Review of Enrique Joven’s “The Book of God and Physics”…

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(I’ll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don’t have star ratings & I’m not one to hide what I’m thinking, so this connection shouldn’t affect the following in any significant way.)

A thing I hear again and again from Cipher Mysteries readers is that they just aren’t into buying novels: for the most part, they’re non-fiction addicts hooked on the subtle adrenaline rush of research and who mostly feel bemused (and possibly even slightly alienated) by my fiction reviews. What, they say, can we possibly learn from a novel?

My angle on Voynich novels has never really been that of a lit crit: which is possibly just as well, it ought to be said, because most are little more than medium-boiled airport novels. Rather, I’m interested in how the idea of the Voynich Manuscript (and/or other historical cipher mysteries) is perceived and passed on by non-Voynich-researchers. Do novelists and/or their research assistants just read the Wikipedia page and make up the rest (as per the basic ‘lazy writer’ stereotype), or do some of them actually engage with the VMs, with the messy Voynich research process, and perhaps even – shock horror – with the historical evidence?

To be honest, few VMs novelists give the impression of their even having reached halfway through the Wikipedia page (however understandable that is), while a surprising number give a strong impression of having relied on even less helpful VMs information sources (such as “The Friar and the Cipher”, ugh). Even in this glorious era of Internet research, the ancient ‘GIGO’ rule (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”) works the same as it ever did. *sigh*

Yet Enrique Joven falls squarely into the engagement camp with his novel “The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery”, in that he has plainly done a lot of reading on the subject and is even well aware of the Voynich mailing list. His fictional treatment of the Voynich mystery is also pretty much the first one I’ve read that treats Jesuits in a fairly sensible, non-tokenistic way (doubly impressive given that his protagonist is a teacher at a Jesuit school), and he constructs his narrative around the VMs’ thrice-APODed page f67r1 and the astronomical sparks showered over the Imperial Court by the tense relationship between Brahe and Kepler (a subject I happen to know a fair amount about).

Yet curiously, the limitations of Enrique’s book arise not from the cipher or from the history, but instead from his treatment of those (fictional) Voynich mailing list members his protagonist gets caught up up with, many of whom apparently suffer from multiple-(virtual)-personality disorder. Now, I’m no great fan of the Voynich mailing list as it has become (has any genuinely useful research appeared there in several years? I don’t think so), and it is true that some listmembers post under deliberately false or whimsical names, as if they were secretly emo teenagers. But to make this aspect so central to the story has all the feeling of a false modern mythology, a kind of ‘Hollywood Internet’ where Everyone (apart from the straight-as-a-die protagonist) Is Online In Order To Hide Some Important Aspect Of Themselves That Will Be Revealed Later In The Plot.

That aside, Joven writes pretty well – and it was a pleasure to read a Voynich book where the Long-Hidden Secret Power It Contains is in fact not About To Destroy The World As We Know It, where the main character is not a charmlessly bionic version of Anthony Grafton, and where there are neither hordes of competing three-letter-agencies nor quasi-mystical Church-backed Conspiracies all fighting each other for ownership of the VMs’ boringly heretical secret.

Long-time (if not actually long-suffering) Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly point to my high opinion of Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum and Lev Grossman’s Codex (both of which have much the same kind of ambitions and restrained execution as Enrique’s book) as correlative evidence that I’m down on Voynich airport novels: but actually, given that Max McCoy’s “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” is still firmly my #1 (why don’t Voynich novelists ever read this first?) on the Big Fat List, it really is all a matter of personal taste. OK, I still think Enrique’s publishers should have dug deep inside themselves to find the sense to keep the rather nice original Spanish title “The Castle of the Stars” (which actually chimes nicely with the story on many different levels, while also being pleasantly reminiscent of the linguistic hack “The astronomer married a star”), but then again it is what it is, and perhaps a clunky title alone isn’t enough to make or break a book these days.

One slightly odd coincidence is that just about the time that the paperback version came out recently, an entirely new Voynich theory came out (courtesy of P. Han) linking Tycho Brahe and historical supernovae to the VMs by way of China (but more on that another day). All of which just goes to show that there really is, errrm, nothing new under the sun, and that the boundary between historical hypothesis and fictional supposition can be surprisingly thin!

The Mayor’s Thames Festival 2009…

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We just had a very enjoyable family day out strolling through the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival 2009: having started with some paella and a set from the remarkably good Petebox near the London Eye, we spent the whole afternoon mooching past countless stalls and live displays along the river towards Tower Bridge.

So far, so not very Cipher Mysteries-esque: but then we ran into Willett & Patteson’s Amazing Portable Camera Obscura. The phrase “Camera Obscura” (literally “darkened room”) was coined by Johannes Kepler to describe rooms using a lens to enhance pinhole projection, yet the concept also forms the backbone of the whole (allegedly much earlier) Hockney-Falco historical thesis. Willett & Patteson’s rotating camera obscura follows a Victorian model dating to around 1850 or so: this allows people inside a tent to pan and tilt a mirror around to project an image of what is happening outside the tent onto a horizontal surface…

Yes, their amazing rotating camera obscura was indeed the very first pan/tilt security camera. (You may not know that my day job is designing and manufacturing PTZ security cameras). Just to show that the best ideas can have a second lease of life 150 years on, here’s European patent EP1166178 (particularly Fig. 3) which is basically an identical optical arrangement for digital PTZ cameras.

However, for me the most stunning historical moment of the day came in Potters Field Park, an open green space directly opposite the Tower of London. OK, to my eyes Tower Bridge  is a Victorian monstrosity, with all the finesse of a ten-tier chav wedding cake made of iron. But all the same, sitting in a deckchair in Potters Field Park looking across the Thames to the Tower, I felt all gooey and medieval, as though time itself was pliable. Perhaps that’s the point of appreciating history? Though I loved the festival, it really shouldn’t take a thousand stalls to demonstrate that London really has something for everyone’s taste.

Review of “The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope”…

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Equal parts brilliant and frustrating, Rolf Willach’s “The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope” (2008), which reprises his featured sessions at the September 2008 conference in Middelburg, is a book formed of two stunningly different halves.

Through his insightful and breathtakingly meticulous analysis in the first seven chapters, Willach dramatically reconstructs the history of optical craft in the centuries preceding the invention of the telescope. Simply put, by casting the development of optics in terms of the technological and craft-based elements in making glass objects, he has produced without any doubt the most important new writing on the subject in decades. However, in chapters eight to eleven, his obvious eagerness to build on his main findings to retell the history of the telescope leads him to make what seem to me to be terribly, terribly weak inferences. Yet if that were to cause historians to look askance at his whole work, it would be a terrible shame, for there is a huge amount to be proud of here.

Willach is an independent scholar with his very own tightly-focused research programme: applying quantitative scientific testing methodologies to old lens-like objects to try to understand the ways in which they were made. Over many years in dogged pursuit of this quest, he has examined the Nimrud Lens, the Lothar crystal, lapides ad legendum (reading stones) embedded in liturgical art, curved glass covers in reliquaries, spectacle lenses embedded in a bookcase, rivet spectacles found beneath a nuns’ choir, spectacles in private collections, early telescope lenses etc. Furthermore, there seems to be no end to the range of physical and optical tests he has at his disposal: and he has even built and used his own a replica lens grinding machine. He has also delved deeply into the practical chemistry, physics and craft of glassmaking and glassblowing. In short, in a world where many self-professed experts are content to simply talk a good talk, it is wonderfully refreshing to find someone who has really, really walked the walk.

For Willach, the physical evidence strongly indicates that spectacle lenses developed not out of reading stones (pieces of rock crystal hand-turned on a wheel but progressively more curved towards the edges), but from the large number of reliquary covers needed to accommodate the tidal wave of martyrs’ relics that washed back into Europe after the Crusades. Just as with the reading stones, these were formed from pieces of rock crystal, and individually ground and polished on some kind of wheel, just as similar items had been turned since antiquity.

At some stage, glass began (quite understandably) to replace the far more expensive rock crystal. But when? Willach translates (pp.33-37) “cristallum” in the 1284 Venetian trade regulations as if it referred to the innovative Murano cristallo glass invented in the mid-Quattrocento by Angelo Barovier (and which is first documented in the context of a salt cellar in 24th May 1453, according to Gianfranco Toso’s “Murano: A history of glass”, p.46). Here, Willach has got the technological sequence right, but the timeline plain wrong. And so it seems highly likely to me that early glass spectacles were tinted or coloured (as indeed all other glass-made items were at that time), until 1450 at the earliest.

The first mass-manufactured glass lenses were made in a devastatingly simple way: by blowing a pear-shaped bubble of glass (contrary to popular myth, these bubbles were never spherical), stamping out circular blanks from it, and then subsequently grinding down the concave side of the blanks until flat. Used up until around 1500, this approach produced plano-convex lenses with a distinctive unground curved side and a ground flat side – though occasionally reasonably good near the centre, they were simply not optically good enough to be used in telescopes.

The next technological change came from Nuremburg, where from around 1478 a small group of spectacle-makers began to produce plano-convex lenses using moulds. For a while, these were ground only on the curved side with the planar side left unground: but it was only about 1500-1510 when both sides began to be ground that the quality of these lenses leapt ahead. This was arguably the first point when telescopes began to become optically possible (but not initially in Italy, for the Nuremberg spectacle-makers managed to keep their secret intact for a long time).

Yet the hunger of the European mass-market for cheap spectacles meant that, before very long, the quality of mould-made lenses began to go downhill. Ultimately, lens moulds ended up (as Girolamo Sirtori lamented in 1612) simply being hammered roughly into shape rather than measured against a perfect curve. By 1600 or so, all the subtle craft skills required for making good lenses had (apparently) long been forgotten.

All of which forms the moving technological and craft canvas upon which the history of optical devices (such as telescopes, microscopes, and camera obscuras) was painted: and, thanks to Willach’s sustained efforts, it is now very much better-defined than it has ever been. But… what of the telescope, then?

As far as the prehistory of the telescope itself goes, there used to be one big open question: despite the fact that convex and concave glasses were produced in large quantity from around 1450, why was the telescope not invented until circa 1600? I think it is a measure of Willach’s massive redefinition of the entire field of study that this now seems hugely simplistic, if not actually naïve. Yet this is essentially the question that he sets out to answer in his final chapters.

As an example: the writing of Girolamo Fracastoro has long been a curious anomaly in the telescope’s prehistory: in 1538, Fracastoro unambiguously described a twin lens telescopic arrangement – but this apparently was not picked up by anybody. Yet within the framework of optical history as rendered by Willach, I think we can get a glimpse of the reason why that should have been the case: in Fracastoro’s time, the craft of lens making was on the way down – that is, Fracastoro just happened to be living in the brief period early in the 16th century when moulded lenses were still made with a bit of craft in Venice – there was (I conjecture) only a brief window around that time when off-the-shelf lenses would have been good enough to be used in a telescope.

But why is Willach so certain that things had recovered by 1608? If, as Girolamo Sirtori wrote in 1612 (which Willach approvingly quotes), the craft of spectacle-making had indeed been lost, from where did the craft of telescopes emerge? As I wrote in my September 2008 History Today article, the notion that three Dutchmen all dreamt the same hi-tech dream at the same time (and then went away and executed it independently of each other) is extraordinarily suspect – and, I would now add, the kind of mass-produced, low-quality glass spectacle market that seems to have been in existence circa 1600 makes this even more unlikely.

But all of this begs a large question about one of Willach’s assumptions. Albert van Helden  baldly expresses the assumption in his introduction to Willach’s book, when he notes that the telescope’s “origins clearly lie in eyeglasses”. I would say that, actually, the first half of Willach’s book does an excellent job in undermining that basic presumption: and that we are now at the point where we can start to glimpse what was really going on – and I now believe it wasn’t anything to do with eyeglasses.

There was a quite different class of glass-made lens-based optical artefact made at the time, which (thanks to David Hockney) has recently received a significant amount of academic attention and debate (particularly in “Inside the Camera Obscura – Optics and Art under the Spell of the Projected Image“, edited by Wolfgang Lefevre) – the camera obscura. The connection between this and the telescope is a big story yet to be properly grasped and retold: but one strand I would like to flag straightaway comes from Sven Dupré’s fascinating article (in Lefevre’s book), “Playing with Images in a Dark Room: Kepler’s Ludi Inside the Camera Obscura“.

Kepler mentioned in his 1604 book Paralipomena “an experimentum […] which I saw at Dresden in the elector’s theater of artifices […] A disk thicker in the middle, or a crystalline lens, a foot in diameter, was standing at the entrance of a closed chamber against a little window, which was the only thing that was open, slanted a little to the right. […] But the walls were also particularly conspicuous through the lens, because they were in deep darkness.” But hold on a moment… who made this camera obscura lens, so obviously predating the Dutch telescope? Perhaps it is to letters in a Dresden-linked archive that telescope historians should now be looking…

Of course, it would be a curious irony if Willach’s scintillating research actually had the effect of severing his presumed link between spectacles and telescopes. And my conclusion (that this is so) will doubtless be no more than one voice amongst many in the field. Regardless: whatever your own angle, I strongly urge you to buy a copy of Willach’s excellent book and make up your own mind. This truly is history in the making – exciting times.

Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (& the Voynich Ms)…?

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Here’s a little piece of Voynichiana pinging on the edges of the VMs research radar, concerning Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who I thought had not to date been speculatively linked with the VMs. It came from the text accompanying the “Earth and Sky: Astronomy and Geography at the University between the 15th and the 18th centuries” exhibition at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2005, but also (mostly) reappears in the Wikipedia page. (Which came first? I don’t know!)

Why flag Hájek at all? Jan Hurych once put up a page on him on his Hurontaria site, but (I thought) only as a piece of background research data. It’s true that as personal physician to Maximilian I (in Vienna) and to Rudolf II (mainly in Prague), Hájek would have vetted or commented on anything alchemical, astronomical, astrological or medical entering the Imperial Court prior to 1600. But might there be more to it?

If (as I do) you see a Northern Italian art history link in the VMs’ drawings, then Hájek’s Prague-Bologna-Milan-Prague travels probably jumps out at you too: so, please go on…

In the words of The Joker, “I like him already“. But, errrrm, what about the VMs, then?

“[…]Hájek eagerly collected manuscripts, especially those by Copernicus, and may have been the one to convince Rudolf II to procure the infamous Voynich manuscript. […] Throughout his life he also published numerous astrological prognostics in Czech and that is why he was until recently viewed as an „occultist” rather than a great scientist.“

I think we can safely say that, apart from the absence of any actual evidence, Hájek is a great candidate manuscript carrier to add to the Voynich story, far better than Dee and Kelley. And what would make it even more poignant is that the pair of them visited Hájek’s house in Prague, which was (according to a fascinating 1999 post on levity.com by Michael Pober) “‘by Bethlem’, first mentioned in “A True and Faithful Relation’ p. 212, Prague 1584, 15th August.”

Might Hájek have owned the VMs, perhaps buying it during his time in Italy? It would be interesting to see his handwriting and marginalia commentary style, just in case there’s some kind of unexpected link between that and what we see in the VMs. I’ve asked Jan Hurych, but he hasn’t examined Hájek’s handwriting: so I’ll have to pursue this with the Czech libraries myself (more on that soon).

Given that Hájek translated Mattioli’s famous herbal into Czech, it is certainly interesting that the marginalia at the top of f17r appears to have been miscorrected to read “mattior”. I had always guessed that it was George Baresch who had done this – but perhaps it might have been Hájek instead? Something to think about, anyway…

“Hájek was in frequent scientific correspondence with the recognized astronomer Tycho and played an important role in persuading Rudolf II to invite Brahe (and later Kepler) to Prague. His voluminous writings in Latin were mostly concerned with astronomy and many regarded him as the greatest astronomer of his time.”

 

“In 1554 he studied medicine in Bologna and went to Milan the same year to listen to lectures by Girolamo Cardano, but he soon returned to Prague, where he became a professor of mathematics at the Charles University of Prague in 1555.”

 

Radio 4 "In Our Time" Rudolph II documentary…

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A nice edition of “In Our Time” on Radio 4 this morning (a tip of the blogging hat to Chris R and Paul C, who both wished the morning Guildford traffic jam had been slightly worse so that they could have heard it all), all about our old Holy Roman Emperor pal, Rudolph II. You can also download the mp3 (20MB, 42 minutes) and listen to it off-line. Which is nice (genuinely).

Discussing the Rudolphine court with Melvyn Bragg were Peter Forshaw (always good value for money – Voynichians may remember him from the Mentorn Voynich documentary on BBC4), Howard Hotson, and Adam Mosley: the topics ranged across alchemy, the occult, Hussite heresy, astronomy, Cabinet of Wonders (including a dodo!), botanical collections, automata, natural magic, paintings, Cornelius Drebbel, Tycho Brahe, Charles University, astrology, John Dee, Kepler, etc etc… oh yes, and the Voynich Manuscript as well (about 5 minutes in), which Melvyn Bragg seemed particularly fascinated by. Maybe he’s seen the Big Fat List of forthcoming Voynich novels? 😮

The programme-makers thoughtfully included a Rudolph-centred bibliography here, which you may find useful (though with Hugh Trevor-Roper listed, I have to say it’s not particularly contemporary).