“Knowledge of the Flesh”

by ⋅ 12 Comments

Here’s something I’d really love to attend: as part of the upcoming annual meeting of The Bibliographical Society of America at The Grolier Club on Friday 23 January 2009, some papers from the BSA’s New Scholars Program are being presented, one of which is by Timothy L. Stinson (from North Carolina State University) and called “Knowledge of the Flesh: Using DNA Analysis to Unlock Bibliographical Secrets of Medieval Parchment“. Having said that, I might be able to save you the fare to New York: here’s a link to an article that summarizes what Timothy Stinson is doing – basically, he is trying to use vellum DNA as a tool for localising individual manuscripts (rather than have to rely on anything so wobbly & interpretative as palaeography)… once he’s built up a large enough corpus of DNA samples.

This is not hugely far from something I have long thought about (for the Voynich Manuscript). I suspect that DNA comparison of the material used in its bifolios could yield a solid first step towards the original page-order, by reconstructing the likely original quire groupings (there is no obvious reason to think that its quires would have been constructed in anything apart from the conventional manner). Back in 2006, I also used matching skin flaws (along the spine) to predict how one of the original quires was cut from an animal skin – it would fascinating to have a parallel DNA data track to compare this kind of analysis with.

In short, while Stinson is interested in inter-textual DNA comparisons, I’m interested in intra-textual DNA comparisons. However, even though the latter might be the kind of techy humanities project you’d half-expect to pop up somewhere like the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, I don’t actually think it will happen any time soon. Unless you know better…?

Update: Bill Walsh sent in a link to a nice National Geographic story with more technical detail on Stinson’s DNA research. Thanks, Bill – neat! 🙂 And here’s another one from SciAm.

Enciphered diaries…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Here’s a nice little blog entry on Rick Smith’s Cryptosmith blog, talking about encrypted documents (rather than just encrypted messages), specifically the enciphered diaries of Charles Wesley (who co-founded the Methodist Church) and of Beatrix Potter.

The 2008 BBC article Rick links to also discusses a war diary made by RAF prisoner of war Donald Hill, and an as-yet-not-fully-decrypted shorthand diary kept by Lord Hailsham. If you want some juicy modern stuff to decipher, the Margaret Thatcher Foundation is looking for cryptological volunteers to decipher more of Lord Hailsham’s notes – there’s even an Excel spreadsheet there with words they’ve cracked so far. Hmmm… sounds like a job for the tireless Tony Gaffney. 😉

For the Beatrix Potter movie website Rick Smith linked to (discussing her diaries), the Second Law of Web Thermodynamics has unfortunately kicked in (“the fancier the website, the sooner it dies“). However, here’s what the Wayback Machine has recorded for it:-

Beatrix Potter’s diary is a true insight into her life. Written in code with the belief that it would never be read, the only surviving entries date from 1881 to 1897. At times she corresponds with a girl called Esther – an imaginary person in Beatrix’s life which perhaps points towards the inevitable moments of loneliness she must have felt, particularly whilst Bertram, her brother, was away at school.

Her diary takes us into her world and she writes not only of her day to day life – family visits, trips to art galleries and exhibitions, but also the turbulent side of the wider world – riots, mobs, murders and political and social upheaval.

It was not until 20 years after Beatrix’s death that the diary code was cracked by the tireless work of Leslie Linder. On Easter Monday 1958, through recognition of a date mentioned and a little more research the first word was deciphered – ‘execution’. This word marked the beginning of the enlightenment and Leslie eventually worked out the code, deciphering the symbols bit by bit.

Ukrainian Voynich theory…

by ⋅ 23 Comments

In the good old days, we seemed to be in a “long boom”, blessed by an apparently unlimited supply of fringe Voynich theories, like so many babies’ socks effortlessly churned out by a deranged knitter. Oh yes, we’ve definitely seen plenty of knitters over the years. 🙂

But of late, it’s hard to avoid noticing that a Voynich theory drought has apparently taken hold. It’s not that all the good theories have already been nabbed: the nature of most Voynich theories is they are intrinsically bad but non-trivial to disprove, while simultaneously playing out a subtle wish-fulfilment role in the theorist’s personal psychodrama. A bit like an Action Man toy for intellectual introverts. 🙂

But why should this ‘silence of the flim-flams’ be happening now? My suspicion is that the VMs cultural meme has subtly drifted over the last few years  into a kind of no man’s land. Whereas it used to be something for everybody, I think that the ‘analysis paralysis’ of the Wikipedia Voynich page has spread, virus-like, through mainstream culture: and that the VMs’ status as a wacky para-historical mystery has been displaced by a kind of diffused epistemological ennui, as if the very need to understand it is somehow misjudged – that it’s not that kind of girl.

However, here’s a tolerably recent Voynich theory I’d missed, courtesy of “Michael the friend of D.” (who appears to be from the Ukraine), first posted to sci.lang in 2007. By plucking characters from a rotating sequence of three lines, Michael is able to pluck out a single non-word (“gracieg”) from the VMs. Where less than three lines are available, he suggests that stuff is hidden (Trithemius-style) in every other word. Of course, he’s not actually using the VMs for this, but a cleaned-up page of VMs text from omniglot.com: which isn’t so very different from Gordon Rugg relying on the statistical properties of the transcription. On the bright side, Michael is at least self-aware enough to notice that that he’s probably falling into a trap. 🙂

“Impossible Objects” announced…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Here’s a link to an unknown (and as-yet-unpublished) Voynich “literary mystery” for late 2009: Adam Hammonds posted a brief description of his Voynich / Tepenecz book “Impossible Objects” on his blog. But… Adam who?, I hear you ask.

A little Google-fu reveals that he lives in Brooklyn, and has been posting to the ‘Absolute Write’ writers forums since September 2008. He apparently has a fiancée and likes Thai food; he likes Premier League football (and so is probably English, or else he’d call it “sah-crrr“) and in the last few days has been taken on by William Clark Associates (literary agents). Hooray! *clink*

Yet these days, being a first time novelist is no fun: now that PCs are so ubiquitous and cheap, you only have (say) a billion-ish other people competing with you to the death. Advances are frugal, royalties are more pared to the bone than ever before (don’t hold your breath for that cheque-y to arrive), while few fiction writers have made a cent from e-publishing. In the face of the ongoing collapse of traditional publishing, the whole notion of actually making money from being a writer seems to me to be both wonderfully mad and horribly outdated. I want to applaud and to cry at the same time: I don’t believe there’s any rational middle ground left between the two extrema.

Hmmm… I think I’ll get back in my box, now. Sorry!

History Today Awards 2009…

by ⋅ 4 Comments

Summoned to the Tower of London for wine & canapés? Do you honestly think I could refuse?

Every year, the History Today Awards organizers find ever more inspiring/imposing historical venues to give out a small set of prizes (best undergraduate dissertation, best historical book, best picture editing in a book, and this year’s special award for “best vaguely historical person called Simon Jenkins who we happen to like very much“): but how they plan to top the fog-enrobed theatricality of the Tower of London for their 2010 shindig I don’t really know. Buckingham Palace? Windsor Castle? Aboard the Mary Rose? 😉

Of course, the real point of such events is to meet a whole succession of nice & interesting people in and around the general History sphere, such as Terka Acton from Thames & Hudson and James Bellini (AKA The Historian of the Future), etc and perhaps get mildly drunk with them. And so at 9pm a good proportion of the attendees decamped from the Tower to the Wetherspoons just opposite, where I got to chat with the small (though perfectly formed) History Today team, particularly Paul Lay (the new editor) and Sheila Corr (who did such a splendid job on the pictures for my telescope article), as well as with other recent History Today contributors such as the Royal Holloway’s Daniel Beer (and his über-engaging partner Katya).

The only downer of the evening was that as we all went to leave, I found that some ethically-challenged attendee had apparently stolen my copy of Deborah Harkness’ very enjoyable “The Jewel House” from the table in the pub. It wasn’t a review copy, it was a Christmas present from my wife, and frustratingly I was just about to get to every historian’s favourite bit (the copious endnotes). All the same, I’ll post up a review here while the book’s still fresh in my mind, doubtless cursing under my breath as I type. Oh well!

The Tepenecz f1r signature…

by ⋅ 4 Comments

Back in February 2005, I decided to use my m4d image-processing 5k1llz to try to see how much of the erased owner’s signature at the bottom of f1r (the very first page) of the Voynich Manuscript I could reasonably reconstruct.

tepenec-raw

The reason the signature is so invisible is because some (probably early 17th century) owner physically scrubbed that part of the page really, really clean, to the point that there’s basically no ink there, nada, zilch. All that remains is no more than a subtle half-shadow, a ghostly echo that you have to enhance over and over and over to snatch even a vague glimpse. Well, that’s what I did four years ago – and here’s what ultimately came out of the process:-

tepenec-fake

By a twist of fate, I discovered this week just how correct my interpretation of the signature is (it’s actually surprisingly close). But that’s actually someone else’s story, which I hope to blog about at a later date…

A mainstream codicological novel, really?

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Here’s something that was a surprise for me, perhaps it will surprise you too: “People of the Book“, a 2008 novel by Geraldine Brooks, teasing out (imagined) story after story from the margins, stains and marks left on “the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated texts” (thus spake Wikipedia). One Amazon customer reviewer called it “CSI for librarians“, but I’m not sure how best to file that kind of compliment: still, better that than “magisterial”, eh?

Oddly, though this is Brooks’ first novel since she won a Pulitzer Prize, there are plenty of cheap copies on bookfinder.com / Amazon Marketplace (etc), so shop around. Even though it’s not strictly a cipher novel per se, I’ve ordered my copy & will review it along the way…

Other Euro Voynich books…

by ⋅ 1 Comment

Having just blogged on up-to-the-minute German Voynichiana, what of the rest of Europe? Here’s a quick sampling to whet your appetite, should you ever wish to feast on such morcels…

Having worked with Enrique recently (he generously translated my History Today telescope article so that it could appear in Astronomia magazine), I’m very much looking forward to the forthcoming English translation of his novel… even if I do still have to wait until June 2009. *sigh*

Elderly professor, Voynich manuscript, high-level Vatican/Jesuit conspiracy, corrupt cardinal, people learn of the VMs and then they get killed, how will it all end?, la-di-da.

Yes, once again it’s those pesky Templars and their accursed book (what, the VMs? Quelle surprise!) *sigh*

The VMs, the Philosophers’ Stone and quantum physics all get woven together here: though any Voynich book without evil Jesuit priests and lost Templar treasure will always move swiftly to the top of my list, who’s to say what this will be like? All the same, first-time novelists probably have more than enough things to worry about without lumping the weighty baggage of the VMs onto their camel’s back.

According to Dennis Stallings, Maugenest’s story describes how Roger Bacon wrote the VMs during his 13-year confinement – and how Bacon’s ideas are so powerful that anyone who now tries to read them falls into an irreversible coma. Hmmm… though I must confess that Jacques Derrida’s “Of Grammatology” did give me a headache for a week afterwards, Maugenest might just be stretching believability past its breaking point here. Oh well!

German Voynich books…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

While adding categories to some old blog posts just now, up popped a mention of the Karlsruhe Virtual Katalog (KVK). I normally use KVK to find specific non-fiction holdings: but today I wondered what otherwise-unknown Voynich masterpieces it might be able to tell me about. At Dennis Stallings’ prompting, I’ve just started to add non-English Voynich novels to my Big Fat List, so this was a good opportunity to expand its scope in a rather more , errrm, “Teutonophile” direction…

What can 32.60 euroes buy you these days? Not a lot of explanation about the VMs, if the Amazon blurb for Roitzsch’s book is anything to go by. Somewhat unbelievably, its Unique Selling Point is that mainstream Voynich researchers will be eternally grateful for any insight readers might have into this mystery. Sadly, “condescending and hostile” might be a better prediction. Oh well. 🙁

Again, 19.90 euroes for a “Mystikthriller” might seem a little steep (particularly for those in the UK looking at the pound’s current 1:1 parity to the euro), but what the hey.  As with The Voynich Enigma, a Templar seal on the cover flags what you’re getting – a Euro-zone admixture of Church, Templar secrets, and (I’d predict fairly thin) cryptography. Ah, bless.

Alexander the Great, Persia, Voynich Manuscript, terrible secret, sexy archaeologist, Yale, bla bla bla. Sorry to be so immediately negative, but when will these people learn?

A bit of an oddity: 34 pages long, 8 euroes, a German-language magazine devoted to cryptozoology puts out an issue focusing on cryptobotany – and no prizes for guessing which bizarre manuscript is invited to the party. Might possibly be an interesting read – but I’ll admit to being somewhat skeptical.

The real curiosity of the day: a book describing the life and (odd) works a German mystic called Frederika Hauffe (1801-1829) whose convulsions and visions led to bizarre trance-like writing in both a “spirit language” and a “unique coded alphabet”. DeSalvo’s putative link between Hauffe and the VMs is anyone’s guess – but perhaps it would be worth having a look at his 224-page, pleasantly-affordable book. 🙂