Could the world ever really be ready for my enciphered sexy Jewish limerick? Having mulled over the punchline for this for a couple of months, I think I’ve finally nailed it. Happy deciphering! 🙂
A randy professor from Haifa
Wrote all his love letters in cipher
“Ven I look in your eyes,”
He would rhapsodize,
“J’n tdiuvqqjoh uif lojti pgg Njdifmmf Qgfjggfs!“
A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).
In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂
With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.
I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.
So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮
As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.
If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.
Halfway through Blunt and Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal”, a small lightbulb flickered briefly to life in my tired head. And it was to do with the VMs’ Occitan marginalia, something that has bugged me for years…
To my codicological eyes, the VMs appears to have had a busy time in the 15th century (with three or four inquisitive owners), a very quiet time for most of the 16th century, before an intense flurry of activity circa 1600 (when I think its folios were numbered and the “heavy paint” layer added), which is just about when its semi-documented life at the Rudolfine court begins.
But, like an alcoholic after a particularly mad binge, there’s a whole chunk of time missing in the middle – in fact, about a century’s worth. What happened then? Who owned it? How did the VMs apparently get from Occitania (probably Southern France) to Prague? And – most crucially of all – why did nobody think fit to mention such an intriguing object?
Now: even though in many ways I hate what I call “join-the-dots histories”, when evidence is completely lacking (as is the case here) you really don’t have much choice. Basically, pragmatic hypotheses (which historians need so as to be even remotely strategic about what they look to for evidence) have to come from somewhere: and so here is my (possibly new) suggestion for how the VMs travelled from Northern Italy to Southern France and onwards towards the Rudolfine Imperial court at Prague. It may be rubbish, but it is at least testable rubbish. 🙂
The dots I propose to conveniently join together in a line (along which the VMs might well have travelled) are:-
From there you can get the VMs to Prague in any number of ways, though many (of course) would like it to have been carried there by Dee & Kelley. While that last part is still in the realms of wishful thinking, I’m more interested here in working out if the Montpellier side of things might be true… but how?
Further reading-wise, here are the lowest hanging fruits of all: HTML text resources.
For correspondence, all three men have stuff in various archives: Pellicier’s Venetian correspondence, Rondelet’s (mainly medical) letters were published in his “Opera Omnia Medica” (?), while L’Obel (from whose name we get “Lobelia”, incidentally) similarly has a few letters out there (his patron Baron Zouche, the 16th century apothecary Jean Mouton, etc).
As with most questions about French letters, Gallica has plenty of scans of creaky old books which may (or may not) be useful. Here are some quick links to start with, sorted by date (rather than by usefulness):-
Books to look at for Guillaume Pellicier (note the various spellings!) would seem to be:-
(Incidentally, Annaclara Cataldi Palau is a Professor at King’s College London, whose research interests are “Greek palaeography and history of book production“: so I presume that the last article was placed in the University of London Library system directly by her, in case you can’t find it anywhere else.)
Books which tend to get cited on Guillaume Rondelet are:-
I’ll return to Lobelius another day (I’m still reeling from all the above). As it is, I’ve already jeopardised my membership of the Bloggers Union by including too much useful information in a single post. :-O
At the beginning of this year, I became interested in the mystery surrounding the invention of the telescope, spurred by Richard SantaColoma’s outrageous claims that the enciphered Voynich Manuscript contained images of telescopes disguised as strange tiered albarelli. But really, who did invent the telescope? Where did it come from?
At first, I thought the answer ought to be straightforward to find out, particularly as this year (in fact this month, September 2008) marks the 400th anniversary of the supposed invention. But the more accounts I read, the less I believed.
You see, for four centuries, people have asserted that three Dutchmen suddenly invented the telescope all at the same time: but my opinion is that this is a placeholder for an explanation rather than a proper explanation – bluntly, whatever actually happened back then, you can be fairly sure that that wasn’t it.
When you strip it all down, there are basically two rival accounts to choose from: the mainstream story (“three Dutchmen invented it, take your pick whichever you prefer“) and the one offered by the Milanese rich kid courtier Girolamo Sirtori in his 1618 book “Telescopium, siue Ars perficiendi nouum illud Galilaei visorium instrumentum ad sydera”. Essentially, Sirtori said that he had gone to Gerona and met the real ‘first inventor’ of the telescope, a man called Roget of Burgundy: however, given all the uncontestable documentation in Dutch archives, historians had long thought this too marginal a research lead to pursue. And anyway, Sirtori offered no means by which Spain and Holland were connected.
However, I managed (thanks to Google and the helpful staff of the Municipal Archive in Barcelona) to dig up a transcript of an obscure 1959 radio broadcast written by a particularly dogged investigator called Jose Maria Simon de Guilleuma – an optometrist, scientific instrument collector and amateur historian from Barcelona. He was so intrigued by Sirtori’s account that he spent probably a decade or more sifting through numerous Spanish and French archival sources – and in so doing verified much of Sirtori’s story.
Fascinating stuff! And furthermore, when I combined Simon’s findings with more up-to-date research, a brand new narrative of the invention of the telescope presented itself, which I believe joins all the disparate pieces together (in a kind of intellectual history sort of way).
I wrote up my findings and reconstruction, sanity checked them with several very experienced telescope historians, and submitted them as a fairly substantial article to History Today (it’s on the front cover, you can’t miss it). Perhaps it’ll cause a stir, perhaps not – but all the same, it’s certainly a fully-rounded hypothesis which I hope will prove to be a spur to other historians and researchers to look that bit further.
There’s a short piece in the Guardian today by Ian Sample, and I did a short interview on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning: there’s also a longer piece in El Mundo, and doubtless several more to come out this week. But for the full story, you’ll have to buy a copy of History Today for yourself… 🙂
While writing my MBA dissertation a few years ago, I spun off a short paper called “Justified True Belief: Three Words, Three Lies?“, where the abstract explained its title:-
Cornelius Castoriadis once famously described the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as “four words, four lies”: here, I examine each of the three words of “justified true belief” in turn to see if that too might be based on a fatally flawed discourse. In fact, “three lies” turns out to be a little strong – but the evidence strongly points to “two-and-a-half lies”. We deserve better than this!
My guess is that Castoriadis, for all his pithiness, was ripping off Voltaire, who in 1756 wrote:
This agglomeration which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
So now, by applying the same pattern to the Voynich Manuscript, I’m extending the chain of ripping yet further. Just so you know!
What’s in a name? Wilfrid Voynich never called it “The Voynich Manuscript”: right from the start, he called it “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”. Which was a bit of a shame, given that it originally almost certainly had nothing to do with Roger Bacon.
However, because Voynich desperately wanted it to contain Bacon’s encrypted secrets, he was convinced it had to be medieval. It was in this context that he referred to it as a “manuscript”, because manuscripts are technically defined as being handwritten documents that predate the start of printing, which means 1450 or so. And so you can see that the word “Manuscript” in “Voynich Manuscript” presupposes a medieval document, or else it would have to be called “an early modern handwritten document” (which, for all its precision, is not quite so punchy). And worse, the range of dates it could sensibly have been made goes over this 1450 mark, so we have no real certainty to work from here.
As for “Voynich”: in one sense it should be “Wojnicz”, the book dealer’s surname before he ended up in London. But we sophisticated moderns should perhaps more sensibly name it after the Jesuit Villa Mondragone (where Wilfrid Voynich found it), or Johannes Marcus Marci (who inherited it and whose letter to Kircher travelled with it all the way to New Haven), or George Baresch (arguably the first obsessive Voynich researcher to be documented), or Sinapius / Jacobus de Tepenecz (whose erased signature still faintly remains on the first page), or even Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (who was said to have paid well for it).
All of this still rather panders to an implied need for naming, as if by giving it a name it somehow helps us understand its origins (it doesn’t, can’t, and won’t). It’s an itch we don’t actually need to scratch: we need to learn to be more comfortable about remaining in a state of uncertainty.
My dissertation was all about knowledge and uncertainty: the work I’ve done since then points to my own three-word definition for knowledge – “hopefully useful lies“. Calling this enigmatic object the “Voynich Manuscript” is indeed “two words, two lies” – but as long as we never forget that they are both lies, its name is a most useful tool.