Voynich Manuscript – the state of play…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Voynich clues from Austria…

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It’s been an interesting day: Edith Sherwood’s Voynich website got Slashdotted – given that Cipher Mysteries picked up 4900 visitors from that tsunami of geeky clicks, edithsherwood.com itself must have had (say) 30000 or more.

And then (just now), ORF released a teaser press release for next week’s “DAS VOYNICH-RÄTSEL” documentary to their (German-language) website. So, the real big news of the day is that the Austrian film-makers are certain that the VMS is even older than previously thought (though they don’t say by how much, or in comparison to which theory). The page says that they also took a number of ink and paint samples for analysis, and examined a number of key sections under UV light for erasures / emendations (all of which is good, exactly the kind of thing I hoped they’d do).

And here’s a site which is even more specific as to the date range and place revealed by the documentary: that it was made between 1404 and 1438 (in the “flat” part of the radiocarbon dating curve, hence the tight range), and in Northern Italy (probably or certainly?). Prepare yourself for the massed onslaught of Voynich doubters to disagree…

So, might the VMs actually turn out to be by Cicco Simonetta in his early days in the Sforza roving Chancellery? Marcello Simonetta would be pleased, but it’s still early days (I thought I’d be the first to mention it)…

PS: is it just me, or can anyone else still hear Steve Ekwall saying “It’S oLdEr ThAn YoU tHiNk“?

UPDATE: see the follow-up post “Voynich Manuscript – the state of play” for more on the Austrian documentary

More early modern correspondence sources…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

eBay crystal sphere – bargain or scam?

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Why, lookie here. An eBay trader is selling a $999 crystal ball allegedly from a boarded-up Voodoo family estate. It says here that the ball was manufactured according to the “alchemic recipe” given in “Apocalypsis spiritus secreti” (by the Venetian Giovanni Battista Agnelli, a book best known from its 1623 printed edition, but John Dee owned a copy too).

And if that alone is not enough to get you wrench open your chequebook against your will, you’ll be signing cheques in your own blood by the time you’ve read the next bit, just in time for Christmas delivery (of course):-

They name Wilfrid Michael Voynich along with his London & New York book shops as being the source of & a number of text & artifacts [in this estate] which their financial records corroborate. They name him as being “met and turned” in Italy in 1898 & apparently had dealings with him until his death in 1931, and with his wife until the time of her demise 1960, whom by the way, they claim “was known to us prior to their marriage”. The timeline makes this LiDiex no more than eleven years old at the time of his “turning”. They name Voynich as their intermediary with the Jesuits of Villa Mondragone in 1912. Their journal entries concerning the “Black Robes” as they refer to the Jesuits & their acquisition of “ancient devices and texts” span decades & a number of articles from this estate have such attributes.

The “LiDiex” is some kind of multi-generational voodoo craftsman, in case you’re wondering. Continuing…

They claim this sphere is, “one of the fifty three made for our Mistress’ use by alchemic recipe contained in the text”, pertaining to their copy of a 16th. century text titled, the Apocalypsis spiritus secreti, by Giovanni Baptista Agnelli, obtained by the Jesuits that allegedly belonged to a John Dee in the 16th. century & obtained by them in 1912. Here again we urge you to research the names mentioned here.

The 1888 LiDiex “under guise” is alleged to have accompanied Voynich to Villa Mondragone in 1912 where he gained access to items in the Jesuit’s possession. Some were purchased, but others were stolen, such as two crystal spheres that had once been the possessions of John Dee which they burgled, replacing them with glass.

John Dee, Wilfrid Voynich, Villa Mondragone, Jesuits, alchemy, Agnelli, LiDiex, crystal balls? Fabulous, amazing, incredible… nonsense, I suspect. Caveat lector, never mind caveat emptor. But make up your own mind!

Other Kinner letters…

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Though the Dean at All Saints in the Citadel of Prague was one of the earliest people to mention the Voynich Manuscript (in two letters to his old friend Athanasius Kircher), poor old Godefridus (Gottfried) Aloysius Kinner of Löwenthurn hasn’t really featured much in the discussion so far.

In Kinner’s letter dated 4th January 1666, he mentions to Kircher that their mutual friend Johannes Marcus Marci asked after “that arcane book which he gave up to you“, which itself seems to mark Marci’s (rather more famous) letter to Kircher as genuine. Kinner also expresses cynicism about alchemy, judging it to be as “worthless” as judicial astrology has proved to be.

Kinner’s letter dated 5 January 1667 from the following New Year finds him still battling with asthma and a cough, and notes that even though Marci “has lost his memory of nearly everything“, he still “wishes to know through me whether you have yet proved an Oedipus in solving that book which he sent via the Father Provincial last year and what mysteries you think it may contain“. He also laments the recent death of Gasparus Schott.

Up until now, most Voynich-related archival search has been carried out by relentlessly trawling through Kircher’s obsessively overflowing (and increasingly well-documented and accessible) inbox. However, for all its interest, this is rather like hearing only one side of a phone conversation – there’s only so much you can reliably infer. I wondered: might there be other letters from/to Kinner out there, or perhaps even books (as these often contained copies of letters)?

A quick online trawl turned up some Kinner letters from 1664-1665 with Christiaan Huygens, reproduced in book V of his “Œuvres complètes”. Curiously, Huygens’ correspondence was published in 22 volumes (from 1888-1950!) yet doesn’t seem to get mentioned much (I ought to add it to my list of correspondence projects): presumably we’d be most interested in looking at “Tome Sixieme: Correspondance 1666-1669” (which I don’t think is online)…

The mention of the Jesuit Gaspar Schott in Kinner’s 1667 letter is also interesting: not only did Schott study under Kircher, he also (while a Professor at Palermo) corresponded with Guericke, Huygens and Boyle, compiling it all into the “Organum mathematicum“, a massive collection of novelties and things of contemporary interest… which Kinner helped edit. Such are the bonds which tie a community together.

Incidentally, the nine volumes of the Organum are: (1) Arithmeticus, (2) Geometricus, (3) Fortificatorius, (4) Chronologicus, (5) Horographicus, (6) Astronomicus, (7) Astrologicus, (8) Steganographicus, (9) Musicus. Of course, book eight might be the most interesting for Voynich researchers. 🙂

WorldCat lists other books by Kinner, such as his (1653) “Elucidatio geometrica problematis austriaci sive quadraturæ circuli“, and his (1664) “Stella Matutina In Medio Nebulae, Sive Laudatio Funebris“, but I somehow doubt that these will produce anything useful.

From all the above, it should be clear here that we are talking about an active community of people continually corresponding across Europe: and indeed, over recent decades letters have become perhaps the most fashionable form of historical documentation amongst early modern / Renaissance historians.

So, you would have thought it would be useful to find out if there is an archive somewhere that just happens to have more correspondence from Kinner, right?

However sensible an idea, this immediately runs into a brick wall: the lack of any kind of cross-collection finding aid for early modern historical correspondence. In fact, libraries’ and private collections’ programmes for scanning and indexing letters are decades behind the many (far more high-visibility) book-scanning programmes. Funding-wise, it seems that books are “sexy”, while letters are “unsexy”: but actually, ask working historians and you’ll find that this is just wrong.

My guess is that the right place to start such a quest would be Book VI of Huygens’ Oeuvres Complètes, to see if it says where Huygens’ correspondence to/from Kinner is held. It may well be that this points the way to more of the same, who knows?

UPDATE: thanks to Christopher Hagedorn’s exemplary persistence in the face of the BnF’s flaky servers, we now have a direct link to Book VI of Huygens’ Oeuvres Complètes. From this we can tell that Kinner’s correspondence seems to stop dead in 1667, the same year that Marci died. My guess is that perhaps this too marked the end of Kinner’s life (and the likely end of this avenue). Ah well. 🙁

“The statistics of meaning”…

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Here’s a teaser for a 2009 paper (from Significance, Vol. 6, No. 4., pp. 165-169) which some Voynich Manuscript researchers might possibly be interested in:-

How concentrated is the information in Darwin’s Origin of Species? How heavy a read is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall? Where does a great white whale fit in? And what on earth is the mysterious Voynich manuscript that has baffled scholars for centuries?Marcelo Montemurro and Damián Zanette look at words and the information they contain.

I have to say that I’m somewhat dubious that any practical lessons about information content can be explicitly drawn from Voynichese transcriptions, given the battles that continue to rage over whether it is a hoax, a lost (public) language, a personal (private) language, or a ciphertext [hint: it’s the last, but don’t tell anyone].

Implicitly, however, there’s a big lesson to be learned, which is: if you apply your favourite statistical tools to things you don’t understand even slightly, don’t be surprised if you get paradoxical or uncertain results. That is, rather than computer scientists’ favoured “Garbage In, Garbage Out“, a more accurate high level model would seem to be “Caviar In, Sh*t Out“. Oh well!

Austrian “The Voynich Riddle” documentary…

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ORF has just announced that its 45-minute Voynich documentary “DAS VOYNICH-RÄTSEL” (the Voynich riddle) will be broadcast on ORF2 (on Astra) at 21:05 on Thursday 10th December.

Well-known Voynich researcher René Zandbergen (who has been involved in the documentary’s production) has kindly passed me an English translation of ORF’s brief online description:-

The Most Mysterious Manuscript In The World.

It is the most mysterious manuscript in the world: a book written by an unknown author, illustrated with drawings that are as bizarre as they are enigmatic – and in a language that could not be deciphered by the best cryptographers in the world. No wonder that this manuscript even plays a role in Dan Brown’s new mystery bestseller “The Lost Symbol”. Since its discovery 100 years ago, the Voynich Manuscript has equally captivated both scientists and occultists. The breakers of the Japanese “Purple” code, physicists with modern computers or expert historians – they all tried their luck, but so far nobody could decipher the contents of this book. This documentary follows a new trail that could lead to the author, using the first ever forensic investigation of the book itself to try to break the secrets of this mysterious manuscript.

A documentary by Klaus Steindl and Andreas Sulzer.

OK… though it’s true that the VMs only gets namechecked in “The Lost Symbol”, and that it has attracted far more interest from novelists than it ever has from occultists, I (along with most other Voynich researchers, I confidently predict) can barely wait to see what they’ve come up with.

I really hope that Klaus and Andreas have managed to do a good job of (a) the history, (b) the forensic science, and (c) putting the two halves together in a coherent and persuasive way. Fingers crossed for them!

“Sous Le Manteau De La Nuit” (2007)…

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Though I’m not sure from the blurb whether it’s a literary detective story or a love story (it might well be both), Tristan Marechal’s (2007) “Sous le manteau de la nuit” definitely does feature the Voynich Manuscript. The protagonists accidentally discover a painting in the (Florentine, not Venetian) Galleria dell’Accademia’s reserve stock that just happens to contain some Voynichese lettering, and (presumably) everything leads on from there.

At least Dennis Stallings will have something nice to put on his Christmas list this year. 🙂

“Alien” cipher language…?

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Ever heard of Palo Alto CARET Labs? Nope, neither had anyone else until “Isaac” posted about his experiences at “PACL” in the mid-1980s as part of a team trying to turn “extraterrestrial technology” taken from “crash sites” into consumer goodies (such as a personal anti-gravity machine, apparently) for our sated materialist society.

So far, so mainstream UFO subculture: but what moves Isaac’s story into the A-list of recent UFO narratives is the set of lovingly-constructed images accompanying it. Some of these show machines (like a junkyard engine with neatly stencilled-on white lettering), while others are extracts from technical report “PACL Q4-86” (though why smuggle out a redacted version?) showing abstract representations of octal software / hardware with wonderfully obfuscated descriptions (e.g. “Isolated view of a three-node AB-type semaphore cascade, extending from an exterior vertex of an octal junction”).

isaac-caret-diagram

There’s a ton of online discussion of Isaac’s images, nowadays mostly centring on whether Adobe Illustrator or Adobe AutoCAD was used to create his pretty diagrams (I’d say Adobe Illustrator, with lots of text and element reuse to make it seem like more than it actually is).

Though I’m not a ufologist (“Men In Black” is about as close as I get), what I like here is his funky alien alphabet – equal parts Star Fleet and Japanese (Kana). For all Isaac’s talk that this expresses a ‘non-compiled alien symbolic programming language’ (yeah, riiiight), it closely resembles a European monoalphabetic cipher in the following basic ways:-

  • There seems to be an explicit numbering system
  • There seem to be a Romance-language-size character set
  • There seems to be a sharp language-like distribution to the symbols

Hence, I predict that the UFO hoaxer created a simple A-Z/0-9 alien font in Adobe Illustrator and just typed a load of technical-looking nonsense along lots of curved paths. For example, here are some of the number-like text fragments from various pages:-

isaac-caret-numbers

To my eyes, this gives the impression of someone cut-and-pasting nonsense numbers – I’d predict that the shapes either side of the repeated string on the left are ‘(‘ and ‘)’ respectively (they reappear in matched pairs elsewhere in the diagrams), that the left pair of strings each reads “(5604)”, and that the other two strings encipher ’12’ and ‘160’. Note that I’m guessing those leading digits are 1’s, on the basis that Benford’s Law probably also holds true on alien worlds. 🙂

If you’re interested in trying to crack this for yourself, feel free to download pages 119, 120, 121, 122, and 123 from Isaac’s Fortune City pages, and see how far you can get. Good luck! 🙂