Happy New Year, and some predictions for 2010…

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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! 😉

Another Voynich paper…

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I’ve just found a German summary of the 2006 “Knowledge, Discipline and Power, 12th-17th Centuries” conference in Sheffield, at which Volkhard Huth of the University of Freiburg apparently presented a paper on the Voynich Manuscript. According to the description, Huth (whose expertise is in handwriting) broadly localizes the manuscript to Germany, provisionally dates it to 1480-1500, and places its encoded contents within a broadly philosophical tradition. According to this, he presented it in session three, just before the ubiquitous Charles Burnett. 🙂

This page describes his paper (well, its title) and where it will be published:-

“The Critic on Magical Mystery Tour. Towards a serious location of the enigmatic ›Voynich Cipher Manuscript‹ in the history of knowledge, in: Knowledge, Discipline and Power, 12th-17th Centuries. An international conference organised by the University of Sheffield with the support of the British Academy in honour of Professor David E. Luscombe, FBA (University of Sheffield / Humanities Research Institute, 15.9. – 17.9. 2006). Papers, ed. by MARTIAL STAUB (erscheint bei Cambridge University Press; in Vorbereitung) “

That’s two academics known to be actively looking at the VMs: hardly a tidal wave, but hopefully the start of something good. I’ll try to get hold of a copy of the paper to review here…

Warwick/Warburg course 2008, Day Three…

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Day One of the Early Modern Research Techniques course was easy to write about, as was Day Two: but Day Three? Tricky…

If I close my eyes, the single image from it burnt into my retinas is of Charles Hope sardonically half-warning participants about the historical Class A drug that is archival research. Yes, he personally had partaken of it, and indeed fully inhaled; yes, truth be told he’d actually quite enjoyed it, and even become quite good at it; but being realistic, the chances that you’ll find anything surprising in any archives anywhere range from Slim Jim McThin to zero.

As to the other speakers, Charles Burnett was (as always) excellent value: I could happily listen to him all day. Ingrid de Smet was good, and… look, every lecturer was good, so that’s not the problem at all.

I’ll try to explain what’s been bugging me for a month – and why. You see, about halfway through my Master’s, a particular kind of critical faculty awoke in me that takes the form of an active intuition that (in effect) ‘listens in’. And so I get a parallel commentary on the subtext of what I’m reading: not “do I believe this (y/n)?“, but “to what degree am I comfortable accepting this account is psychologically representative?” In a way, this added non-binary dimension gives me a sort of novelistic insight into non-fiction, and helps me smell not a rat, but the degree of rattiness. You can see this same kind of thing at play in Carlo Ginzburg’s wonderful history books (which is probably why I’ve got so many of them).

And the funny smell I sensed here wasn’t from the academics (who were all hardworking, insightful, pragmatic and great), but from the Warburg Institute itself. You see, for all the Renaissance pictures of obscure Greco-Roman deities filed upstairs, the biggest mythology stored there is about the usefulness of the Warburg.

What you have to understand about the Warburg Institute’s collections is that they were constructed as a kind of mad iconological machine by Aby Warburg for Aby Warburg to decode the secrets hidden in Renaissance art… but which were never there to decode. The Warburg Institute is therefore a kind of bizarre 1930s steampunk Internet, where every sub-page is devoted to the art history semantic conspiracy behind a different artefact (and the whole indexing is 50 years behind schedule).

As an analogy, David Kahn, with perhaps more than a hint of a sneer, calls the study of Baconian ciphers “enigmatology”: the study of an enigma that was never there. And “Voynichology” as often practised seems little different to Kahn’s “enigmatology”? (Which is why I don’t call myself a “Voynichologist” any more: rather, I’m just an historian working on the Quattrocento mystery that just happens to be the Voynich Manuscript).

In my opinion, “Renaissance iconology” (which Dan Brown fictionalized as Robert Langdon’s “symbology” in the Da Vinci Code, bless him) or indeed what one might call “Warburgology” is no less a failed thought-experiment than “enigmatology”, or indeed “Voynichology”: all share the same faulty methodology of requiring an hypothetical solution in order to make sense of something else uncertain.

But what of the man himself? For me, I see Aby Warburg’s quest as being driven by the desire to move (through his research) ever closer to touch Renaissance gods on earth, through the clues about their Neoplatonic Heaven they left hidden in their works. But now we see that they were instead just jobbing artisans with books of emblems tucked into their work smocks: life is disappointing.

Look, I feel an immense amount of goodwill towards the Warburg Institute and all the people who sail in her: but a large part of me wishes for the mythology that shaped it to fall into the sea. Perhaps the sincere search for a God or Goddess is simply a kind of displaced search for dead, absent or idolized parents in the noise of the world, not unlike Mark Romanek’s film “Static“: if so, I think it’s time we called off the search for Warburg’s parents.

"In Tongues of the Dead"…

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Another Voynich-themed novel is announced: “In Tongues of the Dead“, written by Canadian author and forensic psychologist Brad Kelln, to be published by ECW Press in October 2008. It’s his third book (“Lost Sanity” and “Method of Madness” were his others, with some kind of Dead Sea Scrolls prophecy hook to the second one). According to Kelln’s blog, in his day-job he is “a consultant to the Halifax Police and the Nova Scotia RCMP on hostage negotiation“.

In his soon-to-be-published book, an autistic child visiting the Beinecke library is miraculously able to read the VMs… revealing it as “the bible of the Nephilim”. The manuscript then gets stolen, the (presumably) bad guys in the Vatican chase the various protagonists across the world, but they get helped out by a plucky Canadian psychologist doctor guy with a sick child: and whatever happens at the end happens at the end.

Perhaps I’m just feeling a bit negative because the ECW Press blurb describes the VMs as “a 400-year-old document” (I don’t think so, sorry), but this whole book does sound a bit join-the-dots to me. Look: the Voynich Manuscript is a fantastic cipher mystery, but there’s absolutely no reason to think it has any religious (let alone sacrilegious) content. My old friend GC once tried to argue that a couple of the women in the water section were holding things that might possibly be crosses: but that is a pretty thin reed to be balancing any kind of sophistical superstructure upon.

Cryptographically and historically, I think that Kelln should have instead built his story around the Rohonczi Codex or Rohonc Codex, A.K.A. Magyar Tudományos Akadémia (“The Hungarian Academy of Sciences“) MS K 114. This has 448 pages filled with as-yet-undeciphered text, is thought to have been written on Venetian paper from the 1530s, and has 87 illustrations apparently depicting “religious, laic, and military scenes” (according to Wikipedia). There’s a complete set of scans here.

Older historians thought this codex was simply a hoax: but it actually has a lot of order and structure, all of which seems to point to its being meaningful in some unknown or unexpected way. At the Warburg Institute recently, Professor Charles Burnett mentioned to me in the lunch queue that a European scholar (whose name I half-remember as “Gyula”, so might well be Hungarian?) is just about to publish a paper on the Rohonc Codex: a proper academic perspective on this would be very welcome, as just about all the hypotheses circling around it seem fairly lame.

To be brutally honest, if I was Kelln’s publisher, I’d negotiate with him to drop the Voynich Manuscript angle, and to rebuild the first part of the story around Budapest (a far more intriguing town than New Haven I would say, having spent time in both) and the Rohonc Codex. But what do I know?

Incidentally, there’s a conference currently running at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the fascinating reign of King Mathias. Yet another event I would have loved to attend. *sigh*