Much as I enjoyed watching Micky Bet covering the Voynich Manuscript, I couldn’t help but wonder how much better it would be had it had a slightly funkier script. So (courtesy of the kind people at Overstream) I added my own captions. Enjoy! 🙂
(If you can’t see this in your browser or email client, here’s a direct link to it).
Alas, sometimes the limitations of Twitter are all too apparent. The follow-up to my previous VMs limerick simply refuses to be shoehorned inside the 140 character limit:-
A dodgy bookdealer called Wilfrid
Hotly denied he had pilfered
Or hoaxed, faked or shammed
His “Book Of The Damned”
(That he’d bought off a geezer in Ilford)
Alternatively…
Did the Emperor purchase “The Voynich”
For 600 ducats of coinage?
Perhaps he had hoped
It described a strange soap
That would cure his mysterious groin itch!
Ah well, perhaps blogs aren’t so bad after all! 🙂
Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things Voynich… and an hour later I eventually ran out of steam. 🙂
Pretty much all the fashionable VMs research topics you’d expect to me to crank out – Wilfrid Voynich, John Dee, Rudolf II, Rene Zandbergen, Sinapius, Newbold, dating, TV documentaries, the nine-rosette page, page references, the evolution of Voynichese, cipher history, Trithemius, Leon Battista Alberti, unbreakable ciphers, intellectual history, books of secrets, Brunelleschi’s hoist, enciphered machines, Voynich Bullshit Index, Quattrocento intellectual paranoia, patents, even quantum computing! – get covered, so there should be something there for nearly everyone. 🙂
And if that’s not enough for you, Red Ice Radio has a 45-minute follow-on interview with me in their member-only area: this covers cryptology, intractability, alchemy, Adam Maclean, hoax theories, Gordon Rugg, Cardan grilles, postmodernism, astronomy, astrology (lunar and solar), calendars, Antonio Averlino / Filarete, canals, water-powered machines, (not) the head of John the Baptist, Alan Turing, Enigma, Pascal, the Antikythera Mechanism, Fourier analysis, Ptolemaic epicycles, Copernicus, Kepler, Kryptos sculpture, Tamam Shud, Adrenalini Brothers, steganography, copy vs original, wax tablets, even al-Qaeda!
OK, I’m not a professional broadcaster, and it’s all impromptu (so there are a handful of pauses), but it does bring plenty of Voynich-related stuff that’s appeared here over the last 18 months together into a single place. Enjoy!
Every few years, I get around to posting a list of Voynich challenges – things about the Voynich Manuscript that we would like to know or to find out.
Looking back at my 2001 list of Voynich Challenges, I seem to have been flailing around at every codicological nuance going: yes, there are hundreds of interesting angles to consider – but how many stand any chance of yielding something substantial? With the benefit of just a little hindsight, I’d say… realistically, almost none of them (unfortunately).
Stepping onwards to my 2004 list of Voynich research tasks, which was instead mainly focused on a particularly narrow research question – whether Wilfrid Voynich lost any pages of the VMs. (Having myself consulted the UPenn archives in 2006, I’m certain the answer is a resounding ‘no’.)
Also in 2004, the release of the (generally excellent) MrSID scans by the Beinecke Library (even though it carried out test scans in 2002) was also an important landmark for study of the VMs, because it allowed anybody to look closely at the primary evidence on their own PC without having to trek to New Haven. Many old questions (particularly about colour) that had bounced around on the original VMs mailing list for years were suddenly able to be answered reasonably definitively.
Hurling our nuclear-powered DeLorean fast-forward to June 2009, what things do we now want to know? And moreover, even if we do find them out, does any of them stand any chance of helping us?
For all the determined work over the years that has been put into trawling the post-1600 archives (particularly Kircher’s correspondence), I can’t help but think that there can be precious little left to find of significant value. It has been a nice, well-defined project – but can I suggest we put it behind us now? The presence of 15th century handwriting (on f116v) and 15th century quire numbers surely makes this avenue no more than a fascinating diversion, no more useful than a forensic dissection of (say) Petrus Beckx’s life. Ultimately, “what happened to the VMs after 1600?” is surely one of the many convenient (but wrong) questions to be asking.
But what, then, are the right questions to be asking? In my opinion, the seven most fruitful historical research challenges currently awaiting significant attack are the following…
(1) Understanding the ownership marginalia on f1r, f17r, f66r and f116v, in particular what caused the text on them to end up so confused and apparently unreadable – even their original language(s) (Latin, French, German, Occitan or Voynichese?) is/are far from certain. Whatever details turn up from this research (dates, names, places, languages, etc) may well open the door onto a whole new set of archival resources not previously considered. Alas, delayering these marks is just beyond the reach of the Beinecke’s scans – so unless our Austrian TV documentary friends have already deftly covered this precise angle (and I’m sure they are aware of this issue), I think this would be a fantastic, relatively self-contained codicological / palaeographic research project for someone to take on. Do you know a Yale codicologist looking for a neat term project?
(2) Palaeographically matching the VMs’ quire numbering scheme – abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals (but with Arabic digits for the most part). Again, this should be a self-contained palaeographic research project, one that a determined solo investigator could carry out (say) just using the British Library’s resources. Again, if this suggests links to documents with reasonably well-defined provenances or authorship, it may well open up an entirely new archival research angle to pursue.
(3) Examining the “aiiv” groups for steganography, both in Currier A and in Currier B. I’ve made a very specific prediction, based on carefully observing the VMs at first hand – that in the Herbal-A pages, the “scribal flourish” was added specifically to hide an earlier (less subtle) attempt at steganography, based on dots. A multi-spectral scan of some of these “aiiv” groups might well make reveal the details of this construction, and (with luck) cast some light on the writing phases the author went through. Definitively demonstrating the presence of steganography should also powerfully refute a large number of the theories that have floated around the VMs for years.
(4) Reconstructing the original bifolio nesting of the VMs. Glen Claston and I have attempted to do this from tiny codicological clues, but this is in danger of stalling for want of applicable data. But what kind of data that could be collected non-destructively be useful? Ideally, it would be good if we could perform some kind of DNA matching (to work out which bifolios came from the same animal skin), as this would give a very strong likelihood of connecting groups of pages together – and with that in place, many more subtle symmetries and handwriting matches might become useful. Would different animal skins autofluoresce subtly differently? I think there’s a fascinating research project waiting in there for someone who comes at this from just the right angle.
(5) Documenting and analyzing the VMs’ binding stations. If the VMs happens to go in for restoration at any point (which the Beinecke curators have mentioned at various points as being quite likely), I think it would be extremely revealing if the binding stations and various sewing holes on each bifolio were carefully documented. These might well help us to work out how the various early bindings worked, which in turn should help us reconstruct what early owners did to the manuscript, and (with luck) what the original ‘alpha’ state of the manuscript was.
(6) Carefully differentiating between Currier-A and Currier-B, building up specific Markov-like models for the two “languages”, and working out (from their specific differences) how A was transformed into B. This may not sound like much, but an awful lot of cryptological machinery would need to rest on top of this to make any kind of break into the system.
(7) Making explicit Glen Claston’s notion of script & language evolution over the various writing phases. This would involve a combination both of palaeography and statistical analysis, to understand how Voynichese developed, both as a writing system and a cryptographics system. There’s a great idea in there, but it has yet to be expressed in a really detailed, substantial way.
In retrospect, a lot of the art historical things that preoccupied many Voynich researchers (myself included) back in 2002-2005 such as comparisons with existing drawings, the albarelli, etc now seem somewhat secondary to me. This is because we have a solid date range to work with: the Voynich Mauscript (a) was made after 1450 (because of the presence of parallel hatching in the nine-rosette page), and (b) was made before 1500 (because of the presence of two 15th century hands, in the quire numbers and on f116v).
Some people (particularly those whose pet theories don’t mesh with this 1450-1500 time frame) try to undermine this starting point, but (frankly) the evidence is there for everyone to see – and I think it’s time we moved on past this, so as to take Voynich research as a whole up to the next level. Though researchers have put in a terrific amount of diffuse secondary research over the years, collectively our most productive task now is to forensically dissect the primary evidence, so as to wring out every last iota of historical inference – only then should we go back to the archives.
Will these seven basic challenges still all be open in 2012, a hundred years after Wilfrid Voynich claimed discovery of his eponymous manuscript in a Jesuit trunk? I sincerely hope not – but who is going to step forward to tackle them?
Yesterday, a set of random clicks somewhat akin to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (or do I mean “Six Degrees of Roger Bacon”?) took me to the Voynich Monkeys archive of the main Voynich Mailing List: there, I learnt to my considerable surprise, that one of the premises in London formerly used by Wilfrid Voynich is now the New Mayflower Restaurant (on Shaftesbury Avenue).
OK, I’ve probably been to at least half of the restaurants in and around Chinatown over the years: but I’ve been to the New Mayflower probably ten times – it’s a nice place.
If you’re going there, I highly recommend (hopefully they still do it) the chilli crab – very tasty indeed (if a bit messy, it has to be said). A big thank you to my chess-playing friend Neil Bradbury for recommending it, particularly the basement part of the restaurant.
Of course, it’s a little strange to think that I’ve eaten so many times in what was Voynich’s former bookshop – but historical London’s a bit like that, full of slightly unnerving coincidences! 🙂
Back in 2003, the (Paleo) Ideofact blogger (William Allison) reminisced about having once jointly compiled a list of meaningless dissertation titles, such as “The Semiotics of (En)Gendered Archetypes: A Contextual Deconstruction of the Voynich Manuscript.” His pleasantly-meandering blog train of thought quickly sped on to the possibility of Voynich fiction, continuing…
Later, I thought of writing a few detective stories centered on a career grad student who promised for his dissertation a translation and analysis of the manuscript. Never got around to it, though — maybe in my retirement.
Now there’s a challenge, I thought… so, six years on, here’s my version of how Chapter 1 might go…
[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]
* * * * * * *
7.07pm: Mrs Kurtz tapped Graydon Warnes Harvitz II sharply on the shoulder, waking him from his open-eyed slumber. “Stop sucking the end of your pencil so loudly“, she wheeshed through gritted teeth, “it’s disrespectful”. Vaguely nodding in approval, Graydon looked around at the empty chairs beached by the day’s ebbing tide of students – disrespectful to whom, he wondered? Perhaps she-of-the-library could see people that he couldn’t, he mused, possibly the ghosts of dead Yale grads, haunted by their own unfinished dissertations – a virtual “Skull and Bones” society? And look, over in the far corner, might that be dear old Montgomery Burns himself? Yesssss.
As the fug of dead presidents began to fade from his mind’s eye, Graydon’s own awful situation lurched back into sharp focus – of how to decipher the murderously intractable Voynich Manuscript for his PhD. All of a sudden, the purgatory endured by the library’s wraiths, endlessly waiting for long-stolen books to be returned to the stacks, seemed painfully close at hand. His boastful prediction (that this would be easy-peasy for someone as bright as him) had come back to haunt him.
All the same, his whole adventure had started brightly, zipping through all the literature on “The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript” (so ‘P. T. Barnum’, wouldn’t you say, and isn’t there a Voynich Theorist born every minute?) Yet within a month, he had been reduced to trawling all the works of fiction appropriating the manuscript (typically as a tedious millennia-crossing conspiratorial MacGuffin). Then finally, not unlike an air crash survivor having eaten the seat-covers and the corpses of the other passengers before moving on to the dreaded airline food, Graydon had slurped his way messily through all the Voynich webpages. And the less said about that low-roughage diet the better.
Once the inevitable research euphoria had subsided, he had slid downwards into a bit of a decline – for if you don’t know what your subject is about, how can you read any secondary literature? He felt less like a Yale polymath than an intellectual vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the marginal detritus left over by other scholars, trying in vain to rearrange the collected dust and mites into patterns that would endure longer than a single big sneeze. And so the years had passed – not quite a decade, but far too long by any reasonable measure.
Eating and shaving less (but drinking and swearing more), Graydon began in time to resemble his fearsome alcoholic grandfather Mani Harvitz, the semi-legendary Allied code-breaker who as a young man had worked with John Manly and Edith Rickert breaking German diplomatic codes in World War I.
Once, he had mused whether his own grandfather might have looked at what Wilfrid Voynich had called (rather optimistically, it has to be said) “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”? Graydon had tirelessly gone through all that group’s archived correspondence, finding only that the brilliant young Mani, newly emigrated from Europe, had something of a huge schoolboy crush on the no-less-stellar Miss Rickert.
But this was merely symptomatic of the Mandelbrot Research Maze Of Doom he was stuck in, where each dead-end you go down sprouts off an infinite number of smaller dead-ends for you to recursively waste your time on. He found himself humming Augustus De Morgan’s rhyme “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,: And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum‘. Graydon wished he didn’t know that this was in turn based on a rhyme by Jonathan Swift: his mind had become crammed with a near-infinite constellation of similarly useless fact-bites, all held in interplanetary hibernation, eternally waiting to arrive at an unseen off-world colony.
And now he had just ten short days to prepare a presentation for his supervisor about all the dramatic progress he had claimed to have made over the past six months, when all he actually had to show for his efforts was a pencil dangling from his unkempt, beardy mouth. Perhaps… perhaps that was his subconscious’ way of telling him to take up smoking again?
Lesser fleas, he thought to himself as he removed the pencil and took a closer look. Because he preferred harder pencils for note-taking (laptops gave him back-ache), he had a “2H” rather than an “HB”. The Pencil Code (all the way from 9H to 9B via HB ) was over a hundred years old, yet still sounds like a legal-ese sequel to The Da Vinci Code. More linked trivia tumbled out of his tangled skein of memory: pencils themselves were made of graphite, not lead (that was a 400-year-old misunderstanding, you don’t actually have “lead in your pencil”). But before the pencil came along, people had often used red lead to mark things…
That was it: the red lead drawings on page f55r of the Voynich Manuscript. The only other remaining construction marks (which had generally been so assiduously removed by the author, it would appear) were the horizontal lines drawn on f67r2, under a kind of odd-looking circular calendar with a starfish design in the centre: these lead lines were definitely symptomatic of something… but of what?
Yes, these were the real deal – they were what his subconscious mind was telling him to examine right now, what he needed to be thinking about for his looming presentation. But what did they mean – and how on earth might such an incidental detail possibly help him translate the Voynich Manuscript?
Graydon’s mind raced through his Wikipedia-esque web of details – “red lead” A.K.A. lead tetroxide, better known to classicists as ‘minium’, from which we get ‘miniature’, a medieval style of small picture with lots of red finish. And what was that paper he’d never quite got round to reading? Yes, J. J. G. Alexander’s (1983) “Preliminary Marginal Drawings in Medieval Manuscripts“: that, and the ten thousand other cul-de-sacs to park your car in for a day he’d one day hope to read.
But the important point about f55r was that it was plainly unfinished. If red lead had been used to sketch out the shapes, then this was probably one of the last pages added: yet why would the author, so meticulous and rational in so many other ways, have left this one page in this state? Perhaps he/she had died (or had just given up, as Graydon had wanted to do so many times) before completing it?
Hold on, he thought – given the first page and the last page, perhaps we can use the changes in handwriting and in the cipher system between them to try to reorder the pages inbetween, to reconstruct the document’s construction order, and its flow of meaning… For the first time in perhaps even a year, his mind felt on fire, alive with the possibilities: he felt he was glimpsing something extraordinary, subtle and deep…
And that was when he saw Emm for the very first time, as she walked over to his desk to kick him out of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the night. She was extraordinary, like a long-haired Halle Berry but with piercing, intense eyes, eyes that could slice watermelons.
“That’s odd”, he said, “I didn’t know supermodels worked in libraries”.
“That’s odd”, she deadpanned, parroting his tone, “I didn’t know they let bears handle manuscripts.”
“Oh, the beard thing? Yeah, my barber died and I never found a replacement.”
“Woah, the ’90s must have been a really tough decade for you. Anyhoo, it’s time to kick your bear ass out of the library.”
Graydon blinked. He didn’t know if this conversation was going really well or really badly. “Hi, I’m Graydon Harvitz”, he said, “I’m…”
“…’the eternal Voynich grad’, Mrs Kurtz told me already. Is it true they’re hoping to get rid of you next week?”
“Well, they’re certainly going to try – perhaps it’ll be third time lucky.”
She paused, looking him up and down in the way a butcher would look at a freshly-hung carcass. “That would be a shame – Mrs Kurtz would miss you”, she said with half a smile, turning to walk away. “Though not your pencil sucking.”
“And your name is…?”
“Call me Emm – I’m the new cleaner.”
She was a cleaner? Errm… what? “Do cleaners like to eat lunch?”
“We’re always starving. Tomorrow should be good, because they’ll be kicking you out at noon – a French film crew will have your precious manuscript for the afternoon.”
A French film crew?
* * * * * * * *
Update: the story continues with Chapter 2 (“Game On”)…
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, 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?
I know, I did indeed say that I wasn’t going to post anything for a while… but then this wonderful translation (from the Russian) of Evgeniya Taratuta’s (1957) “Our Friend Ethel Lilian Boole” popped up, made by Séamus Ó Coigligh (who retired as Curator of Cork Public Museum as long ago as 1981). Uhhh… whatever keep-going-forever potion he’s using, I think I’d like the recipe…
Taratuta’s article (which I first read about in Andrew Cook’s “Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly”) beams a whole medley of archival lights onto ELV’s and WMV’s early lives, particularly on the adumbral period before 1900. There is also a mention of a short 16mm film clip that ELV sent to Taratuta – wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to put on YouTube? Just a thought… 🙂
Fancy a walk around London? There are some real scorchers to choose from at London Walks, a company offering fascinating pedestrian slices through the many-layered cake that is our dear Londinium. But for Voynicheros, one walk in particular stands out: “Anarchy in the UK – Mob Rule & Terror Tactics” hosted by writer Ed Glinert, and which should start at Goodge Street at 10:45 am on 17 Jan 2009 (I found it mentioned here on a weirdlondon blog).
The walk is planned to cover “Voynich, Kropotkin, Maletesta, plus Orwell, Stalin, Lenin and even Hitler!“: so, not really your average Saturday morning walk around town, then. £7 for adults.
Here’s a quick research note: a list of Wilfrid Voynich’s archives…
There may well be more, but that should be enough to keep any researcher going for a bit… 🙂