The “Anthony z Florencie” manuscript, continued…

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My recently-started hunt for the authentic source of the “Anthony z Florencie” manuscript (which popped up at the Rudolphine court) continues. Only one person claims to be a disciple of Antonio of Florence: the early (if not the very first!) Czech alchemist Jan z Lazu / Johann von Laaz / Ioannis Lasnioro / Laznioro / Lassnior. This claim is in the last two sentences of his short book on the Philosopher’s Stone as it appeared in print in 1614, on pages 579 to 584 of the snappily-titled “Theatrum chemicum, praecipuos selectorum auctorum tractatus de chemiae et lapidis philosoplici antiquitate, veritate, jure, praestantia, & operationibus” Volume 4:-

Explicit via universalis Joannis de Lasnioro Lazon. sub Anno millesimo quadringentesimo quadragesimo octavo. Feria Sexta in Vigilia Viti. Ego vero Joannes Lucianus exemplavi diligentia magna anno quadringentesimo. Sit laus almae trinitati & individuae unitati sine fine. Amen.

Hic Joannes superius subscriptus de Lazionoro fuit discipulus apsius Antonij Itali de Florentia oriundi, qui hic in Bohemia propter eam artem Chymicam ab hominibus impiis est trucidatus, prout in Bohemico de lapide Philosophorum scripto testatus ita accidisse.

Basically, it claims that it was Jan z Lazu who wrote this down in 1448, after Antonio of Florence himself had been murdered in Bohemia (as a result of his alchemy).

Bohuslav Balbin in Tractatus II of his Bohemia Docta (Manuscriptorium shelfmark I C 21), claimed to have seen the original 1611 document, “de philosophico Ioannis Lassniori Bohemi opusculum“: and this discussion which in turn was picked up by Jungmann (1825). According to John Ferguson, Jan z Lazu was also discussed both by Schmieder and by Petraeus: while A. E. Waite’s “Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers”  (p.291) lists the first date for Lasnioro’s “Tractatus Aureus” as 1612.

However, there are four things I’d say about this:-

  1. The 1448 date is earlier than the 1457 date actually given in the “True Path of Alchemy“
  2. The 1611 / 1612 / 1614 date is almost exactly the same time (or perhaps slightly after) when the “Observationes quaedam…” were written, which is hugely coincidental
  3. To my eye, there appear to be very few obvious similarities between the alchemy presented in this document and the alchemy presented in the “True Path of Alchemy“
  4. None of it, sadly, rings particularly true.

There are plenty (if not actually a majority) of old alchemy texts that appeal to authority by linking themselves to an older (but unconnected) writer on alchemy – and I suspect that this is precisely the case here, i.e. that Jan z Lazu (if such a person even existed) was entirely unconnected to Antonio of Florence.

Anyway, now that I’ve started to separate all the different documents into historiographical strands, the formerly rather marky picture is beginning to clear. The connection with Vaclav Hanka seems to be a red herring; and similarly for the supposed connection with Jan z Lazu. What we have left appears to be a single issue: whether the “True Path of Alchemy” (marked in red in the following diagram) was the same document that is described in the “Observationes quaedam…”, or whether the versions we now have derive from a version that was concocted between 1606 and whatever date that the Leopold copy (shelfmark III H 11) was made.

AntonioProvenance

As yet, I’m still unclear where all this is headed – but I think we’re making good progress towards getting there. More as it happens… 🙂

Otakar Zachar’s (1899) “The True Path of Alchemy” book…

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Today’s Cipher Mysteries post comes from long-time Voynich researcher Jan Hurych, who very kindly agreed to go through Otakar Zachar’s (1899) monograph on the “Cesta spravedliva v alchymii” (“The True Path of Alchemy”) manuscript by Antonio of Florence dated 1457. Here’s what Jan found…

* * * * * * *

While Otakar Zachar’s name is now generally unknown, he appears to have been connected with various Czech National Museum archivists who he mentions in his book, and so was probably a known historical scholar.

His book is basically a commentary on (and a modern Czech translation of) the manuscript “Cesta spravedliva v alchymii” dated 1457, and which was written in the old Czech medieval language. Though its title translates as “The Right [or righteous, or just, or correct] Way in Alchemy” , it is not about travel 🙂 but rather about the alchemical methods and recipes written therein.

Zachar claims he saw the Czech original (or rather a copy, as explained below) in the National Museum (and which should today be in the National Library): however, becasue I was not able to reach that, I will describe only what is in his book, namely in his conclusion (from p.95 onwards). He also quotes some Latin text taken from Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze MS III H 11 (starting at its page 129r) that relates to this same manuscript, but which dates from around after 1606.

Zachar claims that the book was written by the Czech servant of an Italian alchemist called Antonio di Firenze (Florence) and was then hidden somewhere (in Bohemia?). In 1606 (an interesting date!) it was discovered – a hearsay, Zachar admits – by a doctor of medicine (perhaps Czech?) who recognized its value and brought the book to Jerusalem (apparently personally). After the doctor’s death, the book was hidden again (where, in Jerusalem? Or back in Bohemia?) and then rediscovered. Zachar studied the manuscript for several months and copied its text verbatim for his own book (the original text was written on parchment in black ink, with only its chapter headings in red).

The manuscript describes four methods for making gold:-

  1. A bottle of elixir provides gold in value of 30 marks
  2. A cheaper method, providing only gold “fluviatile”, that cannot stand fire
  3. An improvement on method #1
  4. Since gold above (the result of all three methods) contains sulphur, this method is a new way by which the “Veneris” [note that “Venus” is normally the alchemical codeword for “copper”] can be removed

Zachar thinks that #4 is the real secret, and that Antonio and other Italians in Bohemia were looking for a special kind of sulphur, say a “secret sulphur” as it was called in old Czech. Zachar wonders where in Bohemia they were looking… Incidentally, here he calls Antonio “Venezian” (benatcan) so was he from Venice and not from Florence as Zachar said at the beginning? Apparently this was only Zachar’s slight mistake. He also mentioned that “Czech ways” were not as advanced as Italian ones. He noted that some passages in the manuscript were erazed – these passages interested Zachar most, but the erasure was too good for him to read past – he apparently did not have Wilfrid Voynich’s dark room! 🙂

Zachar believes that the Czech manuscript is only a copy of some original – why, he does not say. Also, nothing more is known about Antonio’s servant (who wrote down this manuscript). As for “1457”, that could well be when the original was written, the copy could have been much younger [my comment, j.h.].

So the book – or its history only? – must have been known in the 17th century while the good doctor was still alive, since the book was then in Jerusalem and hidden again after his death.  Of course, all this could have been merely the history of the original manuscript, while what Hanka found in Bohemia was a copy (though exactly when he did was never noted) which may never have travelled to Jerusalem and back again. 🙂

All in all, Zachar’s book does not describe the Voynich Manuscript, but another book entirely. Whether  Antonio himself ever wrote any book, especially the one we now call the VMs – we cannot tell. The Czech manuscript is of course solely concerned with alchemy – no zodiacs, no stars, and no bathing beauties!

* * * * * *

To make things even more complicated, Zachar claims the book reached the National museum via Mr. Vaclav Hanka, who was (in)famous for the discovery of two historical Czech manuscripts (Zelenohorsky, disc. 1817 and Kralodvorsky, 1818). Both of them are today generally considered as fakes, written from nationalistic motives – even though Hanka was an expert on Medieval Czech langauge, he apparently made a number of linguistic mistakes there. 🙂 Zachar confirms he saw the manuscript being first mentioned in 1825 (Jungman’s book History of Czech Literature) but he also quotes some  of the above history, from the copies of some alchemical works dating from the 1600’s. He unfortunately omits to say how he found out (or worked out) that they described exactly the same manuscript. 😮

Hanka himself  lived from 1791 till 1861 and from 1819 onwards he was an archivist in a Czech museum. After his discovery of those two manuscripts, they became the subject of the largely popularized nationalistic “Battle Of The Manuscripts” which lasted right up until the end of the 20th century. The quarrel split the Czech nation (which back then was under the control of the Austrian Empire) into two groups: passionate defenders and passionate rejectors. The battle later subsided and while it never fully stopped, today most people think both manuscripts were just frauds. That is not to say the old “Cesta spravedliva” definitely comes from the workshop of Hanka (and his friend Linda), but the almost-perfect medieval Czech language might just be a gentle giveway…

“The True Path of Alchemy” is *not* the VMs…

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A big tip of the hat to Rafal Prinke: thanks to a swift reply from him last night, I can now say definitively that “The True Path of Alchemy” is not the VMs (confirming Rene’s suspicion), because both still exist independently. And the romanticized 1904 mention of the former by Henry Carrington Bolton that quickened my historical pulse yesterday with its uncanny resemblance to the VMs was, shall we say, rather less than 100% accurate. All the same, the affair is not completely closed just yet…

The manuscript of “The True Path of Alchemy” currently lives in the National Museum Library in Prague (though it doesn’t appear in any of their online catalogues). The first person to write about it in any detail was Otakar Zachar, whose 112-page 1899 monograph “Mistra Antonia z Florencie Cesta spravedlivá v alchymii” is available online (you can download it as a set of six 20-page PDFs). As an aside, “Otakar” was the name of Rudolph II’s pet lion, whose death in 1612 was (reputedly) seen as a portent of Rudolph’s own death later that year. Just so you know! 🙂

Zachar’s monograph contains (facing p.47) only one rather underwhelming scan of the original manuscript’s text: click on the following cropped & enhanced thumbnail to see a larger version:-

TruePath-f22v-f23r
“The True Path of Alchemy” f22v and f23r

Unless I’m hugely mistaken (no laughing at the back), the True Path appears to be written not in Italian or Latin but in Czech / Bohemian in an apparently 15th century hand, with the folio numbering in a standard 16th century hand.

Zachar also includes (facing his page 24) an image of a flask with a crown, which unfortunately appears as a near-black page in the scan (though you can just about resurrect it using fairly heavy image enhancement):-

TruePath-flask
“The True Path of Alchemy”, flask with a crown

According to note 43 on this webpage, a more up-to-date article on the Ms by V Karpenko appeared in Ambix 37, 61 (1990), which I shall try to read. Karpenko mentions that the ms contains 13 questions for telling whether an alchemist is false. Presumably #1 is: “does he/she claim to be an alchemist?” 🙂

As to attribution, one webpage I found seems to claim that the manuscript was actually written by Jan z Lazu (A.K.A. “Laznioro”, reputedly the first Czech alchemist) [the claim appears here as well]: but as my Czech extends no further than occasional words such as “rukopisu” (manuscript), I couldn’t say whether that relates to authorship, translation, or adaptation. Perhaps my Czech mate Hurychnioro will have a look and tell me how badly I’ve got it wrong. 🙂

I then went hunting for the MS reference in the scans of the National Museum Library’s card index, where Zachar’s book merits five cards (is that five copies? or five cross-references?): the card annotations mention “86 J 121”, “Schiller 294”, and “Zeyer 1977”. However, even though “86 J …” appears to be a plausible-looking shelfmark for the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze, searching for “86 J 121” in the Manuscriptorium returned no hits. Oh well!

Rene Zandbergen also very kindly sent over the GIFs absent from the voynich.nu site: unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious mention of the “True Path” there. Really, to identify any manuscript in the Kunstkammer inventory (whether the True Path or even the Voynich Manuscript!), you’d need to know how it was bound (i.e. whether the cover was red or white leather etc) and what else was bound in with it. Zachar and/or Karpenko may well have included this information, of course, but I’ve yet to get quite that far. 🙁

And so… back to Bolton, where this all started.

If you compare the basic factuality with Bolton’s floridity, I think you’d have to conclude that the two don’t quite gel:-

  • “1475” – should have been 1457 (d’oh!)
  • “beautifully illuminated” – though there are some pictures and illuminated letters, from the poor quality of the handwriting I’d be fairly surprised if they were “beautiful” per se
  • “rare” – given that it’s the only extant copy, perhaps we’ll give Bolton the benefit of the doubt on this one 🙂
  • “couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language” – the jury’s out, as Karpenko seems to gives the impression that the text is a touch more rational than most alchemical texts. All the same, an alchemy text that’s not exceedingly obscure is probably a fake, so perhaps this is just Bolton being tautologous. 🙂
  • “library of Wresowitz” – Rafal Prinke highlights a good-sized 1855 article on Czech alchemy by Ferdinand Mikovec in the periodical “Lumir”, which says that Vaclav Vresovec z Vresovic (d. 1583) bequeathed his library (containing various alchemical mss) to the town council of Mala Strana in Prague. However, even though linking “The True Path” to this collection would be a good guess, I saw no mention at all of Counsellor VVzV in Zachar’s monograph, so I’m a little skeptical…
  • “high price” – without any textual source, this may well be another Boltonian ’embellishment’, let’s say. 🙂

Despite my obvious disappointment that the True Path hasn’t turned out to be an early sighting of the Voynich Manuscript, I remain optimistic that it might yet turn out to be linked with Filarete. For example, 1457 is a perfect match for when the Florentine claimed to have been collecting and writing his little books of secrets in his (ample) spare time. It may well be that nobody to date has thought to examine “The True Path of Alchemy” specifically with a Filarete hypothesis in mind – might there be some textual ‘tell’ hidden in there? There’s only one way to find out…

Finally, Zachar includes (pp.91-95) a decent chunk of Latin taken from Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze MS III H 11 that relates to this manuscript. Thanks to the online magic of Manuscriptorium, I can see that these Observationes quaedam circa suprascriptum processum Bohemicum appear on pages 129r to 153r, and that they were written at the beginning of the 17th century (the text specifically mentions “1606”). Later on I’ll ask Philip Neal if there’s anything hugely interesting there – though the chances are quite small, you never know until you look!

Earliest archival reference to the Voynich Manuscript…???

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A vast constellation of curious books revolves around the hazily uncertain core of the Voynich Manuscript: as with most things, some are outright good, some are just plain bad, while most live in a mixed-up zone in the middle.

Henry Carrington Bolton’s (1904) ” The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II” is a poster-child for that mixed-up zone – equal parts fact and fiction, Bolton’s oeuvre contains more than a dash of both historical sense and hysterical nonsense. Though it does go on to cover many varied aspects of Rudolph’s court, the first half of it amounts to a greatest-hits compilation of the credulous alchemical mythology surrounding John Dee’s Bohemian adventure – “Now That’s What I Call Bohemian Alchemy #1“, if you like. 🙂

However, for all the hallucinogenic tableaux he conjures up via the shewstone of his historical imagination (and for all the brazen liberties he takes with the facts), Bolton clearly did go to a great deal of trouble to fabricate his Ikea mansion out a lot of, well, basically good stuff. Hence the reader (though often deeply suspicious) finds hundreds of genuine factual nuggets embedded into the walls of the proto-scientific passageway Bolton has tunnelled through the Rudolfine era.

So, my question to you is this: is the following particularly shiny nugget (pp.37-38) gold or lead?

[...] when conversation was interrupted by the
entrance of Martin de Rutzke, bringing with him a beautifully
illuminated and rare manuscript rescued at the dispersal of
the library of Wresowitz, who was reputed to have been a
successful experimenter. The work was entitled "The True

Path of Alchemy," and was written by Antonio of Florence
in the year 1475; being couched in exceedingly obscure and
mystical language, hinting only at the secrets of the black
art, it was particularly admired by Rudolph who ordered his
treasurer to pay the high price demanded for it, and instructed
his librarian to add it to his valuable collection.

For a start, this “beautifully illuminated and rare manuscript… couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language, hinting only at the secrets of the black art” bought by Rudolph for a “high price” does sounds terrifically like the Voynich Manuscript as described by Dr Raphael Mnishovsky (according to Johannes Marcus Marci in 1665).

Furthermore, even if I just happened to have a time machine in my shed I could barely have engineered a more blatant archival link between Rudolph II and a mid-Quattrocento Florentine called “Antonio”. (Note that Antonio Averlino is reported by Giorgio Vasari to have died in Rome around 1469, but given that there is no documentation to support or refute this, 1475 is entirely possible.)

As far as the book’s 16th century provenance goes, Wolfgang von Wresowitz died on 21st March 1569, while Bernhard Wresowitz died in 1571, and presumably the alchemical “library of Wresowitz” Bolton mentions was dispersed not long after: Rudolph moved his court to Prague in 1583, but it would probably take someone like Rafal Prinke to trace the Wresowitz alchemical library connection any further.

All in all, the big research question then becomes: did Bolton just make up this whole thing (the document name, author name, date, price, and provenance), or was he reporting something he found while trawling relevant books for intriguing-sounding alchemical stories? He comments elsewhere that he made use of the books by Czech historian Josef Svatek (1835-1897), so perhaps that’s one place to start.

Normally, the first proper place one would look for this would be the 1607-1611 Kunstkammer inventory drawn up by miniaturist Daniel Fröschl, as described in detail in Rotraud Bauer and Herbert Haupt’s (1976), “Die Kunstkammer Rudolfs II“. Unfortunately, the relevant gifs have long disappeared from the voynich.nu Bauer-Haupt page, so doing this will probably require someone (i.e. probably me) to spend a day at the library. However, I should also caution that, because Rudolph II may well have presented the same book to Sinapius around 1608 when he gave him the “de Tepenecz” title (i.e. while Fröschl was drawing up the inventory), it is entirely possible that it may not appear there – so, absence of evidence there would (as ever) not be evidence of absence.

However, the problem with this is that Fröschl’s inventory was completely unknown to historians until the middle of the twentieth century, and hence was unknown to Bolton: so, whatever Bolton’s source for this story, the one place we can be sure it didn’t (directly) come from is that inventory.

But all the same: if not there, where on earth did Bolton happen to read about “The True Path of Alchemy“? If we could answer that question, we might well be able to find out about the Voynich Manuscript’s very early history… definitely worth a closer look, I’d say… 🙂

PS: quick reminder not to forget the London Voynich pub meet at 5pm tonight!

PPS: thanks to a high-speed reply from Rafal Prinke, it now looks as though this is not (after all) the Voynich Manuscript (which is a shame, but what do you expect if you rely on Bolton?) – and possibly closer to a chicken nugget than to a gold nugget. Even so, expect a further post on this shortly! 😮

Review of “The Mercurial Emperor”…

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Peter Marshall’s (2006) “The Mercurial Emperor: The Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague” takes a sideways look at everyone’s favourite mad Holy Roman Emperor, by using those around him as a kind of slightly wonky mirror. The choice of who makes the cut is a bit arbitrary in places: John Dee (who never came close to gaining Rudolf’s favour) gets rather more coverage than I think justified, however much some Voynicheros happen to like him. 😉

By using the Imperial court to cast light on the man in the middle, it is reminiscent (and perhaps consciously so?) of John Christanson’s “On Tycho’s Island”, which does much the same thing for Tycho Brahe (who features here too, of course).

Even though Marshall does sometimes feel compelled to thicken up his text with Wikipedificatory asides, overall you can’t help but enjoy the ride – it’s a basically good book. What you end up with is a feeling for Rudolf’s overall character arc, from his ultra-stiff Spanish upbringing, through the alchemical / astronomical / allegorical golden years, to the slow-motion showdown with his bluff soldier brother Matthias (which Rudolf lost, if you didn’t already know).

For me, the biggest takeaway I got from the book came from the raking light it cast onto Rudolf’s relationship with art. His collection of paintings was not, as Warburgian historians formerly liked to believe, imbued with Neoplatonist symbolic power, their artists digging deep into the cultural psyche to tease out deeper archetypes from myth and legend, which only heroic modern ‘symbologists’ (*ack* *spit*) could ever decode. Oh, no: it’s far worse than that; and perhaps worse even than Charles Hope’s art historical cynicism would put it. I think Rudolf’s all-star proto-Mannerist painters spent their time constructing his Imperial Internet pr0n browser: the vision that is conjured up for me is of them feverishly thumbing through their emblem books (etc) finding stories that prominently featured young women, and then ‘artfully’ arranging them on the canvas for maximum fleshly exposure. Shame on me for even thinking it, but ultimately Rudolf’s gallery reeks more of “Beavis and Butthead Win The Lotto” than anything else. Uh huh, huh. *sigh*

But I digress. 🙂

Marshall’s book did have one complete laugh-out-loud moment for me, which made my wife chuckle too (no mean feat). The engraving on p.151 depicts Nostradamus in a magic circle, conjuring up a procession of future kings of France for Catherine de Medicis in a “magic mirror” (not much to do with Rudolf II, but a fun picture all the same). I looked at it and thought – that’s not a mirror, that’s a bloody big plasma TV he’s got there. But perhaps you disagree?

Nostradamus showing off his widescreen TV to the Queen of France

Enjoy! 😉

Review of “Bearing the Heavens”…

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I’ve just come back from 24 hours in Swansea, a town where, bizarrely, almost every road is one way (usually the opposite way to which you want to go). At the top of Mount Pleasant, students eke out their existence, one drunken stumble away from a 5-minute death-roll down Constitution Hill’s 45 degree gradient. Swansea is the kind of place where (ideally) you’d like a hang-glider to get to town, a satnav implant to get around, and a cable-car to get home again. But still, the beer’s good, so I can forgive all that… 😉

All of which springs to mind simply because I’ve just read a book on Tycho Brahe by Adam Mosley, history lecturer at the University of Swansea. From his office, most of the bright lights in the evening sky are doubtless not stars or planets, but roomlights in digs at the top of the hill, full of students massaging their aching quads and calves, & wondering why their 50cc scooter’s clutch burnt out in only two days.

In many ways, Mosley’s book – “Bearing The Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century” (2007), Cambridge University Press, ISBN13: 9780521838665, £55.00, US$105.00 – dovetails quite neatly with “On Tycho’s Island”, as reviewed here recently: whereas the latter looks inwards at Brahe’s insular life on Hven, the former instead looks outwards to Brahe’s links with the external world. To do this, Mosley focuses on three things – Brahe’s letters, his books, and his instruments.

The writing is brisk and accessible throughout (though I felt devoting the first chapter to a justification of why he chose the punning title “Bearing the Heavens” was somewhat superfluous), and the two big chapters on books and instruments cover the ground well. But I have to say that this is all a bit of a feint, a distraction from Mosley’s actual thesis – which is concerned solely with the importance to the history of science of Brahe’s letters in their context. This is the real deal, the stuff that you can tell he’s excited about here.

And, I think, rightly so – Mosley’s book essentially sends out a ‘call to adventure’ to historians of Renaissance science, that they have woefully undervalued the usefulness of letters. Book publishing is just the tip of the iceberg of ideas – even these days, printing your own books is no walk in the park (trust me, I’ve tried it), and the difficulties involved 400-500 years ago were far greater, even for driven people of significant means such as Brahe. Renaissance letters were often copied and circulated, or even collated for later publication: and so Mosely argues that it is the huge interconnected web of letters that form the underwater bulk – and it is to this largely unseen mountain we should be devoting our attention.

Regular readers of this blog will know that this is a zeitgeisty angle (though perhaps still falling just short of being trendy), exemplified by (for example) Josef Smolka’s ongoing study of Tadeas Hajek’s letters to/from Andreas Dudith. What separates Mosley’s exposition is that he simply does not accept that it is a marginal area for study – for him, correspondence is king, and should occupy centre stage for our understanding of science pre-1600.

For a while, I’ve been thinking along these lines: I even tried creating a database in Freebase to try to map out & visualize the connections between various 16th century letter-writers, to try to glimpse the “invisible colleges” as they formed, flourished and faded. Yet when I saw Mosley’s Figure 2.1 on page 36 (which tries to do this for Brahe’s immediate network), I suddenly realised the staggering enormity of the challenge and gave up on the spot.

Fig 2.1 from Adam Mosley\'s \

Ultimately, what historians of science would need is a gigantic collaborative correspondence database, that could be used as a cross-archive finding aid. Even though a few people’s letters have been studied in depth (such as Christopher Clavius, Tycho Brahe, Athanasius Kircher, etc), libraries and archives (particularly private archives) must still have an enormous collection of pearls of which historians are unaware.

Perhaps others have already advanced Mosley’s thesis just as eloquently and persuasively: but it is an idea whose time (I believe) has now come. Will others heed his call? I hope so…

Historical hoaxes…

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I recently stumbled across a forum discussion comparing the Voynich Manuscript to the “Maybrick Diary” (oh, and the Vinland Map, too) inasmuch as they are all high profile documents that have been dubbed fakes or hoaxes. James Maybrick was a Victorian cotton merchant from Liverpool high up the ludicrously long list of people variously accused of being Jack the Ripper, as well as the alleged author of a Ripperesque diary that surfaced in 1992.

It seems that just about everybody (apart from Robert Smith, the present owner) is reasonably sure that the Maybrick Diary (written in a Victorian diary with the first 20 pages ripped out) is a fake: Michael Barrett, who originally claimed to have bought it in a pub, later swore (twice) that he had dictated the diary to his wife, though these affadavits were (apparently) subsequently repudiated.

To me, the Maybrick Diary fits the general template of hoaxers falling out after the event, guiltily unable to keep up the pretence, not unlike the mad furore over the fake alien autopsy I described a while back. In pattern-speak, one might observe that a Beneficiary (Michael Barrett / Ray Santilli) benefits from the appearance of a MacGuffin (the Maybrick Diary / alien autopsy footage) claiming to unravel a notorious unexplained Mystery (Jack the Ripper / Roswell), but couldn’t quite keep up the pretense for a long time.

Compare that with the Vinland Map, and you can see why historians like Kirsten Seaver go looking for that person who benefitted from its appearance: for without a Beneficiary, you haven’t really got a hoax. Seaver proposed that the VM was forged by an Austrian called Josef Fischer (1858-1944) after about 1923, for a rather tortuous (dare I say “Jesuitical“?) reason involving teasing unknown Nazi scholars. However, introducing Nazis (particularly without any actual evidence) is normally a sign that you’ve lost the argument: so it’s easy to understand why Seaver’s otherwise intensely detailed research has failed to please. What everyone does now agree is that it is an astonishingly clever object, whichever century (or centuries) it was from.

And what of the Voynich Manuscript? While some unknown person did benefit (to the tune of 600 ducats) from its first half-documented appearance in Prague, you’d have to imagine really hard (to the point of hallucination) that they actually created it as well – the VMs has a complex, multi-layered codicology that speaks of a busy 15th century existence in the hands of multiple owners, a whole century before Rudolf II’s collecting heyday. Oh, and the other problem with seeing the VMs as a hoax is that it is doesn’t claim to unravel a Mystery – it is itself the Mystery. Unless you can imagine something even more mysterious?

Review of “On Tycho’s Island”…

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People don’t generally know a lot about Tycho Brahe, which is a shame. In most accounts of the history of astronomy, his bright star tends to get eclipsed by the twin 17th century supernovae of Kepler and Galileo. But scratch the surface of the story, and it’s really not that simple…

Brahe was a Danish nobleman with a singleminded desire – to understand why the motions of the planets in the heavens failed to match what the best astronomical tables (based both on Ptolemaic and Copernican systems) predicted. Somehow, he engineered an arrangement by which King Frederick II granted him the island of Hven to pursue his astronomical studies for the glory of Denmark: yet what Brahe set up there was as much a social institution (like a postgraduate research community) as a technical observatory – to get the job done, he needed people just as much as equipment.

In fact, Tycho tried to get all the brightest young astronomers of the time to work on his island (for peanuts, it has to be said, but that’s research for you), and to correspond with everyone who was anyone in astronomy. Even so, things didn’t always work out as planned, most notably with Ursus (though I believe the question of whether Ursus was as big a scoundrel and weasel as Brahe tried to make out is far more open than most historians credit).

Methodologically, Brahe’s biographers and historians have tended to focus on the man and his writings: yet until recently none specifically focused on his ever-changing familia (family) of research assistants that passed through Hven. John Robert Christanson’s book “On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants 1570-1601” (Cambridge University Press, 2000) changed all that: what started out (quite literally) as Christianson’s shoe-box of notecards to pull together the numerous fragmentary mentions of Brahe’s coworkers slowly grew into a database, and then (25 years on) into the present book.

But there’s a problem: however interested you are in the subject, after a while the database-like origins of the book – in the infinitessimal ebbs and flows of the set of assistants – start to grate on the reader. And let’s face it, what Brahe was running was as much a kind of “observation factory” as anything else, turning (taking a Marxist-Leninist spin) a input stream of idealistic researchers into a output stream of data. After around 150 pages of on-island minutiae, you start to wonder: where is this all going? How much more can I take?

And then on page 171, Christianson’s book explodes in a direction you simply won’t (unless you’re extraordinarily well-read on Brahe’s life) have seen coming. Brahe tries to marry off his eldest morganatic daughter (“morganatic” means that when a nobleman marries a commoner, his children won’t inherit his nobility or money) to Gellius Sascerides, a clever (but church-mouse poor) member of his familia. And then everything – and I mean everything – starts to go wrong for Brahe (and at some speed), to the point that he ends up dismantling his beloved observatory and fleeing the country. Thanks to his Europe-wide network of contacts (particularly Tadeas Hajek), he finally ended up working for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague (though only briefly) – but even so, Brahe’s swings in fortune are really quite staggering.

It’s only once you reach the end of the book that you can appreciate what happened in terms of his two familiae. Given that neither his morganatic children nor his set of researchers and coworkers seemed likely to him to give him the continuing legacy he desired, what was Brahe to do? He tried to finesse a best-of-both-worlds scenario, but the attempted union of his morganatic family and his (almost adoptive) intellectual family was simply never going to work within his societal context. It is only really a proper appreciation for his constellation of assistants on Hven that gives his whole story poignancy.

Writing teachers often say that the beginning of a story is rarely the best place to start: and so many writers would start “Brahe: The Novel” with the attempted negotiations for the wedding (and bring in all the preceding history in flashbacks etc), because this is where the wedding train (sorry!) starts to come off the rails – and where oh-so-controlling Brahe begins to lose the plot. Yet what Christianson has produced is rather more valuable than a novel: a rich, dense, vividly-detailed historical stage upon which the reader can imagine and construct their own dramas.

Overall verdict: Highly Recommended (but don’t give up in the middle!)

Czech Voynich theory…

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My fellow Voynich old-timer Jan Hurych has long been interested in various Prague-linked research strands: after all, Prague was home to the first three properly-documented owners of the Voynich Manuscript (Jacobus de Tepenecz, Georg Baresch, and Johannes Marcus Marci), as well as its most illustrious claimed owner (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II).

It is certainly true that Rudolf’s interests and obsessions acted as a powerful magnet to draw wonders from all over Europe to his court. Yet given that the claimed link with John Dee and Edward Kelley is gossamer-thin, it is no less sensible to wonder whether the VMs had been brought to Prague by someone from the town: perhaps someone well-travelled?

I mentioned Rudolf II’s manuscript-collecting astronomer / astrologer / herbalist / physician Tadeás Hájek here recently (who studied in Italy), but Jan Hurych regales me with tales of several others: for one, Hájek’s father (Simon Baccalareus) studied alchemy and collected manuscripts… though what happened to his library after his death is not currently known.

Jan has put together a nice page on one of his favourite Renaissance Czech travelling knights, Krystof Harant de Polzic and Bezdruzic, and his travels from Venice to Crete to Cyprus to the Holy Land to Egypt (etc). But I have to say that if a writer had picked up an intriguing cipher manuscript on their travels, it would be one of the first things they would write about: yet there is no mention. So we can probably rule Harant out, sorry Jan. 🙁

But Jan brings up a rather more full-on Czech Voynich theory, courtesy of Karel Dudek’s Czech webpage (though I used Google Translate, Dudek also put up his own English translation here). Dudek discusses Georg Handsch of Limuz (1529-1578), whose 1563 German translation of Mattioli’s Latin herbal came out a year after Tadeás Hájek’s Czech translation (it even used the same nice woodcuts!) Like Hájek, Handsch was a physician living in Prague, but whose main client was instead Ferdinand II Tyrolský (1529-1595) and his wealthy wife Filipina Welserová (1527-1580).

Dudek got his information from Leopold Selfender’s “Handsch Georg von Limuz – Lebensbild a Arztes aus dem XVI.Jahrenhunderts”: but after a bit of a false start (linking Handsch directly to Baresch, which I doubt would convince anyone), he proposes a possible chain of ownership from Handsch -> Welserová -> Ferdinand II Tyrolský -> Rudolph II -> Jacobus de Tepenecz, before Tepenecz’s estate got looted in the chaos of 1618 and the manuscript somehow ended up with Baresch (with the signature erased).

OK… but why Handsch? Dudek points to the VMs’ botany, and Handsch’s translation of Matthioli’s herbal (though I’d have to say that Hájek fits that bill even better). Dudek also discusses a book by Handsch based on his trips to visit medicinal baths and spas in 1571 called “Die Elbfischerei in Bohmen und Meissen” (eventually published in Prague in 1933), and sees parallels with the VMs’ water section there.

But Dudek gets even more speculative, talking about whether Bartoloměj Welser was financed by Charles V to undertake a (possibly Lutheran?) mission to South America, and drew pictures inspired by exotic plants he saw beside the Orinoco (hey, I thought he was a Womble?)

It’s a good story, but a little lacking in connection to the VMs: and doesn’t really explain why we see (for example) 15th century handwriting in the quire numbers, or even the Occitan-like month names on the zodiac, etc. Perhaps we should really admit that looking for an origin for the VMs in Prague may be a little too hopeful, not dissimilar to the way 19th century German historians’ looked to see if Nicholas of Cusa might secretly have been some kind of Teutonic Leonardo. Nice try… but no cigar.

Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (& the Voynich Ms)…?

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Here’s a little piece of Voynichiana pinging on the edges of the VMs research radar, concerning Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who I thought had not to date been speculatively linked with the VMs. It came from the text accompanying the “Earth and Sky: Astronomy and Geography at the University between the 15th and the 18th centuries” exhibition at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2005, but also (mostly) reappears in the Wikipedia page. (Which came first? I don’t know!)

Why flag Hájek at all? Jan Hurych once put up a page on him on his Hurontaria site, but (I thought) only as a piece of background research data. It’s true that as personal physician to Maximilian I (in Vienna) and to Rudolf II (mainly in Prague), Hájek would have vetted or commented on anything alchemical, astronomical, astrological or medical entering the Imperial Court prior to 1600. But might there be more to it?

If (as I do) you see a Northern Italian art history link in the VMs’ drawings, then Hájek’s Prague-Bologna-Milan-Prague travels probably jumps out at you too: so, please go on…

In the words of The Joker, “I like him already“. But, errrrm, what about the VMs, then?

“[…]Hájek eagerly collected manuscripts, especially those by Copernicus, and may have been the one to convince Rudolf II to procure the infamous Voynich manuscript. […] Throughout his life he also published numerous astrological prognostics in Czech and that is why he was until recently viewed as an „occultist” rather than a great scientist.“

I think we can safely say that, apart from the absence of any actual evidence, Hájek is a great candidate manuscript carrier to add to the Voynich story, far better than Dee and Kelley. And what would make it even more poignant is that the pair of them visited Hájek’s house in Prague, which was (according to a fascinating 1999 post on levity.com by Michael Pober) “‘by Bethlem’, first mentioned in “A True and Faithful Relation’ p. 212, Prague 1584, 15th August.”

Might Hájek have owned the VMs, perhaps buying it during his time in Italy? It would be interesting to see his handwriting and marginalia commentary style, just in case there’s some kind of unexpected link between that and what we see in the VMs. I’ve asked Jan Hurych, but he hasn’t examined Hájek’s handwriting: so I’ll have to pursue this with the Czech libraries myself (more on that soon).

Given that Hájek translated Mattioli’s famous herbal into Czech, it is certainly interesting that the marginalia at the top of f17r appears to have been miscorrected to read “mattior”. I had always guessed that it was George Baresch who had done this – but perhaps it might have been Hájek instead? Something to think about, anyway…

“Hájek was in frequent scientific correspondence with the recognized astronomer Tycho and played an important role in persuading Rudolf II to invite Brahe (and later Kepler) to Prague. His voluminous writings in Latin were mostly concerned with astronomy and many regarded him as the greatest astronomer of his time.”

 

“In 1554 he studied medicine in Bologna and went to Milan the same year to listen to lectures by Girolamo Cardano, but he soon returned to Prague, where he became a professor of mathematics at the Charles University of Prague in 1555.”