Keeping with this week’s Spanish theme, here is a small selection of Voynich tapas to dip into the spicy sauce of your prejudices rich life experiences. Tasty!

(1) René Zandbergen’s recent Voynich talk seems to have gone off OK: here’s a brief mention of it by Hugh Deasy in a blog post.

(2) Here’s a novel (though only partially formed) Spanish Voynich theory presented in the form of a Youtube video: it suggests a link between the Voynich Manuscript and Juan Ponce de León (1474-1521), the soldier who famously went searching for the fountain of youth (though this was only said of him after his death). The irony, of course, is that Florida (to where he travelled) has come to be stuffed full of retirees doing much the same thing. Personally, I suspect he was more interested in gold than any claims of eternal youth: but never mind. Oh, and if you do choose to look at the webpage, don’t forget to turn the shouty rock music backing track off. 😮

(3) Here’s a Voynich theory that is even less well-formed than the above (yes, it’s possible). “Lord Trigon” suspects that the VMs is an elvish school book that fell up from Middle Earth through a well, in basically the same way that he/she once threw his/her own 5th grade maths book down a well (and said he/she’d lost it). Ah, bless.

(4) Finally, a big Cipher Mysteries Guten Tag! goes out to Michael Johne, who puts up brief German summaries of (usually) English-language Voynich news stories on his blog. At first, it was a little strange to see my own posts pop up there (a bit like having a multilingual stalker), but I’m starting to get used to it. I hope to read some of your own posts there soon, Michael!