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!

I was sitting on a train trying to reconcile the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum dating (1404-1438) with its art history dating (1450-1470), while also pondering the various layered aspects of its codicology (such as the pictures apparently behind some the water nymphs), when an unexpected thought popped into my head.

Might the VMs have its (erased) plaintext as a palimpsest beneath its ciphertext?

That is, might the Voynich Manuscript be an enciphered copy of the document that was originally written in broadly the same place on the same pages? The overall timeline could work like this:-

  • 1420 or so: the author compiles his/her books of secrets onto brand new vellum.
  • 1460 or so: the author copies each line or paragraph onto a wax tablet, erases the line or paragraph from the vellum, and replaces it with an enciphered version.

If this is correct (and though I admit that the odds are against it, I do think it’s worth considering), the issue would then become whether the original plaintext might somehow be made legible again – that is, whether the plaintext’s ink made a sufficiently permanent contact with the vellum that some kind of imaging might now reveal it, even if it was heavily erased at the time.

Over on the MapHist mailing list in recent days, there has been a lot of ink-related discussion about the Vinland Map (which has its own curious cryptographic angle that Jim Enterline has been doggedly pursuing for years): this interesting analytical paper on vellums and inks was cited, as well as “Ink Corrosion” by Gerhard Banik. This latter paper discusses Haerting’s “conclusion that only inks containing iron(II) salts can cause ink degradation damage. The other components of the ink […] do not cause noticeable damage to the support medium.

At first glance, you’d have to say that the VMs really doesn’t appear to be a classical palimpsest: but this is because palimpsests were typically washed clean and the second layer of writing put down at right angles to the original direction of the text.

But perhaps some of the original ink layer wasn’t erased, in forms other than that of almost imperceptible damage to the support material: I’m thinking in particular of the “hidden house” on f77v that I discussed here back in June 2009.

voynich-f77v-central-nymph

I’m pretty sure that this originally depicted some kind of house structure (drawn in faint, straight lines), but that the “water nymph” and the “wolkenbanden” were subsequently added in a later pass (in a completely different ink) to mislead the eye.

Codicologically, what is most interesting here is that the original ink (i.e. from the “house”) might be identified and separated out into its own layer… and that understanding its particular composition (and the way that it interacts with the support material) might point to a way of imaging the manuscript’s original (1420?) ink layers from beneath the subsequent (1460?) ink layers (if it exists, of course).

Basicaly, why even try to break the cipher, if it might be possible just to read it? Now wouldn’t that be a surprise for everyone!

Here’s today’s gratuitous Voynich limerick (stop me if you’ve heard it before):-

A microscope gives you a two-fold
Clue to the secrets of true gold
You need it to write
Baconian sh!te
And you need it to read it like Newbold

Rather less meaningfully, here’s a Voynich-related “asemic” (defined as ‘having no specific semantic content’, so make of it what you will, quite literally) poem that popped up onto the web a few days ago. Though it fails to tease with my brand of appalling rhymes, it does have a charm of its own. Enjoy! 🙂

Do I have a problem with the fact that the Internet appears to have a machine continuously cranking out second-rate stories about the Voynich Manuscript? No, not really – an “unreadable historical manuscript” presses many of the cultural buttons left exposed by large numbers of mainstream Netizens.

What does annoy me, however, is that virtually every VMs account ever written fails to come close to grasping the complex (and actually very interesting, I suspect) nature and character of poor old Wilfrid Michael Voynich (WMV) himself. It’s rather like reading a five-line wartime biography of Winston Churchill and expecting that to suffice for everything else he ever did: but what about the rest of Voynich’s life?

In many ways, you have to understand that WMV is doubly occulted: on one side, he’s forever in the shadow of his accursed manuscript, while on the other side, he’s in the shadow of his blessèd wife Ethel. Though he could charm the birds down from the trees (and, more importantly for him, the books down off unwilling shelves) in eighteen-ish languages, he didn’t leave a substantial written record for biographers to work with. Ultimately, do we really know much of importance about Voynich? I think the honest answer would be ‘no’.

For example, I don’t think we have a clue about his sexual orientation: family lore has it that Ethel was attracted more to women than to men, and (allegedly) lived with Anne Nill in New York as a couple for decades, yet WMV and ELV were also notably a devoted couple prior to WMV’s death. Did they initially marry for love, for revolutionary support, for reasons of practicality, or for some other reason? Is it just me, or do you also hate it when you know that the 10% you know about a subject is actually the least important 10%?

All of which musings were prompted by a nice email from historical researcher & writer Jackie Speel, who asked if I knew that Wilfrid Voynich’s naturalization papers were in the National Archive. (“HO 144/751/117022”, to be precise). Ummm: no, I didn’t – but thanks very much for pointing this out! 🙂

It’s a good find – but I suspect that the real archival pay dirt would be WMV’s Special Branch file. Circa 1900, there was a lot of terrorist paranoia (sounds familiar?): the Special Irish Branch had only recently morphed into Special Branch, and was now tracking Russian revolutionaries and dissidents in London as well as Irish republicans. Andrew Cook’s (2002) Ace of Spies has a nice bit of useful stuff on this period (particularly Chapter Two “The Man From Nowhere”) and on Ethel Voynich (mainly in Appendix One), if you haven’t already seen this. So, Wilfrid Voynich almost certainly had a Special Branch file on him and his links with Stepniak etc: but what did it say? Perhaps there’s a similar secret file on him in New York archives? I wish someone was looking for this stuff, I really do.

Basically, I think that the recent vellum dating (to the early 15th century) should end any lingering romantic or postmodern notion that WMV forged his (now eponymous) manuscript: honestly, isn’t it a good enough Early Modern mystery as it is without any additional confounding nonsense to muddy the waters? Oh well!

Giancarlo Truffa recently posted a link to the HASTRO-L mailing list that contains a mention of a surprising claim that Leonardo da Vinci apparently designed a telescope:-

On page 59(b) of Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus appears this drawing. Bülent Atalay proposed in 2005 that it is Leonardo’s “telescope”. The page also contains a “study of light reflection of a concave mirror”.

And here’s the drawing itself:-

Leonardo-telescope

Though (perhaps understandably) skeptical of the basic proposition, Giancarlo kindly listed the literature:

  • B. Atalay and K. Wamsley “Leonardo’s Universe: The Renaissance World of Leonardo da Vinci” (National Geographic Books, 2009)
  • B. Atalay “Math and the Mona Lisa: the Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci” (Smithsonian Books, 2004)

Bülent Atalay was convinced enough by his own arguments to get a modern reproduction built, so maybe this is a proto-telescope… though the odds would seem to be against it. Add it to the (long) list of things that Leonardo may have invented (but probably didn’t)…

Here it is, the Austrian Voynich documentary we’ve been waiting so eagerly for – and you don’t even need to have a satellite dish to watch it (as long as you hurry, it’ll probably only be online for a few days).

(Hint and tip: if you click on the diagonal arrow button just above the video, you can watch it in your own media player – and if that happens to be Windows Media Player (*sigh*), don’t forget that you can turn on the (German) subtitles with the unforgettable key combination CTRL-SHIFT-C.)

The documentary features Micky Bet Rene Zandbergen chatting amiably with 21st century Voynich stalwarts Gordon Rugg and Richard SantaColoma, lots of “flying-low”-style rostrum sequences of the Voynich Manuscript, together with other historical / forensic talking heads you may not have heard of, such as Paula Zyats, Kevin Repp, Joseph Barabe, Gerhard Strasser and Greg Hodgins.

My German isn’t really industrial strength, but I’m reasonably sure I picked up most of the research-relevant stuff: a blue pigment that was tested was azurite, a red was red ochre (but I wasn’t sure about the green). And the 1404-1438 range was indeed 2-sigma (95%), and there’s a nice graph showing the peaks against the C14 dating curve.

The documentary showed Greg Hodgins slicing a fine edge off from the Quire 9 sexfolio: which I would argue is a Very Good Thing, because that is one of the bifolios least likely to be old vellum. Doubtless we shall hear more about this over the next few days…

I don’t know, though: at the end of the whole beautiful-looking documentary, the researcher part of me felt a tiny bit cheated – that for all their hard work, the documentary makers hadn’t really managed to engage with the last decade of proper Voynich research (and I don’t really include Gordon Rugg in that), but rather had steered their televisual plough along what I would call a resolutely “Voynich 1.0” furrow. Basically, whenever I hear keywords like “inquisition”, “alchemy”, “allegorical”, “Doctor Mirabilis” and “heresy”, something in me switches off: rather, I want to be hearing words like “layer”, “spectroscopic”, “multispectral”, “ductus”, “hands”, “composition”, “sequence”, “Raman”, “DNA”, “pollen”, “Urbino”, “ledger”, etc.

What do you think? Were Andreas Sulzer and his team wide of the target or did they actually hit the spot?

Ex-Mormon Mike Reed became interested in a lightly-enciphered entry in Mormon founder Brigham Young’s diary (dated 6th January 1842)… and wondered to himself whether Young was actually using a Masonic “Royal Arch cipher” (basically, a kind of pigpen cipher).

Well… after a bit of online bantering with an LDS (“Latter Day Saints”) apologist, the answer turned out to be: basically yes, Young was. Amusingly, the apologist also cited a Royal Arch cipher as per p.42 of “A Big Color Activity Book: Nintendo Super Mario Bros.” (1989), as used by his 9-year-old son – and I couldn’t miss the once-in-a-lifetime chance to segue from Mormons to Masons to Mario. 🙂

Apart from the large number of pictures, what I liked most about Mike’s post (and which I’m sure Tony Gaffney would appreciate too) was keeping track of the proportion of errors made while enciphering – adding or dropping dots, reversing shapes, etc. Enjoy!

Getting ever closer to the day… here’s a quicky trailer to whet your appetite, featuring a René Zandbergen talking head, a Voynichese-as-Matrix visual gag, a monk in a cowl with a quill, rotating circular diagrams, animated nymphs, etc. No Micky Bet, but I wasn’t casting it. Enjoy! 🙂

Incidentally, The Daily Grail also very kindly posted the Voynich dating story on their front page yesterday, including a link to Cipher Mysteries – thanks, Greg!

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…

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…