what Hockney likes to call “chemical photography”.

Lapucci’s primary evidence is based on having found traces of “mercury salt” on some of Caravaggio’s canvases under X-ray fluorescence – yet she notes “That is not uncommon because it was used in glue, but we are awaiting proof he was using it on the surface, in his primer.”

Also, it has to be pointed out that Caravaggio’s lack of preliminary sketches is only correlative evidence, not causative proof: while I have yet to see any passage by Giovanni Battista Della Porta (presumably in his Natural Magic?) that discusses the firefly-based paste (allegedly used in 16th century drama productions). All of which would seem to indicate that Lapucci’s hypothesis is well worth testing: but without anything approaching a smoking gun as yet.

Poor old Caravaggio: for centuries, his reputation suffered at the hands of art historians, who were almost unanimous in their sneering dismissiveness. Yet opinion swung right around, and his powerfully-lit (if a bit overwrought, truth be told) artworks are now routinely described as masterpieces. To me, whether or not he used lenses and chemical trickery to assist him is almost a secondary issue: whatever means he happened to employ to fix his particular sense of pictorial drama onto his canvases were well worth it.

What is a quire?

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A while back, I posted about how the name “Voynich Manuscript” implicitly contains two lies – for one, it had been known for centuries prior to Wilfrid Voynich; and for two, you can only properly call something a “manuscript” if it was produced before 1450, which seems not to be the case here (though probably by only a whisker).

Much the same kind of thing goes for any discussion of “quires” – this too is carrying a heap of linguistic baggage which we should at least be aware of. So: what exactly is a quire, then?

Probably the best starting point is to step through the vellum manufacturing process from the start. Once a suitable animal (typically calf, lamb or goat kid) had been killed and its rawhide (literally its “raw hide”) flayed from the carcass, that hide had to be soaked and pounded (to remove the flesh from the “flesh side” and the hair fibres from the “hair side”) and then “tanned” (to prevent it from rotting). The beautiful thing is that soaking a rawhide for several days in just the right kind of noxious goo (this is called “liming” if you use lime, or “bucking” if you use wood ash) transforms its protein structure and thereby turns that hide into something that will (if kept properly) stay stable for decades, if not centuries – leather.

However, to be able to write satisfactorily on it, freshly-limed leather has to be dried on a stretching frame, “scudded” (to remove any remaining hairs), smoothed with a pumice stone, pounced (roughened up again, otherwise it would be too slippery to write on), and whitened. What you end up with is a piece of writable leather – vellum or parchment. Having said that, given that I have seen at least ten different opinions on what should be called “vellum” and what should be called “parchment”, my best advice is simply to call all writable leather “vellum” and move swiftly on.

Of course, because animal skins don’t come in perfectly book-sized and -shaped dimensions, the large piece of vellum you have just produced then has to be folded, cut and trimmed into a more useful size. By doing this in the most obvious way, you would end up with a nested set of bifolios (double pages with a fold down the middle) where each facing pair of folios has a flesh side or a hair side. This isn’t necessarily always the case, but it does seem to be a rule of thumb that is generally followed.

[Incidentally, the plural of folio is folios, of folium is folia, of bifolio is bifolios, and of bifolium is bifolia. Ignore any Internet nonsense that mixes any of these pairs up, as well as the occasionally-seen foolish assertion that the plural of folio is folio’s. *sigh*]

What you are then holding is called an unsewn gathering – a folded set of loose bifolios. If these are then sewn together (the needle holes down the central fold are called the “sewing stations”), they are called a sewn gathering.

But this is not yet a quire. Strictly speaking, a quire is a part of a set of sewn gatherings that have been sequentially ordered (the ordering mark is known as the “quire signature”, typically numbers or letters – ‘i’ / ‘ii’ / ‘iii’, ‘a’ / ‘b’ / ‘c’,  etc) ready to be bound together – until such time as . There are therefore two basic forms of quires: unbound quires (a set of gatherings that have been ordered but not yet bound) and bound quires (a set of gatherings that have been both ordered and bound). You can also sometimes find an unordered set of gatherings bound together: but without quire signatures (which were normally placed on each quires’ back page), these aren’t really quires per se.

Confusingly, many texts also refer to gatherings or quires as “quire signatures”: though this is a good example of metonymy (using a part to stand in for a whole), in this context it only really serves to muddy the waters.

In the case of the enciphered Voynich Manuscript, we have a basic codicological dilemma: even though the bifolios have been sewn and bound together into quires, there seems little doubt that the various people who added the quire numbers (i.e. the quire signature numbers) did so without being able to read the contents – and because the original bifolio grouping, sewing, and binding order has been lost, we don’t know what the original gathering structure was.

enciphered-x
Voynich Manuscript f83v – enciphered “X”?

And so if the Voynich Manuscript turns out to have enciphered quire numbers (for example, given that f83v was probably the back page of a quire, the drawing there might contain an enciphered “X” to denote “Quire #10”), then it originally was an ordered set of quires (though whether unbound quires or bound quires isn’t known) – but if it didn’t, then it was originally an unordered bundle of gatherings. Or it might have been partially ordered (and so be a mixture of quires and gatherings). We just don’t know… yet!

Robert Teague’s Voynich claim…

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Has Robert Teague found a sensational astronomical ‘crib’ into the Voynich Manuscript’s ciphertext? Several Voynicheros have asked me to have a look at his claim: normally, this is researcher code for “I think it’s nonsense but I’d like someone else to say it rather than me, because I quite like the guy“, but let’s see what he has to say…

Certainly, Robert’s best-known previous attempt at understanding Voynichese (Teague numbers) didn’t work out particularly well – as I recall, he used the table on f49v’s margin as a basis for linking glyphs to numbers, much as Robert Brumbaugh did back in the 1970s. However, given that there is a powerful palaeographic argument this table was added roughly a century after the VMs was originally made, this is a hugely unreliable thing to be basing anything substantive upon.

So, what of Teague’s 2009 assault? He starts out (in his “Cracks in the Ice I” document) by pointing out what he thinks are seven fuzzy matches to “Aldebaran” across several pages, and so links seven Voynichese letters with their Latin plaintext equivalents. The obvious problem with this is that this basic fuzzy template can also be matched throughout the entire text: and you’d have to admit that the notion of the whole of the VMs’ text’s being about Aldebaran is somewhat unlikely. But it’s possible, of course.

He moves on (in his “Cracks in the Ice II” document) to finding a secondary crib for the star Alcyone: however, because I’m pretty sure that Giovanni Battista Riccioli first named this in his (1665) “Astronomia Reformata“, this is probably not correct. Robert also suggests some anagrammatic cribs for HOLLAND, POLLAN (“Poland”), and LAPLAND, all of which seem historically anachronistic (for example, Holland wasn’t known by that name until the 17th century). He also makes extensive use of some letter substitutions suggested by Philip Neal, but almost certainly not in a way that Philip himself would feel particularly comfortable with. He finishes up with a suggested translation for the so-called “PM curve word” (EVA ‘oalcheol‘) as ‘COBBLED”: this is done by picking one out of 128 possible permutations and then anagramming the result, a kind of wobbly mid-ground between Brumbaugh and Newbold. Why he chose ‘cobbled’ and not (for example) the rather more august 13th century Anglo-Saxon ‘BOLLOCS’ you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Finally, in his “Cracks in the Ice III“, Robert moves on to try to work out the rest of the alphabet, but runs into trouble with the much-used ‘4o’ token, to which he assigns a rather arbitrary set of 14 possible letter pairs. At the end, Robert proposes a set of six 21-letter mappings, and presents them in a mysterious colour-coded table, which (frankly) doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Of course, this is the point in the post where I’m supposed to say something withering, dismissive and ironic to leave readers chortling into their morning cup of coffee: but that’s not even close to what’s going through my mind. Right now, I actually feel a huge sadness that for many people these days this kind of thing is what passes for credible research.

In many ways, the Internet has de-skilled historical research: I can quite imagine that many students would now be able to gain a history degree without ever entering an archive, without learning Latin, and without actually physically engaging with the subject. If you’re only one paltry mouse-click away from a plausible answer, why bother to look any further? Why, then, should we be cross with non-specialist historians who replicate this same behaviour?

What we have here, then, is simply misdirected cryptology built on top of poor history, with substantial similarities to Robert Brumbaugh’s attempts three decades ago. Though Brumbaugh was an extremely able and clever scholar, he nonetheless read the Voynich Manuscript just plain wrong – and this is the “same old same old”.

Voynich Quire 8… what happened?

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I’ve just had a nice email from my old friend GC, asking what I think happened with Quire 8 (“Q8”). You see, the problem is that Q8 contains a whole heap of codicological oddities, all of which fail to join together in a satisfactory way:-

  • f57v has a bottom-right piece of marginalia that (I think) looks rather like “ij” with a bar above it – yet it’s not one of the quire numbers, and doesn’t appear on the back of a quire.
  • f66r has some bottom-left marginalia (the “mus del” nymph): yet unlike most similar Voynich Ms marginalia doesn’t appear on the front or back of a quire.
  • The first (f57 + f66) bifolio contains both circular diagrams and plants
  • The second (f58 + f65) bifolio contains two text-only pages and two herbal pages
  • f58r and f58v have stars linked to most of the paragraphs: but these have no tails, and hence are more like the “starfish” and “stars” found in Quire 9 (Q9) than the paragraph stars used in the recipe section at the end.
  • The page numbers on f65, f66, and f67 all appear to have been emended by a later owner (you can still see the old faint 67 to the right of the new 67)
  • And don’t even get me started about the circular diagram on f57v (with the repeated sequence on one of the rings). Put simply, I think it’s not a magic circle, but rather something else completely masquerading as a magic circle.
  • But sure: at the very least, f57v’s circular diagram would seem to have much more in common with the circular diagrams in Q9 than with herbal quires 1-7.

Generally speaking, though, Q8 seems to be broadly in the right kind of place within the manuscript as a whole. Because its bifolios contain both herbal and diagrammatic stuff, it seems to “belong” between the herbal section and the astronomical section. However, the bifolios’ contents (as we now see them) appear to be rather back-to-front – the circular diagram and the stars are at the front (next to the herbal section), while the herbal drawings are at the back (next to the astronomical section).

This does suggest that the pages are out of order. And if you also look for continuity in the handwriting between originally consecutive pages, I think that only one original page order makes proper sense: f65-f66-f57-f58. When you try this out, the content becomes:

herbal, herbal, text, herbal, herbal, // circle, stars + text, star + text

Where I’ve put the two slashes is where I think the first (herbal) book stops and the second (astronomical) book begins: and I believe the “ij-bar” piece of marginalia on the circle page is one owner’s note that this is the start of “book ij” (book #2).

So, I strongly suspect that what happened to Q8 was a sequence very much like this:-
1. The original page order was f65-f66-x-x-x-x-x-x-f57-f58
2. The bottom right piece of marginalia was added to f57v (start of book “ij”, I believe)
3. The pages were mis-/re-bound to f66-f65-x-x-x-x-x-x-f58-f57 -OR- (more likely) the front folio (f65) simply got folded over to the back of the quire, leaving f66r at the front: f66-x-x-x-x-x-x-f57-f58-f65
4. The nymph & text marginalia were added to f66r.
5. The pages were mis-/re-bound to f57-f58-x-x-x-x-x-x-f65-f66.
6. The quire numbers were added to f66v.
7. The page numbers were added to all the pages.
8. The central three bifolios were removed / lost.

But what happened to pages 59 to 64, which apparently got lost along the way?

Currently, my best guess is that these were never actually there to be lost: there is practically no difference in quill or handwriting between f58v and f65r, which suggests to me that they originally sat adjacent to each other… that is to say, that Q8 probably only ever contained two bifolios. And so, the proper page numbers added (at 7 above) were probably 57-58-59-60, which would make perfect sense.

So… why were they later emended to 57-58-65-66?

My suspicion is that, temporarily bound between Q8 and Q9, there was an extra tricky set of pages, which the page-numberer skipped past before continuing with 67 (in the astronomical section). But what tricky block might that be?

Could it have been the nine-rosette fold-out section? Might the page-numberer have skipped past that, before subsequently noticing that an earlier owner had given it a higher quire number, and so moving it forward to its proper place? It’s a bit of a tricky one to argue for, but I do strongly suspect that something in someone’s system broke down right around here, causing more confusion than we can easily sort out.

However, I’ll leave the nine-rosette section for later: that’s quite enough codicology for one day! 🙂