News arrives from the New Journal Magazine at Yale (via Jeff Haley on the Voynich Mailing List and Elmar Vogt’s Voynich blog, thanks to you both!) that “two outside specialists” at the Sterling Memorial Library have been “analyzing the pigments in [the Voynich Manuscript’s] ink and carbon dating a tiny sample of its vellum“. Hooray!

Though Yale was perhaps spurred on to do this by the documentary that is currently being made, it is not clear whether the lack of results or details published as yet is because of some arrangement-to-withhold with the film-makers, or perhaps because the results are so astonishing that it’s taking ages to write them up. 🙂 Hopefully we’ll find out soon…

The 2009 Kalamazoo medieval congress continues apace (until tomorrow) – did anyone see Angela Catalina Ghionea’s Voynich plant presentation? I should perhaps comment here that her ongoing dissertation topic “The Occult Origins of European Science” seems hugely ironic to me, given that I view a lot of Renaissance & modern occult practices as being built on top of misunderstood proto-science – so if I was writing a dissertation, it would be on the “The Scientific Origins of European Occultism“. But which of us, then, is the contrarian? 😮

Finally… after a period of domain transition, my compellingpress.com site is now back online: there’s still a small boxful of copies of “The Curse of the Voynich” sitting in the corner, all awaiting owners. 😉

Here’s a nice Voynich-themed oddity from the much-frayed edge between C.P.Snow’s “Two Cultures” of art and science.

A contemporary painter called Shardcore explores the history of science by painting famous scientists and historical scientific objects: and was so entertained by the notion that Ethel Lilian Boole – the daughter of the famous logician George Boole – came to own the Voynich Manuscript (she married Wilfrid Voynich, of course) that he decided to paint a picture celebrating it: and you can see the result here, together with a time-lapse recording of the painter as he painted it.

In Voynichological circles, this connection is old news: the website of my old Voynichian chum Jeff Haley is called The George Boole Fanclub, for precisely this reason. Incidentally, I have spent five years trying not to think of Julian Clary’s former life as The Joan Collins’ Fan Club (terrible, but surely better than “Gillian Pie-Face”?) whenever I see this, but as yet without success. Perhaps in another five years, when Julian Clary has become as horribly mainstream as Jim Davidson (sorry, but that’s how showbiz works)…

The quotation which adorns the picture is from George Boole: “Language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought“. Which is nice. But it this true of Voynichese?