Ultimate Voynichiana: Lynn Thorndike’s 1929 review of Newbold’s book…

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Lynn Thorndike (1882-1965)

In this postmodern, post-macho era, you’re not supposed to have heroes – to the point that most modern kids’ heroes are lame (Ash in Pokemon, Mickey Mouse, Mario, Ben 10, dare I say Harry Potter for most of the books?). Who now doesn’t honestly prefer antiheroes like Team Rocket, Bugs Bunny, Wario, Kevin 11, Voldemort?

Well, I don’t care much for trends: my #1 historian hero is Lynn Thorndike. Hence, as a Voynich manuscript researcher, I always wanted to know what he thought of this troublesome artefact: and while trawling through his (1929) “Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century” in 2008 was delighted to discover that Thorndike thought Newbold’s claimed decryption was, frankly, nonsense.

But now I can go one better: on the Roger Bacon wikipedia page, someone recently edited in a link to a 1929 review Thorndike wrote in American Historical Review Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jan., 1929), pp. 317-319 on JSTOR. Oooh, I tell ya, that Mr Thorndike didn’t think that his late friend Professor Newbold would have wanted to see his notes published like that; and he wasn’t at all impressed that it went out under the august auspices of the University of Pennsylvania.

You also get a sense of Thorndike’s frustration at constantly being asked his opinion on “an anonymous manuscript of dubious value”. If I had stepped out of the Tardis to ask him about the Voynich Manuscript circa 1929, he might very well have grouchily punched my lights out.

“I should like to be able to force every one who asks me my opinion of the Voynich manuscript to read [Newbold’s] book from cover to cover. I think it will either kill or cure.”

Even though Thorndike’s review doesn’t go so far as to offer his own opinion, he does ironically predict the whole sad demented future of Voynich research, for which we should perhaps be grateful:-

“I would offer the ironic suggestion that the illegible writing is only a blind, and the the pictures should be interpreted symbolically, were I not afraid that some self-constituted successor to Newbold would take the suggestion seriously.”

Now ain’t that the truth, brothers and sisters of the faith? Oh, well! *sigh*

“The Voynich Tattoo”

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Such a stupid thing for a bright kid to do: pinballing through her mid-teen rebellion, Jena Kyng had wanted to demonstrate some kind of unbranded online tribal allegiance, and ended up with two lines of Voynichese across her lower back (from the end paragraph of page f67r2, as if anyone off-list really cared). Though in many ways, she’d had a lucky escape: imagine ending up with that bozo Gap logo as a tattoo – now that would have really sucked.

But since then, her whole A-grade student train had derailed: and once bad boy boyfriend #1 had morphed into worse boyfriend #2, it was surely just a matter of time before her steadily-growing drink, drugs and abusive partner habits all conspired to help her paint herself into a truly dismal corner of society. All that Voynich research graft lay long behind her: why bother about history when you can see no future?

Countless times since she’d tried to fit herself into straight-ass day jobs, but the minute she got asked to work extra, she’d elevate the royal middle digit… and then it was just a matter of days before the order came from on high to clear her desk. And so, like Michael Palin, Jena’s life now danced defiantly from inhospitable pole to pole – though she somehow doubted Palin could shake his aging Pythonic tush half as as well as her. It’s a skill, she liked to console herself, however minor in the big scheme of things.

So, welcome one and all to her latest home from home, the Green Lizard Club in Muskogee, Oklahoma – ‘Green’ because the owners had replaced all the seedy lighting with LED lamps, thus helping its patrons to feel as though they were saving the planet while stuffing high-denom bills into pole-dancers’ lithely minimalist underwear. Sure, it’s a big fat eco-gimmick: but everybody loves eco-gimmicks, right?

All the same, tonight had been shaping up to be a stultifyingly mediocre night to cap a shockingly shabby week. Jena’s only ray of hope left was the bunch of startup guys – no, not the wind turbine crew (who came in once with some terrified-looking VCs but never returned), but the social media gaggle on Table 3. Bright people, no doubt, but… social media in Muskogee? As if Dave McClure is ever going to drop by here, of all places. Well, not unless he’d absolutely insisted on a live demo from some MIT Star Trek teleportation spin-out. How vividly Daveski would swear if he found himself unexpectedly re-materialized on Okmulgee Avenue, eh?

So, when the lanky one with a testosteronal chin (a bit like a pumped-down Matt Damon) called over to her, she twisted her mouth into her second-best smile (“positive, life-affirming, it’s-great-to-make-money-off-you-geeks”) and danced towards the group. As you’d expect, they knew her name already, but of course she couldn’t give a rat’s ass about theirs. Life is easy when you just don’t care.

“Hey Jena”, Matt Jnr shouted over Hooverphonic’s sweet music, “I think there’s a problem with your tattoo.”

Well, she thought, m-a-y-b-e: but that was when she noticed The Handsome But Odd Guy in the group, mouth slightly open, looking straight through her with his puppy-dumb X-ray eyes. “A problem?” she replied, her PanAm Smile still intact.

“Our guy Rain Man wants to know why you have a Latin poison book for a tattoo”, the tall guy continued. “Oh, and just so you know, Nate’s got Asperger’s, which for him means he codes like an angel but doesn’t like to get out of the office much.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s not a poison recipe”, Jena replied turning towards him, a wave of minor cracklets starting to break round the edge of her working smile. “It’s from an astronomical page of…”

“multa michi circa venenorum materiam“, Nate was reading, “dubia occurrent quorum declaratio nixi. Pretty funny tattoo you’ve got there, Miss.”

There was an odd, whooshing sound in her head, as clusters of Jurassic synapses creakily reassembled a fossilized memory from way back when she was still a basically whole person. Yes: it was an incipit she’d seen before, back in her Voynich research life. And if so, then it was probably from Thorndike’s History of Magic & Experimental Science, most likely her favourite Volume IV. So, it would be… the second half of Antonius Guaynerius of Pavia’s twin treatise on plague and poison, composed before 1440. Might Guaynerius have been the Voynich Manuscript’s author? The raw electricity of the possibility surged up and down her, like lightning trying vainly to reach ground. But… even if the idea just happened to be consistent with the radiocarbon dating, nothing that speculative could be true, it was all some spooky coincidence. It had to be, right?

Against her will, Jena was starting to get just a little freaked out. If any of this was even remotely right, the guy Nate must be some kind of idiot savant, unable to tie his shoelaces but able to read the frickin’ Voynich Manuscript. She sneaked a sly glance at his shoes: slip-on Vans. As if I couldn’t guess, she thought. “Does your friend actually know Latin?”, she asked as casually as her quickening pulse would allow.

“Latin?” the lanky guy replied. “He’s always seemed happier talking in Python or C++ than English. But anyway, what is that crazy shit alphabet on your back?”

“Oh, it’s from the Voynich Manuscript, a kind of weird cipher mystery thing”, she said in the best noncommittal voice she could muster. “But I think I’d better show your man the next line down, see if he can read that too.”

She moved down to the startup guys’ table, and turned to face away from them. Down went the already skimpy silver lamé pole dancing underwear an extra two inches to reveal the only line of red writing in the whole of the VMs. Way back in her Voynich research days, she’d often wondered whether this might be the single line that would some day serve to crack its cipher system. So what would Asperger’s Nate make of it?

“It’s a beautiful thing”, the Odd Guy mumbled. “But I can’t make out the first word, may I move closer, Miss?”

“Uhhh… sure”, she said.

Nate moved right up close, and ran his index finger tenderly over the red letters with a kind of Braille-reading intensity. Instantly, her long-submerged memories of holding the Voynich Manuscript at the Beinecke Library surfaced, and exploded in the physicality of his touch. For that moment, her skin was the Voynich’s vellum, her tattoo was the Voynich’s ink, and she felt utterly entangled in time and space with the Voynich’s author (whoever he or she happened to be).

But… then Jena noticed out the corner of her eye that all the other startup guys were taking out their wallets, placing hundred dollar bills into a pile on the table, and shaking their heads.

“Sorry”, said Nate in a completely different (and totally normal) voice as he stood up, “I can’t make it out, Miss.”

“Hey…”, said Jena as each of the guys high-fived Nate, “what’s going on here?”

One of the group’s regulars, a bald-headed guy with comedy glasses – perhaps the in-house web designer?, she wondered – was laughing into his hand. “Sorry, Jena, it was just a joke. Nate bet us a hundred bucks each he’d get inside your panties tonight, and we all thought he had precisely zero chance.”

“You did this for money?” Jena spat at Nate. “You made a fool of my ass to make yourself some freakin’ money?”

“Oh no”, said Nate handing her the cash, “the money’s for you. These guys work for me, I just enjoyed the challenge. When Larry” – he pointed at the bald-headed guy – “showed me a picture of you on his cameraphone, I thought you looked cute, and – you know – one thing led to another.”

“But all that Antonius Guaynerius stuff”, Jena spluttered, “how on earth did you…”

“Ah, all your old postings to the Voynich mailing list are still online”, Nate smiled. “Didn’t take long to find something to bait the line.”

“You bastard”, Jena said sotto voce, “you… smart bastard” – but this time she could feel her eyes twinkling, for the first time in a couple of years. “You… gonna come back soon?”

“I think I will”, said Nate. “I rather like the view from this table.”

All of a sudden, Jena fancied doing some problem-solving herself.

Voynich Cisioianus cipher crib…?

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When is Easter? A simple question, but one with quite a tricky answer: following the decision of the First Council of Nicaea in 325AD, it is the first Sunday after the full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is simplified to be 21st March): hence, Easter can fall anywhere between 22nd March and 25th April.

A moment’s reflection should be ample to reveal what a dog’s dinner of a calculation this entails: and when combined with leap years, calendrical uncertainty, and subsequent calendrical reform, what a practical mess it yielded in the centuries following. Even Carl Gauss got his own Easter-calculating algorithm wrong first time round (and he was no mathematical slouch).

From the early Middle Ages onwards, the awkward task of determining when Easter fell was known as computus – Latin for ‘computation’. In fact, you might (just about) argue that the Nicaean Council’s curious dating mix of pagan festivals, Metonic cycles, astrology and religion provided the original impetus for the modern digital computer – people in the Church had been computing Easter by hand for the previous millennium or so, and were doubtless thoroughly sick of the whole thing.

Given all the above, the obvious historical question to ask is: how on earth did anyone ever manage to calculate Easter? The answer lies in a motley bunch of tables, diagrams, and mnemonics devised, copied and adapted throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance that attempt to make the task do-able. For the most part, these are built upon the 19-year cycle of the moon (the Metonic cycle): this means that any time you find yourself looking at an unusual-looking table or diagram in a medieval manuscript that ‘just happens’ to be divided into nineteen columns or segments, there’s a fairly good chance it will turn out to be some kind of computus-based trickery.

The literature on computus is fairly spotty, because (I think) it tends to fall between two stools: basically, it’s too religious to be of interest to many historians of science, but also too scientific for many historians of religion. However, one decent starting point is a 1954 article in Speculum by Lynn Thorndike (one of my favourite historians, as long-time Cipher Mysteries readers will no doubt recall) called simply “Computus” (here’s the JSTOR page for it).

Thorndike had previously written a 1947 paper “Blasius the Franciscan and his Works on Computus” (again, here’s its JSTOR page), in which he discussed Blasius’ “circio” computus mnemonics and their reception in other manuscripts: for example, “CIRCIO” decomposes into CIR = “January 1st, circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision”, CI = “C, the third letter of the alphabet, which (I think) signifies the third section of the nineteen-year cycle”, O = “O, the 14th letter of the Latin alphabet, hence Easter falls on the 14th April”. Which is to say, in the thirteenth century (probably), Blasius constructed a tricksy Latin-sounding mnemonic that (it seems) replaced one of the computus tables (though note that I haven’t yet read either Thorndike article, so this is just a guess).

But this was not the only similar mnemonic from this time: what became far better known was the “Cisioianus” / “Cisiojanus” mnemonic. Because this spread mainly through 14th and 15th century German woodblock calendars, there’s a fair bit of German-language literature on this, and (for a nice change) the German Wikipedia page on Cisiojanus is actually quite helpful.

Basically, a Cisioianus mnemonic consists of 12 Latin-sounding (but nonsensical) couplets, padded out so that you step through the number of syllables to remember the saint’s days and feasts in that month. Here’s the couplet for January, from where you can see that the mnemonic got its name from the first two ‘words’:-

císio jánus epí ¦ sibi véndicat óc feli már an
prísca fab ág vincén ¦ ti páu po nóbile lúmen

(In case any passing pub quiz pop trivia fans are wondering, Carol Decker’s band “T’Pau” was named after a Vulcan priestess in Star Trek, not after the “ti pau” in the second line here. Just so you know.)

So: because January has 31 days, the couplet for it has 31 syllables, with the feast days highlighted:-

  1. cí → circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision
  2. si → (continuation)
  3. o → (continuation)
  4. ján → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  5. us → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  6. ep → epiphanias, Epiphany
  7. í → (continuation)
  8. si → (null)
  9. bi → (null)
  10. vén → (null)
  11. dic → (null)
  12. at → (null)
  13. óc → octava epiphaniae, the eighth day of the Epiphany
  14. fe → Felicis presbyteris
  15. li → (continuation)
  16. már → Marcelli papae
  17. an → Antoni abbatis
  18. prís → Priscae virginis martiris
  19. ca → (continuation)
  20. fab → Fabiani et Sebastiani
  21. ág → Agnetis virginis
  22. vin → Vincentii martiris
  23. cén → (continuation)
  24. ti → Timotei martiris und Titi martiris
  25. páu → conversio Pauli
  26. po → Polycarpi episcopi martiris
  27. nó → (null)
  28. bi → (null)
  29. le → (null)
  30. lú → lumen
  31. men → (continuation)

So, now you know a couplet to remember all the important medieval feast days in January. All you have to do is remember the other eleven couplets and you’ve got the whole year covered, right?

Incidentally, January was named after the two-headed gate-keeper Janus, god of doors and gates (though personally I would prefer it if we had stuck with the Anglo-Saxon “Wulfmonath”, the perishingly cold month when hungry wolves try to enter villages, the original ‘wolf from the door’). And also… Macrobius relates that Roman boys would play with a coin called the “as” (which had Janus on one side and a ship’s prow on the other), calling “capita aut navia?” – (‘heads or ships?’), which presumably morphed into the modern “heads or tails”… but I perhaps have digressed a tad too far here!

Of course, human nature being what it is, people then went on to construct rude and/or ridiculous versions of this basic cisioianus mnemonic that were easier to remember, but that’s a story for another day. 🙂

“Fascinating, Nick… but how on earth is this all linked to the Voynich Manuscript?“, I hear you (very reasonably) ask. Well… this all started with an intriguing email from Steve Herbelin, who got the online Voynich / historical research bug a while ago. He had been particularly intrigued by the circular picture on f67r2, which seems to be built around some kind of rational, 12-way division, presumably depicting something calendrical… but what?

f67r2-400x500-enhanced

Specifically, Steve wondered if this (or something similar) might reappear in other medieval manuscripts. After some protracted searching, he found this online image from a manuscript from Auxerre from circa 1400 which has plenty of circular computus diagrams (hence all the discussion of computus above), and the following 12-way circular diagram on fol. 9v:-

AuxerreMS240-fol9v-centre

Decoding this: the outer ring (#1) is a reminder of which cisioianus couplet to use, ring #2 is the month name (“januari9” is at about 8 o’clock), #3 is the kalends, #4 is the nones, #5 is the ides, and the innermost ring (#6) says whether the month belongs to the third (lunar regulars) or fifth (new moon calculation) cycle.

Basically, Steve wonders whether these two images might somehow be part of the same (cladistic / stemmatic) family-tree of manuscripts: that is, whether the text in f67r2’s twelve segments might encipher the same kind of information on the Auxerre MS’s fol. 9v.

Having thought about this for a few days, though the precise details probably don’t quite mesh as well as they at first appear, I really don’t think you can dismiss this comparison out of hand. Mnemonics were useful and not widely known (and so might well fall into the category of “secret practical knowledge“): and it has long been noted that the “medallions” in the centre of the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac pages do seem to hark back to the kind of illustration you’d find in early German woodblock-printed calendars, so there may well be some kind of reasonably direct influence there.

My own take on f67r2 (The Curse of the Voynich, pp.59-60) has long been that it seems to link a 12-way division around the outside with an 8-way division in the centre, and so (as astrology historian David Juste suggested to me several years ago) could very easily depict or signify some kind of calendrical conversion between a 12-way (lunar) zodiac/administrative calendar and an 8-way (solar) pagan/agricultural calendar. All of which is very neat: but fails to explain the 12 coloured moons or the structure of the text.

Of course, if we could only find the way in which any one ring of the f67r2 diagram enciphers the same information as a ring on the Auxerre MS fol. 9v, then we’d have an almost unbeatably good crib to crack the VMs’ cunning cryptography. However, nothing to do with the Voynich has ever proved to be that straightforward…

For a start, there don’t seem to be 30-31 syllables in each of the 12 segments (however you try to count them), so we can probably rule out a full cisioianus plaintext: so matching this in some abbreviated way would require a bit of thought. Also, I don’t (yet) know the details of Blasius’ “circius” mnemonic, but that might possibly be a better match (as long as it is a 12-part mnemonic rather than a 19-part mnemonic). Furthermore, I can’t see an obvious match with month names (which others have tried to do here for decades), and we don’t even know where the sequence of twelve segments start (or indeed end).

Interestingly, there’s a marginal mark at the top left of f69r2 which came out artificially sharply in the enhanced image above. At full resolution it looks rather messier, but might possibly include a left-to-right-flipped “J” at the bottom:-

f67r2-top-left-detail

Might this be indicating where to start on the diagram; or might it instead signify the start of the quire or chapter? (This was formerly the frontmost page of Quire 9, before it was rebound along the wrong fold, pace John Grove).

At this point, I have to call a halt on this (already far too long) post: once again, I don’t have all the answers, but perhaps I have managed to ask one or two reasonably good questions. All credit to Steve Herbelin!

Voynich Ms Reading List Recommendations…?

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In a comment to a recent post on Alberti & Averlino, ‘infinitii’ asks what my recommendations would be for a Voynich Manuscript reading list… a deceptively hard question.

Apart from the direct literature on the subject (Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”, my “The Curse of the Voynich”, and perhaps even Kennedy & Churchill’s “The Voynich Manuscript”), probably the best first step would always be to buy yourself a copy of “Le Code Voynich” – not for its prolix French introduction *sigh*, but simply so that you can look at the VMs’ pages in colour. The best guide to the manuscript still remains the evidence of your own eyes. 🙂

All of which is the easy, lazy blogger answer: but the kind of proper answer infinitii alludes to would be much, much harder. I should declare here that the VMs’ life in Bohemia (and beyond) strikes me as merely a footnote to the main story (though admittedly one that has been interminably expanded, mainly for lack of proper research focus).. Given that I’m convinced (a) 1450 is pretty close, date-wise; (b) Northern Italy is pretty close, location-wise; and (c) it’s almost certainly some kind of enciphered book of secrets, then the main subject we should be reading up on is simply Quattrocento books of secrets.

Doubtless there are three or four literature trees on this that I’m completely unaware of (please tell me!): but as a high level starting point, I’d recommend Part One (the first 90 pages, though really only the last few touch on the 15th century) of William Eamon’s “Science and the Secrets of Nature” (1994). Unfortunately for us, Eamon’s main interest is in Renaissance printed books of secrets. “In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy a little I can read” (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra), indeed. 🙂

From there, you’ll probably have to drill down (as I did) to individual studies of single books. Virtually everything written by Prager and Scaglia fits this bill, such as  their “Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions” (1970) and “Mariano Taccola and His Book De Ingeneis” (1972). I recently blogged about Battisti and Battisti’s splendid “Le Macchine Cifrate di Giovanni Fontana” (1984), and that is also definitely one to look at (though being able to read Italian tolerably well would be a distinct help there). I’ve also read articles by Patrizia Catellani on Caterina Sforza’s “Gli Experimenti” (which has a smattering of cipher in its recipes), and read up on the possible origins of Isabella Cortese’s supposed “I Secreti” (which is about as late as I’ve gone). Beyond that, you’re pretty much on your own (sorry).

As general background for what secrets such books might contain, I can yet again (though I know that infinitii will groan) only really point to Lynn Thorndike’s sprawling (but wonderful) “History of Magic & Experimental Science” (particularly Volumes III and IV on the 14th and 15th century), and his little-read “Science and Thought in the XVth Century”. Thorndike’s epic books stand proud in the middle of a largely desolate research plain, somewhat like Kubrick’s black monoliths: if anything else comes close to them, I don’t know of it.

As far as Quattrocento cryptography goes, David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers” is (despite its size) no more than an apéritif to a book that has yet to be written. I found Paolo Preto’s “I Servizi Segreti” very helpful, though limited in scope. For Leon Battista Alberti’s cryptography, Augusto Buonafalce’s exemplary modern translation of “De Cifris” is absolutely essential.

What is missing? There are a few relevant books I’ve been meaning to source but haven’t yet got round to, most notably the century-old (but possibly never surpassed) “Bibliographical Notes on Histories of Inventions & Books of Secrets” by John Ferguson. You can buy an updated version with an index and a preface by William Eamon, for example from here.

In many ways the above is no more than a very personal selection of books, and one obviously based around my own particular research programme / priorities. Yet even though I have tried to cover the ground reasonably well over the last few years, there are doubtless large clusters of (for example Italian-language) papers, books and particularly dissertations I am completely unaware of.

It should be clear that I think the basic research challenge here is to build up a properly modern bibliography of Quattrocento books of secrets, and thereby to map out the larger literature field within which the whole idea of ‘the VMs as an enciphered book of secrets’ can be properly placed. Perhaps I should use this as a test case for open source history?

Review of “Secret Knowledge”…

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Back in 2001, David Hockney proposed a radical new take on art history: that around 1430, artists began to use a camera obscura arrangement to focus images onto a canvas. This was to help them attain a level of draughting accuracy not available to artists who were simply “eyeballing” (Hockney’s term) a scene. The key paintings he employs as evidence for this claim are Jan Van Eyck’s ultra-famous “Arnolfini Portrait” (1434) and Robert Campin’s “Man In A Red Turban” (circa 1430) [though it’s not actually a turban but a “chaperon” – bet you’re glad you know that].

What is unavoidably odd about these Flemish pictures is that they suddenly aspire to a level of representational precision that had no obvious precedent – the technique of oil painting (developed much earlier) was suddenly refined and heightened in these artists’ apparent quest for almost (dare I say it) photographic imagery. Hockney sees all this as posing the implicitly technological question “How did they do that?” (particularly things like van Eyck’s highly complex chandelier, which has neither underdrawings nor construction marks): his own answer is that they must have used some unspecified (and now lost) optical means to assist them. But what?

Initially, this seems likely (he argues) to have been a convex mirror (though somewhat confusingly Hockney calls this a “mirror-lens”) within a camera obscura arrangement: but its technological limitations (particularly the small size of the projected image and the shallow depth of field) would only have allowed them to project one depth slice of one picture element at a time; and so would have required a kind of sequential collage effect to build up a complete composition. Much later (In the 1590s), the mirror was apparently (Hockney asserts) replaced by a lens, with Caravaggio’s two drunken Bacchuses held up as evidence (a “before-the-lens” and an “after-the-lens” pair, if you will).

Much of the scientific support for Hockney’s claim was provided by depth-of-field and relative size calculations by Charles Falco. Hence it has become known as the “Hockney-Falco thesis”. Really, it is a bold, almost aggressively naive technological-centred re-spin of art history, which sees photography merely as the modern version of a roughly 600-year-old tradition of optically-assisted realistic representation. By all rights, the entire hypothesis should be horribly wrong, with (I would guess) the majority of art historians on the planet looking for a way to help it sink into the sand upon which it appears to be be built. However, it has (quite surprisingly) proved remarkably resilient.

Actually, many of the criticisms are well-founded: but most seem to be missing the point. Hockney isn’t an art historian (not even close), but a practitioner: praxis is his matrix. Here, he is in the business of imaginative, empathetic knowledge production – which is a necessary part of the whole knowledge-generation cycle. Hockney repeatedly falls into many of David Fischer’s “Historians’ Fallacies” when trying to post-rationalize a narrative onto his observation: but given that historians often follow these same antipatterns, it is hardly surprising that an accidental historian such as Hockney fails to avoid them too.

Admirably, Hockney tried to respond to many of his critics by bringing together an intriguing selection of from primary sources on optics and the camera obscura (not dissimilar to the second half of Albert van Helden’s splendid “The Invention of the Telescope”). And so the “new and expanded” 2006 edition of his (2001) “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters” has appended English translations of many relevant historical texts (Bacon, Alhazan, Witelo, Manetti, Leonardo, Cardano, Barbaro, Della Porta, etc), as well as correspondence from 1999-2001 between Hockney and various people (mainly the very excellent Leonardo expert Martin Kemp, who squeeze in several satisfyingly good whinges about academe along the way).

OK: enough folksy summarizing, already. So, what do I think about all this?

For a start, this obviously cuts a path right through a lot of my ongoing research interests – Quattrocento secret knowledge & books of secrets, the mirror+lens combinations, early camera obscuras, Renaissance proto-telescopes, the emergence of modern optics 1590-1612. So I ought to have an opinion, right?

In a way, the unbelievable technical prowess of the Old Masters – their sheer blessèd giftedness – has been so much of a given for so long that to have David Hockney waltz in & undermine that is quite shocking. And all credit to Martin Kemp for grasping so early on that this points to such a potentially significant sea-change in the tides of academic art history.

I’m hugely sympathetic to Hockney: I did a bit of painting (though many years ago), and I have a professional interest in camera optics & the subtle problems of image perception – so I can see very clearly the artefacts in the paintings upon which he and Charles Falco are focusing. In a very important way, that’s the easy bit.

Yet one of the problems I have with the correspondence reproduced at the back of the book is that it gives the overwhelming impression that Hockney is all too ready to leap to the conclusion that the Church would deem this kind of image capturing a new kind of heresy: that that which is not understood must be occult. This exact same non-argument template (along the lines of ‘if the evidence isn’t there, it must have been suppressed for being heretical’) gets trotted out ad nauseam for many other hard-to-explain historical mysteries (perhaps most notably for the Voynich Manuscript): and, quite frankly, turns me right off every time I see it.

But the reason for this is obvious: the quality of the non-pictorial evidence Hockney cites to support his case is generally rather poor. He simply doesn’t have a smoking gun – nor even a non-smoking gun, really. He’s reduced to speculating about the nature of the mirrors Caravaggio owned when he died: and, frankly, that’s not really sufficient. When he can’t even point to a single substantive mention in a single pre-1500 letter or document, it’s easy to see why the whole hypothesis remains speculative (historically speaking).

I suspect one good question that should be asked is instead about the quality of the translations we are all relying upon to form our critical judgments on this. When tackling an early modern passage, translators must first conceive what kind of thing is being talked about when trying to give the text a shape comprehensible to our modern mindsets. And when something as basic as using curved mirrors as a painting aid has only just entered our collective awareness, I think it is likely that almost all translators of primary sources would have fudged over difficult or obscure passages. And so the ‘absence of evidence’ may ultimately have arisen from a missing conceptual framework in translators’ minds.

For what it is worth, my best guess is that there will turn out to be some primary evidence to support Hockney’s ideas, but that it won’t be a new passage: rather, it will turn out to be a known passage that was subtly mistranslated. But which should we be reassessing?

I’ve checked Thorndike (as you would) and Sabine Melchior-Bonnet (of which Hockney seems blissfully unaware) for ideas: the latter discusses Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1524) on p.227, which should contain sufficient information for an optical historian to reconstruct the size and focal length of the mirror used. She gives many other leads: for example, Fioravanti discusses mirrors in his “Miroir des arts et des sciences”, and there is yet more discussion in Salomon de Caus (1576-1626)’s book “Perspective avec la raison des ombres et des miroirs”. Yet ultimately, if there is a smoking gun, it probably sits waiting to be found in 15th century letters and books of secrets.

Regardless of how much moral support it gains, Hockney’s hypothesis continues to stand parallel to the art history mainstream: it awaits a truly daring art historian to look again at the sources, and to tease out the subtle behind-the-scenes narrative. This kind of reconstructionist approach (not unlike Rolf Willach’s take on telescope history) yields one kind of evidence – but only one, and so this is not the whole story. Life is never quite that simple…

Top 10 Voynich Manuscript theories, decoded…

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Symmetrical and repetitive prey behaviour is the key tool exploited by hunter gatherers: and so it goes with Voynich Manuscript websites. Once you’ve seen the same damaged pattern a few times, the shared wonky rationale behind it is usually fairly transparent.

And so here is a suggested critical reader for those fruity (but decidedly wobbly) jellies we all love to dip our fingers in: Voynich theories. Make of them all what you will…

(1) Any theory involving time travel or aliens
Subtext: “My theory has so many holes in, it would need two series of Doctor Who to fix them all.”

(2) Any theory involving Jesuits
Subtext: “I prefer reading 18th century fiction to 20th century non-fiction.”

(3) Any theory involving China
Subtext: “What do you mean, Jacques Guy wasn’t being serious?”

(4) Any theory involving the New World
Subtext: “I’ve got the hots for that Brazilian woman. What do you mean, she’s not female?”

(5) Any theory where the VMs is written in lightly disguised Hebrew
Subtext: “I wish I had read the Bible when I was young, instead of taking so many drugs.”

(6) Any theory where the VMs is written in a mixture of European languages
Subtext: “I put so much time into learning those languages, they have to be useful soon, right?”

(7) Any theory where the VMs contains alchemical or heretical secrets
Subtext: “Lynn Thorndike’s books are far too heavy for my weak arms to lift.”

(8) Any theory where the VMs describes telescopes, microscopes, or computers
Subtext: “I can rewrite the technological history of the world howsoever I please; and anyone who objects is just a moany old loser.”

(9) Any theory where the VMs is a hoax, channeled writing, glossolalia, etc
Subtext: “I can say anything I like about the VMs, and there’s absolutely nothing you idiot historians can do about it, ner ner ner.”

And finally…

(10) Any theory where the VMs was written by an architect
Subtext: “I see everything in the VMs as rational and ordered, however irrational and disordered everyone else may think it is. Perhaps I should lighten up.”

PS: because the torrent of VMs-related news has dwindled to a thin trickle over recent weeks, I’m taking the rest of August off – see you again in September! 😉

Review of "Inventing The Flat Earth"…

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It’s a mystery: when there is abundant evidence that people in the Middle Ages knew for sure that the earth was basically spherical, why has the myth persisted until the late 20th century that Columbus had to argue against Flat Earth proponents to gain backing for his voyage? And where did this whole mythology come from?

In his fascinating (if all too brief) “Inventing The Flat Earth” (1991), medieval historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traces the faulty arguments and ideologies across the centuries that contributed to this nonsense. As an immediate cause, he points to a small coterie of 19th century writers (specifically William Whewell (1794-1866) and John W. Draper (1811-1882)) who decided to start an agitprop war between “religion” and “science”, essentially by building opposing false idols of both “sides” and getting people angry enough about it to join in the fight.

For “religion”, the caricature they constructed was one of superstition and medieval backwardness: and what (thanks to multiple careful misreadings of the sources) could be more retrogressive than the notion of the flat earth? Disregarding the fact that just about everyone at that time believed in a spherical earth, Church or not. *sigh*

Yet for retrogressivity to be of interest as something to avoid, someone had (logically) to be promoting progressivity: Russell traces this back to Hegel, Auguste Comte, and to Jules Michelet, the last of which dubbed medieval scholastics “valiant athletes of stupidity” (hugely unfairly, of course).

But Jeffrey Burton Russell goes back further still: calling the Middle Ages “the Middle Ages” is a way of implicitly saying that it sat inbetween the (glorious) Classical Era and the (glorious) Renaissance – that it was a Tweenie era, that was more than just a bit disappointing and dull. And similarly with the Dark Ages, which would appear to have been so hugely disappointing that some extreme revisionist historians are trying to excise it completely!

Ultimately, Russell points the finger at Renaissance myth-makers: it was they who essentially invented the whole “medieval = rubbish” mythology which used to annoy Lynn Thorndike so much (though perhaps he should have been angrier with Alberti & his chums than with Jacob Burckhardt), in order to justify their own glory, as if fama was a zero-sum game. What did those Renaissance brainiacs ever do for us, eh?

Rewind to 1492, and the basic history is that Columbus never had to argue against a flat earth. His main point of disagreement was with those scientifically-minded people of the time who argued (completely correctly!) that his estimate of the distance East West to the Orient was far too low, and that he and his crew would die of starvation before they reached there. And they would have done, had another continent not happened to be in the way… but that’s another story.

Some may have heard of this book via the recent short article by Mano Singham (Phi Delta Kappan, 1st April 2007, available online) that was built almost entirely around a high-speed precis of Russell’s book: on HASTRO-L (2nd December 2007), Michael Meo criticized Singham’s presentation, but I think the inaccuracies there were in the summarizing, not in the original.

As far as the intellectual history goes, the seed of the myth/error seems to have been specifically sown by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus preface (not the one Osiander added!). There, he says:-

For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the earth’s shape, when he mocks those who declared that the earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me.

Copernicus was trying to play to the Church audience here, as the spherical earth was so well-believed as to be a point of faith. Yet because Lactantius’ opposing view (of a flat earth) had been deemed heretical, the papacy ordered in 1616 that this passage be censored from Copernicus’ book – but this order came too late for the 3rd edition of 1617, and the subsequent edition came along only in 1854.

And so the final irony here is that if De Revolutionibus had indeed (as Koestler asserted) been “The Book Nobody Read”, the flat-earth myth/error might never have flowered.

Lynn Thorndike’s papers…

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Somehow, I think it was inevitable that a determinedly analytical mind like Lynn Thorndike‘s would have left a well-organized archival record: and so it was that he and his successors left his extensive collection of papers to the University of Columbia, the last place he worked as a History Professor. The archival finding aid went online here only in 2004, so it seems likely that few historians have thought of using it.

All the same, it still comes as a bit of a surprise to find out that there are 60 linear feet of records in this archive (“ca. 30,000 items in 124 boxes and 1 Flatbox; some in Mapcase“). As well as containing the obvious stuff such as correspondence and numerous card files, this also includes “76 volumes of personal diaries, 1902-1963“.

Thorndike’s epic quest to examine, read and understand medieval scientific texts was on a scale few have attempted before or since: his multi-volume “History of Magic & Experimental Science” provides a richly textured background that I think anyone seriously looking at early modern proto-scientific mysteries (such as the Voynich Manuscript, naturally) should have gone through. And even so, how much more might there be languishing in his papers – unseen, unread, unknown to us all?

"The Montefeltro Conspiracy" arrives…

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A copy of Marcello Simonetta’s new book “The Montefeltro Conspiracy” (2008) has just arrived in the post (I first mentioned it here). I must admit to being a bit excited, as he covers a lot of ground I’d had to wade slowly through in the Italian sources when writing my own book – Cicco Simonetta, Francesco Sforza, the death of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Italian cryptography – as well as the fascinating web of intrigue and treachery threaded through so many of the condottieri and(mainly Florentine) princes which forms the book’s focus.

Really, it’s the kind of book I aspired to in “The Curse“: a historical account of the politics of cryptography (though the cryptography aspect here is fairly light by comparison). And, quite unexpectedly, Marcello cites my book (though admittedly only in the endnote to p.24 – but hey, it’s in the bibliography too, every little citation helps).

Even at a glance, it’s obvious that his book is well illustrated, with even some nice pictures of the Urbino intarsia I mentioned here only a few days ago. But I’m getting way ahead of myself now: I have to go away and read it ASAP so that I can post a proper review here…

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!