Following a trail of breadcrumbs from my recent post on Johann Adam Schall von Bell, I’m returning to the issue of whether the VMs could ever have had a Far Eastern origin. To recap, Jacques Guy originally proposed Chinese as a kind of linguistic fou-merde joke on the Voynich research community, only to be unhappily surprised when people started taking it seriously enough to dig up evidence why he might actually have been right. Guy’s “Chinese theory” was, then, somewhat like the Rosicrucian manifestos, in that it was a ludibrium that somehow managed to survive and thrive quite independently of its creator.

Of course, every class of Voynich theory has its naysayers (who normally outnumber the proposer[s] by some 1000:1). In this instance, such people typically point to three major areas of difficulty that any particular Chinese theory would have to overcome – cultural mismatch, codicological mismatch and linguistic mismatch.

Cultural mismatch is the easiest one of the three: where are the Chinese faces, Chinese motifs, Chinese artefacts, Chinese sequences, etc? Search as hard as you like, but you’ll probably (despite what some novelists like to pretend) only find signs of late medieval European culture in there – baths, castles (yes, with swallowtail merlons), European herbals, heads in the roots, cryptoheraldry (eagle, lion, etc)… essentially the same set of cultural conceits that you can see in real Quattrocento herbals and related manuscripts (oh, and in the so-called “alchemical herbals”, which are neither alchemical nor herbal, strictly speaking). I’m also somewhat culturally suspicious about the apparent 30 x 12 = 360-degree division in the zodiac section, because Chinese astronomy before Johann Adam Schall von Bell had long been based on a 365.25 day astronomical year (no matter how awkward this made the maths).

Codicological mismatch is also fairly easy to spot: why would a mysterious Chinese herbal have marginalia and quire numbers written in various 15th century hands? If you are arguing that the VMs is a genuine Far Eastern linguistic artefact (i.e. that it is not openly deceptive), then you’d need to have a particularly strong narrative argument if you are going to try to date its return to Europe much after 1500 (or even 1450). The vellum also seems to have a physically European origin, so this too needs to be taken account of. Furthermore, Voynichese’s general ductus seems to fall within the range of late medieval European styles (it was written by someone fairly adept with a quill rather than with a brush), so the most likely point of codicological departure here would always be that the VMs was written by a European rather than by a Chinese person.

Linguistic mismatch is perhaps both the hardest to spot as well as the hardest to deal with. The core of the Chinese theory was based on Jacques Guy’s amused observation that the frequent “CVCV…” patterns found in Voynichese (such as “otolal“, etc) might be not so much a highly-structured consonant-vowel linguistic artefact as a tonal transcription artefact. That is, that Voynichese is ‘simply’ a structured tonal rendition of an exotic language such as Mandarin Chinese etc, and that perhaps a lot of the letter-following structures we observe are caused by limitations of the way that tones happen to work in that language. OK… but given that the very first tonal rendition of Chinese was apparently attempted by Matteo Ricci in 1583-1588 (the point where the whole idea of a tonal transcription seems to have first appeared), this would seem to point to quite a strong earliest dating for the VMs of (say) 1590 or so, unless you’re going to rewrite a fair bit of the history books etc in your quest to tell your narrative.

Now, you really don’t have to have as big a Renaissance brain as Anthony Grafton’s to be able to notice the contradiction here: which is that for a Chinese theory to overcome the codicological mismatch it seems to require a pre-1500 dating, while for it to overcome the linguistic mismatch it seems to require a post-1590 dating, while simultaneously overcoming the quite separate (and quite large) cultural mismatch issues. The easy answer, of course, is simply to ignore any such problems and just get on with telling your story: it’s far harder to tackle the underlying mismatches and see where they take you.

Incidentally, there’s a little-known interview with Guy Mazars and Christophe Wiart in Actualites en Phytotherapie to be found here (in French) where they propose that many of the Voynich Manuscript’s mysterious plants may in fact be East Asian plants (for example, that f6v depicts Ricinus communis) or Indian plants (they think that many of the plants shown are types of Asteraceae, with f27r representing Centella Asiatica). But you’d have to point out that there are also many, many, many plants in the VMs that are unlikely to match anything these (very learned) experts on Indian and East Asian plants have ever seen. Make of all this what you will (as per normal).

Once again, it’s time to roll out and dust off the Cipher Mysteries crystal skull crystal ball (no, I didn’t buy it on eBay, nor did I nick it from the British Museum) to peer dimly ahead to 2010. What will it bring us all?

Of course, 2009’s big news was the radiocarbon dating of four slivers of the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum for the recent Austrian TV documentary, which yielded an oddly early date (1405-1438 at 95% confidence). We’re still waiting for the actual data to get a better feel for the historical reasoning: doubtless there will be more announcements to come during this year (some from the Beinecke Library itself), perhaps as the English version of the documentary edges closer to broadcast. Hence…

Prediction #1: by mid-2010, carefully combining the raw data from the documentary with what we already know about the Voynich Manuscript will move us to an entirely new and unexpected (though no less paradoxical or awkward) mainstream position.

Of course, hard evidence is doubly hard for some to swallow: while behind the scenes, quite a few people are silently beavering away with their own VMs-related stuff. For example, I can’t help but notice Jorge Stolfi pa-/de-trolling the Wikipedia Voynich:Talk page, which rather makes me wonder what he’s up to. Hence…

Prediction #2: throughout 2010, a whole bunch of Voynicheros will exit stage right, the arrival of hard evidence having spoiled their long-running soft evidence gig. At the same time, a whole scrum of other researchers will join in the VMs pool party. The Voynich research landscape will become more overtly historical, less wildly speculative (and about time too).

In 2009, we’ve seen quite a few academics looking at the VMs: but I think it’s fair to say that none to date has fully engaged with the breadth and heterogeneity of the evidence that plagues & intrigues us all. If Lynn Thorndike were alive, I’d be camping outside his office 🙂 but circa 2010 what kind of historian has the breadth and daring to take on the risk of rising to this challenge? Anthony Grafton? Charles Burnett [in 2010]?

Prediction #3: I suspect that late in 2010, we’ll see the arrival of perhaps the first truly heavyweight academic Voynich Manuscript paper for decades. I just can’t shake the intuition that something big is coming this way…

Combine all of the above with the conservative set of analyses carried out by Andreas Sulzer’s team, and I think you get:-

Prediction #4: throughout 2010, the Beinecke Library’s curators will receive many requests for specific art historical forensic tests to be carried out on the VMs, such as multispectral imaging on the marginalia / paints / inks (to try to separate out the different authorial and/or construction layers) and/or vellum DNA analysis (to try to reconstruct the original bifolio grouping). However, they will probably say ‘no’ to all of them (a shame, but there you go).

Ummm… here’s looking forward to 2011, then! 😉

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! 🙂

I just saw (via H-ITALY) an announcement for an online peer-reviewed journal from Stanford:

We are delighted to announce the publication of a new digital journal, Republics of Letters. This peer-reviewed, open-access publication is dedicated to the study of knowledge, politics, and the arts, from Antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the early-modern period.

Its first issue has a splendidly accessible article by Anthony Grafton called “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters”, a broad-brush outline of the historical and political development of the Republic of Letters (Respublica Literarum) from 1500 all the way to the Enlightenment. If you only know a little bit about this fascinating subject, I’d recommend his overview as a really good high-level starting point.

Grafton is always good value for money: but I note with suspicion a number of Simon Schama-esque TV tropes edging into his prose – for example, his “Pedantic Park” metaphor seems peculiarly strained and gratuitous in print, far more suited to being used as a throwaway TV documentary conceit to be consumed and instantly forgotten. Perhaps our Princeton Professor has plans, who knows?