“Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500″…?

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While searching for things to do with the humanist minuscule hand, I stumbled across a reference in a short 2002 paper by Jessica Wilbur to an oversized 1981 hardback by Jacqueline Herald called “Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500“. Now, I thought, that sounds like a book I’d really like to buy: only to find out from Bookfinder.com that copies now go for between £403 and £836. Ohhhh well…

However, according to the M25 Consortium and WorldCat there are at least 20 copies of it in libraries not too far from me (including the British Library, the Warburg Institute, Kingston University, Cambridge, Oxford, etc), so it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of this by some [hopefully legal] means.

Is this something any Cipher Mysteries reader has already seen? It seems almost the perfect book to have in one hand while examining the various Voynich nymphs’ costumes: and it seems strange that such a strong visual resource didn’t feature in the recent Austrian documentary. Maybe its very rarity has made it lost to a whole generation of researchers, who knows?

Update: having posted this, I settled down to continue reading the copy of Mark Phillips’ (1987) “The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence” that I bought yesterday in the very pleasant  Oxford Street Books in Whitstable. And in footnote 22 on p.40 there just happens to be… yes, a direct reference to Jacqueline Herald’s book. What are the chances of that, eh?

Happy New Year, and some predictions for 2010…

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Once again, it’s time to roll out and dust off the Cipher Mysteries crystal skull crystal ball (no, I didn’t buy it on eBay, nor did I nick it from the British Museum) to peer dimly ahead to 2010. What will it bring us all?

Of course, 2009’s big news was the radiocarbon dating of four slivers of the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum for the recent Austrian TV documentary, which yielded an oddly early date (1405-1438 at 95% confidence). We’re still waiting for the actual data to get a better feel for the historical reasoning: doubtless there will be more announcements to come during this year (some from the Beinecke Library itself), perhaps as the English version of the documentary edges closer to broadcast. Hence…

Prediction #1: by mid-2010, carefully combining the raw data from the documentary with what we already know about the Voynich Manuscript will move us to an entirely new and unexpected (though no less paradoxical or awkward) mainstream position.

Of course, hard evidence is doubly hard for some to swallow: while behind the scenes, quite a few people are silently beavering away with their own VMs-related stuff. For example, I can’t help but notice Jorge Stolfi pa-/de-trolling the Wikipedia Voynich:Talk page, which rather makes me wonder what he’s up to. Hence…

Prediction #2: throughout 2010, a whole bunch of Voynicheros will exit stage right, the arrival of hard evidence having spoiled their long-running soft evidence gig. At the same time, a whole scrum of other researchers will join in the VMs pool party. The Voynich research landscape will become more overtly historical, less wildly speculative (and about time too).

In 2009, we’ve seen quite a few academics looking at the VMs: but I think it’s fair to say that none to date has fully engaged with the breadth and heterogeneity of the evidence that plagues & intrigues us all. If Lynn Thorndike were alive, I’d be camping outside his office 🙂 but circa 2010 what kind of historian has the breadth and daring to take on the risk of rising to this challenge? Anthony Grafton? Charles Burnett [in 2010]?

Prediction #3: I suspect that late in 2010, we’ll see the arrival of perhaps the first truly heavyweight academic Voynich Manuscript paper for decades. I just can’t shake the intuition that something big is coming this way…

Combine all of the above with the conservative set of analyses carried out by Andreas Sulzer’s team, and I think you get:-

Prediction #4: throughout 2010, the Beinecke Library’s curators will receive many requests for specific art historical forensic tests to be carried out on the VMs, such as multispectral imaging on the marginalia / paints / inks (to try to separate out the different authorial and/or construction layers) and/or vellum DNA analysis (to try to reconstruct the original bifolio grouping). However, they will probably say ‘no’ to all of them (a shame, but there you go).

Ummm… here’s looking forward to 2011, then! 😉

Bacon = Shakespeare, 2009 remix…

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A modern day Baron Frankenstein (actually, a mild-mannered Norwegian) has wired up the electrodes to a monstrous-looking zombie most thought long dead. It rises! It stands! It lives! It liiiiives!!!!!

I’m referring, of course, to the whole idea of using wobbly cryptography to prove that Francis Bacon = William Shakespeare, that David Kahn somewhat derisively called “enigmatology”. Note that I’m not saying the end result is wrong (even though I personally suspect that Shakespeare collaborated rather more thoroughly than his “solo genius” biographers tend to claim), but rather that the kind of reconstructive Renaissance pseudo-cryptography usually employed to try to prove that end result is usually pants central highly questionable guff.

So… what of church organist Petter Amundsen’s “Sweet Swan of Avon – The Shakespeare Treasure” claims (which I found via the forum posts here)? It’s a pretty chunky bit of TV: four 50 minute episodes, of which part 1, part 2 and part 3 are available for viewing online (mostly in Norwegian).

It all (somewhat inevitably) starts with the original version of “Good frend for Iesus SAKE forbeare…” (the start of Shakespeare’s Stratford plaque, much loved by Shakespeare conspiracy novelists), with its camelcase and extraneous dots, all good grist to Renaissance cryptographers’ mills (they also loved hiding things with doubled letters). Only in this case, Amundsen reads them as our old friend the Baconian biliteral cipher:-

BAAAB - AAAAA - AABAA - AABBB - BAAAA
  S       A       E       H       R
AAAAB - AAAAA - BABBA - AABAA - AABAA - ABBBA
  B       A       Y       E       E       P
BAAAA - AABAB - BAABA - AAAAA - BABAB - AAAAA
  R       F       T       A       X       A
BAAAA - AAAAA - BABAA - AAAAA - BAAAA
  R       A       W       A       R

…which leaves him with the letters…

S A E H R
B A Y E E P
R F T A X A
R A W A R

…where he arbitrarily transposes the two coloured groups into “W SHAXPEARE” (blue) and “FR(ancis) BA(con)” (red). But what to make of the mysterious “YETA” in the middle? After some (frankly rather kabbalistic) meditation, Amundsen decides to add “DUST” to “YETA” (modulo 24, I think) to get:-

+   Y E T A
    D U S T
    C A N V

 …thus filling out the middle of his letter rectangle even further…

S A E H R
B A C A E P
R F N V X A
R A W A R

 …i.e. “FR(ancis) BACAN V(erulam)”.

OK, I’ll admit it: we’re only halfway through the first episode of four and my patent-pending “pants-o-meter” is already shrieking like a robotic pig fed AC rather than DC… not a good start. It goes on to talk about the School of Night, the importance of the number 53, freemason plots, Oak Island, la-la-la.

Ultimately, it comes down to the age-old question: cryptographically, do I think Amundsen is (a) onto something or (b) on something? Sadly for Baconian enigmatologists everywhere, I have to say that (b) is looking far more likely. But please feel free to watch all four episodes yourself, don’t let me stop you making up your own mind. 🙂

“The Curse of the Voynich”, now back in print…

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Today’s brief news is that 100 copies of “The Curse of the Voynich” have just arrived from the printers, so those 20-odd people who ordered one from Amazon this month should be receiving it by the New Year (post willing). Alternatively, if you’d like your own shiny signed copy, order one via PayPal using the “Buy Now” [UK, Europe, R.O.W.] buttons at the top of the Compelling Press book page, let me know by email, and I’ll add a suitable anagram on the front page for you. 🙂

Pre-1450 German Voynich possibility…?

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The recent Austrian Voynich documentary gave a nice clear radiocarbon dating (1404-1438 at 95% confidence) for the vellum, and finished by suggesting (based on the swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle) a Northern Italian origin for the manuscript. But I have to say that as art history proofs go, that last bit is a little bit, ummm, lame: it’s a single detail on a single page, that might just as well be a copy of a previous drawing (or a drawing of a description, or an imaginary castle) as a real castle.

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of sensible art history reasons to suspect Northern Italy 1450-1470, for example:-

  1. Swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle are reminiscent of those on many Northern Italian (and Southern Italian, too) castles of the 14th and 15th centuries
  2. The rendering of the sun faces on f67v1 and f68v1 are reminiscent of the Visconti sun raza, most notably as per  in the Milan Duomo’s “Apocalypse” apse window (1420), so arguably point to a post-1420 dating
  3. Voynichese seems to be a more advanced version of those ciphers in Sforza / Urbino cipher ledgers that have the same verbose ‘4o’ character pair
  4. Handwriting is strongly reminiscent of Milanese “humanist” hands circa 1460-1470
  5. Dots on ‘pharma’ glassware (f89r1 and f89r2) are strongly reminiscent of post-1450 Murano glass decoration
  6. Decoration on barrels / albarelli is most reminiscent of 1450-1475 Islamic-influence maiolica
  7. The kind of baths apparently depicted in the balneo quire became most fashionable in Italy between 1450 and 1490
  8. The costumes and hair styles of the many Voynich ‘nymphs’ have been dated as belonging to the second half of the 15th century (and typically dated later rather than earlier)
  9. Parallel hatching only appeared in Florence in 1440, and in Venice (and elsewhere in Italy) from about 1450 onwards, before giving way to cross-hatching from about 1480 onwards.
  10. (etc)

But Northern Italy 1404-1438? Actually, apart from the first two above (which I have to say are probably the least persuasive of all), the evidence falls away to almost nothing, rather like an oddly disturbing dream fading away as you wake up in the morning.

But what about Germany circa 1404-1438? After all, Erwin Panofsky thought a German origin most likely (though perhaps he took a little bit too much notice of Richard Salomon’s readings of the marginalia), and there’s a touch of Germanic influence in the “augst” marginalia month name for the Leo zodiac page. Others have suggested Germany over the years, most recently Volkhard Huth (though I somehow doubt it’s Jim Child’s pronounceable early German, or Beatrice Gwynn’s left-right-mirrored Middle High German, while Huth’s 1480-1500 dating now seems a little adrift as well).

Art history links with Germany are thin on the ground in the Voynich Manuscript: it’s a (very) short list, comprising the general stylistic similarity between the VMs zodiac’s central rosettes and early German woodblock calendars, and the recent (but very tenuous) cisioianus comparison with f67r2: Panofsky also pointed to Richard Salomon’s reading of some clumps of marginalia as German, and to the fact the VMs eventually surfaced in Prague… but this is all pretty optimistic (if not actually hallucinatory) stuff. Basically, you’d need to do a lot better than that to build up any kind of plausible case. (Though I don’t know if Volkhard Huth added any new observations to this list).

But one thing that emerged since I wrote my parallel hatching history page is that the technique actually seems to have emerged in Germany before it appeared in Florence. I mentioned that there was a German master engraver known as “Master E.S.” (also known as the “Master of 1466”), who produced a number of hatched and cross-hatched pieces in the period 1450-1467: and I was content with the generally accepted art history notion that the technique probably spread northwards from Florence to Venice and Germany at roughly the same time (i.e. 1450).

However, the problem with this presumed ‘Italy → Germany’ model is that there was another German engraver (“Meister der Spielkarten”, “The Master of the Cards“) who was active (1425-1450) a generation or so before Master E.S., and who includes fine parallel lines in his work, most notably in the oldest known set of copperplate playing cards (1440). Anyone who wants to read up on this should probably rush to get themselves a copy of Martha Anne Wood Wolff’s 1979 Yale PhD thesis “The Master of the playing cards: an early engraver and his relationship to traditional media”. (Please let me know if you do!) Alternatively, you might well find things of interest in Martha Wolff’s paper “Some Manuscript Sources for the Playing Card Master’s Number Cards” , The Art Bulletin 64, Dec. 1982, p.587-600.

Of course, I don’t think for a moment that The Master of the Cards’ clear line and nuanced material rendering has anything directly to do with what we see in the VMs. Rather, it just seems worth noting that the existence of parallel hatching in the VMs is consistent with a post-1420 origin if German, with a post-1440 origin if from Florence , or a post-1450 origin if from elsewhere.

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 palimpsest hypothesis…?

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I was sitting on a train trying to reconcile the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum dating (1404-1438) with its art history dating (1450-1470), while also pondering the various layered aspects of its codicology (such as the pictures apparently behind some the water nymphs), when an unexpected thought popped into my head.

Might the VMs have its (erased) plaintext as a palimpsest beneath its ciphertext?

That is, might the Voynich Manuscript be an enciphered copy of the document that was originally written in broadly the same place on the same pages? The overall timeline could work like this:-

  • 1420 or so: the author compiles his/her books of secrets onto brand new vellum.
  • 1460 or so: the author copies each line or paragraph onto a wax tablet, erases the line or paragraph from the vellum, and replaces it with an enciphered version.

If this is correct (and though I admit that the odds are against it, I do think it’s worth considering), the issue would then become whether the original plaintext might somehow be made legible again – that is, whether the plaintext’s ink made a sufficiently permanent contact with the vellum that some kind of imaging might now reveal it, even if it was heavily erased at the time.

Over on the MapHist mailing list in recent days, there has been a lot of ink-related discussion about the Vinland Map (which has its own curious cryptographic angle that Jim Enterline has been doggedly pursuing for years): this interesting analytical paper on vellums and inks was cited, as well as “Ink Corrosion” by Gerhard Banik. This latter paper discusses Haerting’s “conclusion that only inks containing iron(II) salts can cause ink degradation damage. The other components of the ink […] do not cause noticeable damage to the support medium.”

At first glance, you’d have to say that the VMs really doesn’t appear to be a classical palimpsest: but this is because palimpsests were typically washed clean and the second layer of writing put down at right angles to the original direction of the text.

But perhaps some of the original ink layer wasn’t erased, in forms other than that of almost imperceptible damage to the support material: I’m thinking in particular of the “hidden house” on f77v that I discussed here back in June 2009.

voynich-f77v-central-nymph

I’m pretty sure that this originally depicted some kind of house structure (drawn in faint, straight lines), but that the “water nymph” and the “wolkenbanden” were subsequently added in a later pass (in a completely different ink) to mislead the eye.

Codicologically, what is most interesting here is that the original ink (i.e. from the “house”) might be identified and separated out into its own layer… and that understanding its particular composition (and the way that it interacts with the support material) might point to a way of imaging the manuscript’s original (1420?) ink layers from beneath the subsequent (1460?) ink layers (if it exists, of course).

Basicaly, why even try to break the cipher, if it might be possible just to read it? Now wouldn’t that be a surprise for everyone!

Asemic Voynich poem…

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Here’s today’s gratuitous Voynich limerick (stop me if you’ve heard it before):-

A microscope gives you a two-fold
Clue to the secrets of true gold
You need it to write
Baconian sh!te
And you need it to read it like Newbold

Rather less meaningfully, here’s a Voynich-related “asemic” (defined as ‘having no specific semantic content’, so make of it what you will, quite literally) poem that popped up onto the web a few days ago. Though it fails to tease with my brand of appalling rhymes, it does have a charm of its own. Enjoy! 🙂

Das Voynich-Rätsel – now viewable online (but hurry!)

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Here it is, the Austrian Voynich documentary we’ve been waiting so eagerly for – and you don’t even need to have a satellite dish to watch it (as long as you hurry, it’ll probably only be online for a few days).

(Hint and tip: if you click on the diagonal arrow button just above the video, you can watch it in your own media player – and if that happens to be Windows Media Player (*sigh*), don’t forget that you can turn on the (German) subtitles with the unforgettable key combination CTRL-SHIFT-C.)

The documentary features Micky Bet Rene Zandbergen chatting amiably with 21st century Voynich stalwarts Gordon Rugg and Richard SantaColoma, lots of “flying-low”-style rostrum sequences of the Voynich Manuscript, together with other historical / forensic talking heads you may not have heard of, such as Paula Zyats, Kevin Repp, Joseph Barabe, Gerhard Strasser and Greg Hodgins.

My German isn’t really industrial strength, but I’m reasonably sure I picked up most of the research-relevant stuff: a blue pigment that was tested was azurite, a red was red ochre (but I wasn’t sure about the green). And the 1404-1438 range was indeed 2-sigma (95%), and there’s a nice graph showing the peaks against the C14 dating curve.

The documentary showed Greg Hodgins slicing a fine edge off from the Quire 9 sexfolio: which I would argue is a Very Good Thing, because that is one of the bifolios least likely to be old vellum. Doubtless we shall hear more about this over the next few days…

I don’t know, though: at the end of the whole beautiful-looking documentary, the researcher part of me felt a tiny bit cheated – that for all their hard work, the documentary makers hadn’t really managed to engage with the last decade of proper Voynich research (and I don’t really include Gordon Rugg in that), but rather had steered their televisual plough along what I would call a resolutely “Voynich 1.0” furrow. Basically, whenever I hear keywords like “inquisition”, “alchemy”, “allegorical”, “Doctor Mirabilis” and “heresy”, something in me switches off: rather, I want to be hearing words like “layer”, “spectroscopic”, “multispectral”, “ductus”, “hands”, “composition”, “sequence”, “Raman”, “DNA”, “pollen”, “Urbino”, “ledger”, etc.

What do you think? Were Andreas Sulzer and his team wide of the target or did they actually hit the spot?

Mormons, Masons, and Mario…?

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Ex-Mormon Mike Reed became interested in a lightly-enciphered entry in Mormon founder Brigham Young’s diary (dated 6th January 1842)… and wondered to himself whether Young was actually using a Masonic “Royal Arch cipher” (basically, a kind of pigpen cipher).

Well… after a bit of online bantering with an LDS (“Latter Day Saints”) apologist, the answer turned out to be: basically yes, Young was. Amusingly, the apologist also cited a Royal Arch cipher as per p.42 of “A Big Color Activity Book: Nintendo Super Mario Bros.” (1989), as used by his 9-year-old son – and I couldn’t miss the once-in-a-lifetime chance to segue from Mormons to Masons to Mario. 🙂

Apart from the large number of pictures, what I liked most about Mike’s post (and which I’m sure Tony Gaffney would appreciate too) was keeping track of the proportion of errors made while enciphering – adding or dropping dots, reversing shapes, etc. Enjoy!