As a brief follow-up to yesterday’s post on Edith Rickert, I wondered whether her papers might be in the University of Chicago archives – and indeed here they are. For any Voynich researcher who just happens to be passing by, you might consider looking through Box 1 Folder 8 (for correspondence) and Box 10 Folder 13 (for photographs of her family – not important, but nice to see all the same).
The U. of C. also holds the papers of her younger sister Margaret Rickert: she specialised in medieval illuminated manuscripts (there’s a 10-page paper on her in the 2005 book “Women Medievalists and the Academy“) and worked as a code-breaker in WWII, just as her older sister had done in WWI. She’s briefly mentioned in the First Study Group minutes – one from 1944 that notes she “accompanied WFF [William Friedman] at Phila[delphia] in 1923 to hear Newbold. Cannot add anything else“; and another that notes she attended a 31 August 1945 FSG meeting. Box 1 holds her notes on various manuscripts: might she have taken notes on the Voynich Manuscript? My guess is no, that the small range of poor quality reproductions of Voynich Manuscript pages available at that time probably dissuaded her from getting interested in it as an art history puzzle. But you never know until you look!
Of course, John Matthews Manly’s papers are there too (the link has a nice summary of his life, including his famous “cigar” story) – I’ve summarized the Voynich-related ones here already, but would also note here that his Series II of folders related purely to cryptographic correspondence.
