The Voynich Translation – Chapter 3

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[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Chapter 3 – “Unjust Desserts”

“I suppose you just happened to pick this up at a rummage sale?”, said Emm, minutely scrutinizing the jacket’s material through her Swiss army knife’s magnifying glass.

“No, it was my grandfather’s – Mani Harvitz, he was a WWI codebreaker. He knew John Manly well, so must have known all about the Voynich Manuscript, I guess.”

“Hmmm… so why’s it in such good condition?”

“Ah”, said Graydon as he leaned over to pick up his club sandwich, “there’s a family story. On the boat back to the US from some European trip in the late 1920s, my grandpa fell seriously ill – and that turned out to be the tail end of the whole encephalitis lethargica epidemic.”

“Oh my God”, said Emm appalled, “the whole Oliver Sacks ‘Awakenings‘ thing, right?”

“Right. My grandfather stayed in a kind of catatonic state for decades – he died before I was born. Somehow I ended up inheriting his favourite jacket.”

Emm paused, looking at him through narrowed eyes, furious mental calculations plainly rattling through her head. The moment she turned her magnified gaze around to the small piece of parchment. Graydon stuffed an ungraciously large lump of sandwich into his mouth, trying hard not to moan with pleasure at his accelerated relief from starvation.

“Well, at least we know what he was doing”, Emm said, her shoulders relaxing a little as she began to take off her white cotton gloves.

“Errrm… which was… what?” Graydon replied, trying hard not to open his overfilled mouth too widely.

“For a start, he was visiting the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze – the Czech National Library, you can tell from the handwritten shelfmark. And here’s the giveaway he was stealing this”, she continued, pointing at the vellum’s left hand side , “the clean edge where Mani cut it out – probably with a smuggled-in razor blade – before stashing it in his secret pocket.”

 “Jeez, so now I’m on a lunch date with Gil Grissom. Did you happen to notice any anomalous beetle larvae?”

“You ate your sandwich first, you tell me. Was the salad unusually… crunchy?”

But now it was Graydon’s turn to go vague and starry-eyed, triggered by a cascade of half-memories from his capacious mental warehouse of Voynich trivia. “I reckon the connection here is… Edith Rickert. See, my grandpa had had this massive crush on her from the codebreaking office, but she was utterly devoted to working with John Manly and so turned him down: basically, Mani got married on the rebound. I went through Rickert’s letters in the archives: the last one from him promised to travel up and show her something she’d be very interested in. Didn’t say what it was, though.”

“So, if Edith Rickert was into the Voynich…”

“Way back then, Wilfrid Voynich called it his ‘Roger Bacon Manuscript’, but I don’t think she was ever fooled.”

“OK, whatever the damn manuscript was called, it seems pretty likely to me that the thing hidden in this jacket was a Voynich-related fragment your grandpa stole from the Czech museum library to try to impress Rickert.”  Emm said as she finally reached over to her plate. “You know, exciting her mind to get her into bed.”

“People do recommend that, but honestly, it’s never worked for me yet”, said Graydon. “Personally, I tend to find a nice lunch far more effective.”

Emm laughed, nearly choking on her sandwich, before frowning and pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Don’t you get any ideas – it would take much more than a club sandwich to get me into bed.”

“Whatever you say, Scully. Oh, the desserts here are pretty good, by the way.”

“Cheeky bastard!”

“And you’d definitely have to promise not to wear those cotton gloves”, continued Graydon grinning. “That would be wrong on so many levels.”

“Well, as long as I get to keep my magnifying glass and ruler, though.”

“Cheeky bastard!”

They both paused awkwardly, eyes scanning the other, resolutely reading between each other’s lines.

“Look”, said Emm as she began putting her things back into her clutch bag, “I’ve… I’ve got to get back to work now, before Mrs Kurtz starts punching the film crew. Could turn ugly.”

“That’s good”, said Graydon, noticing that even he didn’t believe the sound of his own words. “Ummm… thanks for dismantling my jacket and giving me a whole new research lead. Might even save my PhD. Oh, and I’d be very happy to help you with your cleaning, any time.”

“That’s great”, she replied, but her face was looking away as she stood up to leave. “Anyway, the Voynich film crew are filming an interview with Marina Lyonne this afternoon, I guess you probably know her, right?”

Graydon’s face dropped faster than a Wile E. Coyote grand piano. “Yeah, I know her”.

Ouch-a-rama.

His Voynich über-skeptic ex-wife was in town.

Oh, Marina, Marina, Marina: she knew the Beinecke curators very well – far too well, in fact – and she had a score of scores to settle with him. And this was more than just a bad moment for her to turn up wielding her +10 Axe of Grudgery, this was surely the worst imaginable moment.

Whoever said “one step forward, two steps back” was surely wearing X-ray specs, looking at the workings of the heart…

Edith Rickert, revisited…

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The century since Wilfrid Voynich unearthed his now-eponymous manuscript has seen many groups of codebreakers take a tilt at its cryptographic windmills. The most famous of these was William Friedman’s “First Study Group” of WWII cryptologists: but I’ve recently become interested in finding out to what degree WWI codebreakers tried to get in on the act. Those were the halcyon days of what modern crypto people now call (perhaps with a touch of disdain) “non-machine ciphers”, and so we shallow computer-centric moderns might have plenty to learn from what they had to say (if they left any notes for us to find, which we don’t currently know).

Did the Voynich manuscript, then, have a Zeroth Study Group circa 1920? John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert were part of the same American First World War codebreaking team, and certainly had far more than a passing familiarity with the VMs (Rickert briefly corresponded with WMV, for example). However, their attention subsequently turned to producing critical edition of Chaucer’s work, a challenge which was to occupy them both for many years.

Not that much has been written about Edith Rickert: when I blogged about her before, I found only a few online sources (such as this one) to work from. However, a very nice 2009 paper by William Snell just turned up on the Net – A Woman Medievalist Much Maligned: A Note in Defense of Edith Rickert (1871–1938) – which seems to meet this lack well.

Probably the most telling comment on Manly’s relationship with Rickert was this:-

…Manly’s remarks written in April 1934 to David H. Stevens, the English teacher at Chicago who worked on the cipher team with them during the First World War, two years before Rickert’s final heart attack: “Miss Rickert is working twenty-five hours a day, as usual, and is on the verge of a breakdown, but she won’t break. She never does.” (Qtd. in Ramsey 1994: 77)

But then she did, alas. 🙁

Square #1 & wife #8…

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I remember when I first saw the “Roger Bacon Manuscript”: Wilfrid Voynich brought it with him to Philadelphia for his lecture back in 1921 – my old friend Bill Newbold was there, taking in every word, nodding like the crazy-but-brilliant spiritualist and Antioch-obsessed nutter he was. So it just had to be Bacon behind it all, right? I sat at the back, laughing quietly: but all the same, I couldn’t help but notice that there was something rather disconcerting about the whole thing that demanded being checked out at a convenient point…

My big break came in late 1929, in a chance visit to New York: though charming as ever, Voynich was already sickly, well along the path to his own deathbed. Though he was unwilling at first, I convinced him to let me take a closer look at his manuscript’s oh-so-boring quire 13 – why not, what could a lowly UPhil Italian academic possibly find of interest there? Yet behind the scenes, I’d had help from Johnny Manly and Edith Rickerts: though they’d initially tried to dissuade me from looking closely, I’d carefully zoomed in on the bits they were most intrigued by – and with stunning results. They’d been so utterly wrong to think it was Latin (hardly surprising, given that they were arch-Latinists), when I’d instead worked out it was mostly an abbreviated Italian scribal shorthand…

But honestly – how could I not remember the day when Hans Kraus pitched up to Yale with the 1428 Albergati bible ($204,000, and worth every cent) along with Wilfrid’s “ugly duckling” manuscript. Old man Beinecke had come along for the ride, too: everyone there was trembling with excitement – but I swear nobody could have been sweating like me. If only they knew how I felt! Once dear old Annie Nill had sold it to HPK, I’d worked out where things were leading and had networked my way into the position as Beinecke curator – so my first unofficial job was to remove it from the stacks, to give myself the opportunity of making sense of quire 20‘s recipes for myself. But sad to say, I never quite did, and so my last job there was to retire.

All the same, I have to give a big hooray for the Beinecke’s hi-res scans: though I’d really thought my second act was over (and so did wife #7), with a bit of help from Steve Ekwall I finally managed to get Voynich’s other fountain working. Whoever it was that said that diligence has its own rewards was really onto something – it certainly works for me!

And so here I am once again, back to square #1 and wife #8. Sure, I do my best to prevent anyone on the Voynich mailing list from coming even close to reproducing what I found: but everyone thinks I’m just some kind of ultra-informed troll, and they back off from the truth. Which suits me 100%.

Here’s to wife #9!

The latest date for the Voynich Manuscript…

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In 1931, John Matthews Manly (who was very sharp, both historically and cryptologically) pointed out that the Voynich quire numbers were written in a 15th century hand – you can tell this from the characteristic ‘4’s, ‘5’s, and ‘7’s. To be precise, even though a fair few of the VMs quire numbers appear to have been added later (most obviously the numbers for Q19 and Q20, but also those for Q6 and Q7) for reasons as yet unknown, the bulk of them are indeed 15th century.

unusual-quire-numbers
The four quire hands, from The Curse of the Voynich (2006) p.17

What isn’t widely known is that there is also a (quite different) 15th century hand in the marginalia. Even though some people like to dismiss the hard-to-understand writing on the back page of the VMs (f116v) as merely “pen trials” or “doodling”, I think you can look past the codicologically tangled mess to see that the earliest (faint) hand has distinctively 15th century letter-shapes, as underlined in green here:-

ahia-maria-annotated

Whatever all the other words on f116v happen to read (and people will no doubt continue to debate that for a fair while yet), I’m pretty sure that this faint (but apparently unemended) section reads “a + ma+ria“, and that it is (from the distinctive shape of the three ‘a’ characters) written in a 15th century hand, one quite different from the quire numbers.

What does this tell us? Given that the Voynich Manuscript almost certainly turned up in Rudolf II’s Imperial Court in the first decade of the 17th century, and assiduous archival trawling has turned up no definite earlier reference to it, I believe that this points to two main scenarios to choose from:-

  1. [Real] It’s a genuine mid-15th century object.
  2. [Hoax] It’s a (probably late-)16th century fake, designed to resemble a genuine mid-15th century object.

To which I would further add that Voynichese is apparently designed to look like an enciphered 14th century herbal (i.e. written in a medieval simple substitution cipher, with medieval herbal illustrations, and medieval page references), even though the parallel hatching and handwriting are both 15th century in style. All of which suggests three scenarios to consider:

  1. [Real] It’s a genuine mid-15th century object designed to resemble an enciphered 14th century herbal.
  2. [Clever Hoax] It’s a (probably late-)16th century fake, designed to resemble a genuine 15th century object designed to resemble an enciphered 14th century herbal.
  3. [Dumb Hoax] It’s a (probably late-)16th century fake, designed to resemble an enciphered 14th century herbal, but with a number of 15th century details included by mistake.

All the same, is it really the case that one individual late-16th century hoaxer / faker was sophisticated enough to add multiple 15th century hands to the quire numbers and back page? Well… possibly: but it should be no surprise that I think the historical odds are very much against it. Your mileage may vary, of course.

(As an aside, it has recently been suggested that the VMs might have come from around 1300 (and I shall soon be posting about Patrick Lockerby’s series of VMs-related posts): but the presence of parallel hatching in the VMs would seem to be a strong indication that even 1400 would be too early a date.)

Edith Rickert’s & Margaret Rickert’s papers…

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As a brief follow-up to yesterday’s post on Edith Rickert, I wondered whether her papers might be in the University of Chicago archives – and indeed here they are. For any Voynich researcher who just happens to be passing by, you might consider looking through Box 1 Folder 8 (for correspondence) and Box 10 Folder 13 (for photographs of her family – not important, but nice to see all the same).

The U. of C. also holds the papers of her younger sister Margaret Rickert: she specialised in medieval illuminated manuscripts (there’s a 10-page paper on her in the 2005 book “Women Medievalists and the Academy“) and worked as a code-breaker in WWII, just as her older sister had done in WWI. She’s briefly mentioned in the First Study Group minutes – one from 1944 that notes she “accompanied WFF [William Friedman] at Phila[delphia] in 1923 to hear Newbold. Cannot add anything else“; and another that notes she attended a 31 August 1945 FSG meeting. Box 1 holds her notes on various manuscripts: might she have taken notes on the Voynich Manuscript? My guess is no, that the small range of poor quality reproductions of Voynich Manuscript pages available at that time probably dissuaded her from getting interested in it as an art history puzzle. But you never know until you look!

Of course, John Matthews Manly’s papers are there too (the link has a nice summary of his life, including his famous “cigar” story) – I’ve summarized the Voynich-related ones here already, but would also note here that his Series II of folders related purely to cryptographic correspondence.

Edith Rickert and the Voynich Manuscript…

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An off-blog email exchange about the Grolier Club (where Wilfrid Voynich’s estate bequeathed eight boxes of papers relating to his book business in America) nudged my memory about a minor player on the 20th century Voynich stage…

When Voynich researcher Richard SantaColoma visited the Grolier Club back in May 2008, he trawled through these boxes (Box 6 in particular) for anything unexpected: he very kindly wrote up his notes and passed them on to the Journal of Voynich Studies, which posted them on its website.

There are some scans of letters (and extracts of letters) sent by William Romaine Newbold: and Ethel Voynich’s handwritten notes on Voynich botany: but probably the most interesting thing is a set of short research notes from Anne Nill’s ring binder in Box 6.

On page 2, there’s an August 1917 letter from ‘Edith Richert’ to Wilfrid Voynich, asking: “I should be glad to know your reasons for believing that the symbols vary according to their position. I have my own reasons. I should like to see whether they agree.”

WMV replied (in September 1917) that “I have no reasons for believing that the symbols vary to their positions, as I know nothing about cipher. But it was the opinion of two or three European professors.”

I was particularly struck by this clear-sighted observation (by Richert and the European professors): thanks to modern computer transcriptions, this kind of thing is now plain to see – but all the same, this was only 1917.

Who was this “Edith Richert”? Actually, this was Edith Rickert (1871-1938), who worked at the University of Chicago, and worked very closely with our old friend John Matthews Manly, co-authoring numerous books with him, and spending sixteen years on “a monumental undertaking of scholarship, critical analysis, and data collection” – a critical edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

john-matthews-manly-and-edith-rickert-smallJohn Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, 1932

There’s much more on their working relationship on this U. of Chicago webpage here. However, exhausted by the epic scale of what they were trying to achieve, Rickert died just before publication of the first volume: though Manly lived long enough to see the project completed, he too died soon afterwards.

What I find slightly unnerving is that what Manly and Rickert were attempting to do for the Canterbury Tales (detailed palaographic and codicological analysis, examining every page of every manuscript in person looking for otherwise unseen clues to its secret history) is precisely what we are trying to do for the Voynich Manuscript. But all the same, it took them (and a funded team of graduate students and collaborators) 16 years, and the effort pretty much killed them both. Hmmm… makes you wonder how much of a chance of success we actually stand, doesn’t it?

The punchline here is that Manly and Rickert actually worked together breaking World War One codes – yes, she was an Allied cryptologist. There’s much more on her life here, and a copy of the book “Edith Rickert: a memoir” (1944) by Fred Millett is online here.

But, hold on a minute! I normally don’t like counterfactual histories, but… if William Romaine Newbold hadn’t wrecked the credibility of our “Roger Bacon Manuscript”, what are the chances that Manly and Rickert in 1924 might have instead chosen that as their subject for study in preference to Chaucer? Really, who’s to say?

John Matthews Manly’s papers…

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One of the major figures in the early 20th century history of the Voynich Manuscript was John Matthews Manly, the man who definitively debunked Newbold’s strange micrographic cipher claims. During the First World War, Manly worked in the US Military Intelligence Division, and left in 1919 having attained the rank of Major. After that, he put most of his time at the University of Chicago into researching Chaucer, before dying in 1940.

Interestingly, Manly’s papers are held by the University of Chicago: there’s even an online guide to them, which lists a whole set of Voynich & non-Army cryptographic folders to look at, particularly in Boxes 4 and 5. One day, if I happen to get the opportunity to spend a day in Chicago, I’d love to go through these: Manly was a smart guy, so it would be fascinating to find out what was going through his mind (however indirectly).

Box: 4
Folder: 19 – Table of Latin Syllables
Folder: 20-21 – Photographs of Voynich Ms
Folder: 22 – “Key to the Library” (JMM’s?)

Box: 5
Folder: 1 – Worksheets
Folder: 2 – Photographs of Mss (Including Français 24306, incomplete) and of one printed label
Folder: 3 – Three working notebooks, labelled “Bacon Cipher”
Folder: 4 – Notes on code for article; other notes on Sloane 830 [“Written in the years 1575-6, by a person whose initials appear to be M.A.B.”, according to levity.com] and 414 [two collections of “chymical receipts”]
Folder: 5 – Worksheets on related ciphers: “Galen’s Anatomy” [?] and “Kazwini” [presumably the 13th century Persian astronomical writer Al Kazwini]
Folder: 6 – Articles on the Voynich Roger Bacon Ms
Folder: 7-8 – Notes: ciphers in other Mss; other notes on printed sources
Folder: 9 – Notes on alchemical Mss, etc.
Folder: 10 – Notes for Bacon Cipher; “Key to Aggas”
Folder: 11 – Notes on texts in cryptography
Folder: 12 – Miscellaneous notes and worksheets
Folder: 13 – Bibliographies
Folder: 14 – Photostats of Mss: John Dee (Sloane 3188, 3189, 2599): unidentified
Folder: 15 – Notes on Vatican Latin Ms 3102 [Here’s the Jordanus page on this ms, Manly reproduced f27r in his article, while Newbold’s book reproduced f27r and f27v opposite p.148 and p.150]
Folder: 16 – “Notes on an Inquiry into the Validity of the Baconian Bi-Literal Cypher for the Interpretation of Certain Writings Claimed for Francis Bacon”
Folder: 17 – Comments on “Sixty Drops of Laudanum,” by E.A. Poe
Folder: 18-19 – “The Bi-formed Alphabet Classifier” of the Riverbank Laboratories
Folder: 20 – Notes on Shakespeare/Bacon cipher

Box: 11
Folder: 9 “Roger Bacon and the Voynich Ms” by JMM, reprint [first page is here on JSTOR]

More Dan Burisch Voynichification…

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It used to be the case that Google could find hardly anything connecting Dan Burisch and the Voynich Manuscript apart from my postings here: but now there are over 50 hits.

Some of these, such as this one, are from people on the inside of the labyrinth/RPG: these tend to throw yet more sand in the face of anyone trying to understand Burisch’s claim, by asserting things such as “The Voynich Manuscript may provide clues to the shape and function of items found in the YSC cells, spooled material“. No, you’re absolutely right: it means nothing to me either.

Other discussion boards have whole bunches of people saying Dan Burisch is a fraud, though with occasional rambling posters popping up to defend him:-

From the website ‘world mysteries’ concerning the Voynich document we read in an except from Dr. Levitov: “There is not a single so-called botanical illustration that does not contain some Cathari symbol or Isis symbol. The astrological drawings are likewise easy to deal with; the innumerable stars are representative of the stars in Isis’ mantle.” The fate of the the Cathars resembles that of the Knights Templar, does not the dualism of the former also receive a modicum of redemption in the restoration of the latter?With Dr. Burisch’s background in microbiology, the Voynich ‘botanical illustrations’ were child’s play, and the astrological designations had already been previously noted as corresponding to the Milky Way Galaxy, and by conversion of linear transformations into ‘diagrammatic notation,’ the determinant of the matrix was solved. ‘As above so below’ was not, in this case, a spiritual derivative, it was simply and starkly a ‘spacial’ one.

Ohhhh dear: if a novelist tried to get away with froth like this, he/she would get taken apart. There is no Milky Way link, there is no microbiology, there is no Cathar link, there is no Templar link, there is no matrix (spatial or otherwise), there is no religion, no gnosis, no dualism. The Voynich Manuscript being summoned up here is an imaginary one, a heretical MacGuffin for a potboiler that never quite got written.
In many ways, I get a sense from all this of a deeply tragic situation, of a bright (but disturbed) person grasping at anything they can find on the glittering, shallow surface of Net knowledge that might just explain (however temporarily) their personal pain, the loss they feel: but it never does, and their pain never goes away.
I have no idea if that person is Dan Burisch or someone else: and in most of the important ways, it really doesn’t matter. John Manly was right in detail but not in scope: more than simply a blank cryptographic screen to project ideas and emptions upon, the VMs is actually like a magnet for unhappy PhDs, a sandpit for them to play out their make-believe stories of intellectual redemption. By doing this, they can “rescue” someone from historical oblivion whose frustrated life-experience somehow chimes with theirs: all of which amounts to a kind of intellectual displacement activity directed at the past when they should be putting the effort into their own lives in the present to save themselves – but perhaps that’s too emotionally hard for them to do.
Perhaps I’m no less guilty (with my reconstructed story of Antonio Averlino “Filarete”) as Levitov, or Rugg, or any of the other 20+ Voynich theories out there. I don’t feel unhappy: but I can at least see that maybe I was hoping for redemption in some other way. In my defence, all I can say is that I at least tried my best to let the manuscript do the talking… and hope that this will in the end prove to be enough to move the history forward. Isn’t that as good as it gets?
As a (frankly slightly spooky) postnote on the whole Dan Burisch affair, there’s an online novel (with a bit of a Voynich thing going on) posted to a blog that you might well find fascinating. It’s called “Josef6” by Benjamin Kerstein, and deals with a claimed time-traveller from the future posting messages to an online community, and all the cultish madness that follows on.

The peril of science fiction is that it attracts the worst kind of lunatics
— those prepared to believe not only their own delusions but each others. The
frenzied construction of delusional architectures of thought is a fascinating
talent, and one which reached its pinnacle in the late twentieth century.

 

Sounds familiar, Burisch fans? Though it’s not strictly a Voynich novel per se, I really quite enjoyed it (and even donated $5 to the author via PayPal for posting it up). Recommended! 🙂

Voynich and PhD people…

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I recently stumbled upon an active Voynich researcher I’d never heard of: Angela Catalina Ghionea (note that, even though Internet Explorer throws up lots of warnings for her website, it’s basically OK), who is a teaching assistant and 3rd year PhD student in the History Department at Purdue University.

She’s “currently focused on the most mysterious manuscript in the world, The ‘Voynich Manuscript’ “, and is preparing an article called “Understanding the Voynich Manuscript. New Evidence for a Genuine Alphabet, Shamanic Imagery, and Magical Plants“. Her recent presentations at various conferences include:-

  • “Voynich Manuscript and its Genuine Alphabet” (12 April, HGSA 2008 Conference, Purdue)
  • “Understanding the “Voynich”, the Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World. American Shamanism and Exotic Plants” (29 March at the OAH 2008 Annual Meeting, New York, Hilton Hotel)
  • “Contributions to Voynich Manuscript’s Mystery” (24 March 2008, MARS Conference, Purdue)
  • “Voynich Manuscript is not a Hoax. Uncovering New Evidence” (Purdue, 29 January 2008)

All of which I hope to see very soon (and to review here). But this set me wondering: how many other people with PhD’s have looked at the Voynich? I drew up a quick list (let me know if there are more), but there are plenty of familiar faces…

  • William Romaine Newbold
  • John Manly (love the cigar story!)
  • Leonell Strong (love that facial hair / collar combination)
  • Derek de Solla Price
  • Jim Reeds
  • Jacques Guy
  • Gabriel Landini
  • Jorge Stolfi
  • Gordon Rugg
  • Edith Sherwood

Though according to Dr C. S. Lewis Barrie PhD, the Voynich Manuscript is a medieval blog, which is why it makes no sense. Ah, bless.

Thorndike on the Voynich Manuscript!

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I’ve often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich’s cipher manuscript mania/hype was at its peak. As a well-known writer on alchemy, magic and science, my guess is that Thorndike would surely have been one of those distinguished American academics and historians whom Voynich tried so hard to court after his move from Europe to New York.

One of my ongoing projects is to work my way through all of Thorndike’s works, as it seems to me that his science/magic research programme carved a trail through the jungle of mostly-unread proto-scientific manuscripts that probably falls close to where the Voynich Manuscript is situated: and few historians since him have felt any pressing need to build on his work except in generally quite specific ways. All of which is why I happened to be reading Chapter VII “Nicholas of Cusa and the Triple Motion of the Earth” in Thorndike’s “Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century” (1929).

Firstly, you need to understand that Thorndike thought that the whole Burckhardtian notion of the (supposedly fabulous and extraordinary) Renaissance was plain ridiculous: there were countless examples of ingenuity, invention, and insight throughout the Middle Ages (and, indeed, throughout all history) to be found, if you just bothered to take the time and effort to place events and writings within their own context.

Furthermore, Thorndike believed that lazy historians, having set up this false opposition between (high) Renaissance culture and (low) medieval scholasticism, then went looking for exceptional individuals who somehow bucked that trend, “forerunners, predictors, or martyrs of the glorious age of modern science that was to come.” (p.133) The list of usual suspects Thorndike suggests – “Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Peurbach and Regiomontanus, Leonardo da Vinci” – appears to me not far from how the fake table of Priory of Sion Grand Masters would have looked, if Pierre Plantard been a tad more receptive to non-French history.

Of course, Thorndike – being Thorndike – then goes on to demonstrate precisely how the whole myth around Nicholas of Cusa arose: basically, German historians looking out for a German ‘forerunner, predictor, or martyr‘ plucked three marginal fragments from Nicholas’s work and wove them together to tell a story that was, frankly, not there to be told. Then you can almost feel the fever rising in Thorndike’s genuinely angry brow when he continues:

“Could anything, even the most childish of medieval superstitions, be more unscientific, unhistorical, and lacking in common sense than this absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation, by modern investigators and historians of science?” (p.137)

Punchy (and grouchy) stuff: but he’s far from finished yet. He has an example of something even more scandalous which he feels compelled to share with us:-

“When are we ever going to come out of it? To stop approaching the study of medieval science by such occult methods as the scrutiny of a manuscript supposed to have been written by Roger Bacon in cipher, instead of by reading the numerous scientific manuscripts that are expressed in straightforward and coherent, albeit somewhat abbreviated, Latin?” (p.137)

So there you have it. In 1929, while Wilfrid Voynich was still alive, Thorndike took a measured look at Voynich’s and Newbold’s “Roger Bacon Manuscript” nonsense, and placed it straight in the category of “absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation“.

John Manly may have been more dismissive of Newboldian cryptography in his article in Speculum 6 (July 1931), but Thorndike was no less dismissive of Newboldian history in print in 1929. Just so you know!