Ludus and paidia, VMs-style…

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I just stumbled upon a January 2008 paper on translating nonsense texts in Translation Studies journal, written by Jean-Jacques Lecercle from the University of Nanterre, for the simple reason that it happened to discuss the (apparently nonsensical) Voynich Manuscript.

Plainly, Gordon Rugg’s hoax-theory fan-club (which I guess used to be Terence McKenna’s hoax-theory fan-club) has been all too successful in its drive for new members: but really, ’tis pity she’s no hoax.

Though I wasn’t quite intrigued enough by the article’s abstract to pay Informaworld the required £15 + VAT to download it, its mention of Callois’ ludus and paidia did get me thinking, particularly considering my background as a computer games programmer: Callois tries to categorise games along a continuum between fully structured games (ludus) and totally unstructured ones (paidia).

In the context of the Voynich, this has an additional resonance for me. The main VMs mailing list used to be a church broad enough to encompass both structured and unstructured contributions, broadly corresponding to people playing the Voynich research game as a ludus or as a paidia. But in recent years, it seems to me that this tolerance slowly disintegrated: as art historical and forensic evidence has started to encroach on the whole game, a number of the unstructured game-players have started to feel threatened. In fact, the idea that they might have to play by rules (even if those rules were laid down by the Voynich Manuscript’s own author/authors!) was so unappealing to them that they began to fight against the whole notion of evidence.

The whole hoax theory is in many ways symptomatic of this trend: roughly speaking, it says “every piece of VMs evidence might have been faked, and so the hoax hypothesis provides a complete explanation for every scenario that can be imagined… regardless of the evidence.” Such an acutely anti-evidential stance is perilously close to a kind of ‘creationist’-style take on the VMs, where the VMs sprung as a convincing, fully-rounded entity from the hoaxer’s imagination [like Athena from Zeus’ head?], in all its multi-layered forensic glory.

I simply don’t buy into this kind of armchair intellectual fantasy: there’s deception and misdirection at the heart of the VMs, for sure – but there’s also an overriding rationality behind it too, one that has structured it as a complex ludus to frustrate us (but which has become scrambled over time), not as a Rorschachian paidia, where every interpretation is equally true.

However unpopular it may sound, my judgment is that the anti-evidentialism on the main Voynich mailing list has now become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Just because we can glimpse the VMs’ rules does not mean that the game is over: instead, I think it signals that the game is moving from paidia to ludus… whether that suits you or not.

A monstrance is born…

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The best academic stories normally begin something like “I was chatting with [name-drop] in the bar/taxi/plane/train after the conference when…“: so I’ll do my best to shoehorn the following into that template…

After Day One of the Warwick/Warburg “Resources and Techniques” seminars in Warwick, I ended up standing in the aisle of a packed Virgin Pendolino train all the way to London, in the company of two fellow course participants (Zoe Willis and Charlotte Bolland) and Francois Quiviger, one of the course lecturers from the Warburg Institute. Francois knew little about the Voynich Manuscript, but was interested enough to take a look at the pictures in Jean-Claude Gawsewitch’s “Le Code Voynich“, the (how can I put it any other way?) French coffee-table edition of the VMs. (And yes, I was carrying a copy in my bag: as with all things Voynichian, you make your own luck.)

Francois very kindly suggested a number of things I might consider: for example, when looking at the pharma section, he immediately asked if the idea that the ornate “jars” might be optical instruments (such as unknown kinds of telescopes) had been considered (it has, of course). He also wondered about the apparent resemblance between some of the (apparently) fantastical glass objects in the VMs’ pharmacological section and the monstrance, a word so beautifully obscure I simply had to look up on my return…

From the dawn of Christianity onwards, many churches owned (or claimed to own) holy relics: bones or teeth of saints, ephemera linked with miracles, nails or fragments from the One True Cross, Christ’s baby teeth, even the Holy Foreskin (yes, really: there’s a fascinating 2006 article from Slate here about its modern history), and so on. (Coincidentally, Michael Cordy’s novel “The Messiah Code” which I mentioned here name-checks many of these still-existent objects of veneration.)

Quite reasonably, many historians now wonder whether many of these were simply medieval money-making scams for attracting pilgrims and parting them from their money: Internet hype, circa 1250. But the pilgrim had to be able to see the relics whose claimed powers they had travelled so far to have contact with (in some cases literally – the blind could allegedly be cured by rubbing the Holy Foreskin on their eyelids, it says here): and therein lay the problem.

Right from the start, boxes or caskets containing relics needed to both protect the relic and to help make it accessible to pilgrims, as well as allowing the relic to be carried around on particular saint’s days: and so these reliquaries evolved into gaudy carrying-cases, sometimes fashioned in part from transparent rock crystal, thus solving all the problems. Technically, the precise term for a partly-transparent reliquary is a a philatory, but this is such an incredibly rare term that it is unlikely to help you much in your Googling: indeed, philatory will get you nowhere.

A monstrance, then, is a very specific kind of philatory, not for an ancient relic but for a special kind of relic that is recreated all the time – the consecrated Eucharistic Host. In Catholicism, the wafer and wine are believed quite literally to turn into Christ’s Body and Blood (the whole process is “transsubstantiation”), a real mini-miracle. Churches needed some affordable way of displaying the Host, of demonstrating the Real Presence of Christ to the assembled faithful: but how?

To solve this problem, someone invented circa 1475 the “monstrance”: a portable golden object, typically with a central “luna”, a circular glass area (for the transformed wafer to slip into for display) not unlike a pair of oversized glass specimen slides (modern monstrances are sometimes categorized by the diameter of the luna). And these remain in use today, with only cosmetic changes from this basic design.

Etymologically, monstrance comes from the same Latin roots from which we get “demonstrate”, and so retains its meaning of ‘showing something’: another obscure word (though one probably even less useful for Scrabble players) for the same object is ostensorium, which is presumably somehow linked with ostentatious.

What I find interesting in all this is that, just beneath the surface history, I can catch a glimpse of the kind of properly Warburgian history Francois Quiviger was talking about when he looked at the pharma section. From 1450 onwards, the invention and manufacture of beautifully-clear cristallo glass in Murano transformed the whole way objects such as philatories and monstrances were conceived: by breaking the need for (what was ludicrously expensive) rock crystal, cristallo made visibility an affordable design feature.

Could it be, then, that what we are seeing in this part of the VMs is not a set of purely fantasy glass objects, but possibly a kind of mangled brochure for a range of designs for cristallo-based philatories or monstrances, in the period at the end of the Quattrocento when the former was somehow seguing into the latter? 1475 is the earliest date I’ve seen quoted for a monstrance, but I would be unsurprised if the actual date of origination were to be found to be a little closer to 1450.

I couldn’t claim (by any stretch of the imagination) to be an expert on early modern reliquaries, philatories and monstrances (and how many such experts are there in the world, anyway?): but it’s an intriguing suggestion, one on which I’d be interested to hear any comments…

Mona Lisa overkill…

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Why is it that so many people wonder whether Leonardo da Vinci created the Voynich Manuscript? Even well-informed, thoughtful people such as Edith Sherwood (whose Adwords ad frequently pops up if you happen to Google for “Voynich”) manage to succumb to this notion.

There’s only one little problem: the VMs’ pen-strokes predominantly go from top-left to bottom-right, clearly indicating that it was written by someone who was right-handed. (Or left-handed, writing from right-to-left with the pages upside-down: but that just seems a bit stupid). In terms of identifying the author, that’s about 10% of the population eliminated: but, sadly, this is the tranche containing our Florentine chum Leonardo.

It’s probably symptomatic of what I call “join-the-dots history”, where you start with a set of evocative pieces and then work out the minimum amount of evidence you need to appropriate / use / abuse to link them together in a way that suggests some kind of correlation. For example, if you started with the (fake) Priory of Sion, Leonardo da Vinci, and Opus Dei… errrrrm… no, that would never work…

Anyway, here’s the latest real news on Leonardo: apparently, the Mona Lisa was indeed a picture of Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and was being painted in October 1503. We have a “Heidelberg library expert” called Armin Schlechter to thank for finding this: and thankful I am.

What, *another* Voynich novel?

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Another Voynich-inspired (I’m yet sure whether or not “Voynich-themed” might be putting it a bit strongly) novel to add to the ever-fattening Big Fat List. Australian writer Matt Rubinstein‘s novel was called “A Little Rain on Thursday” (the picture is from f75r) when it was published last June in Oz by Text Publishing: it appeared here last July (published by Quercus) under the title “Vellum“. Amazon Marketplace has copies for £1.98 + £2.75 UK p&p: I’ve ordered one & will post a review here ASAP. It doesn’t appear to have any evil Jesuit priests in it, which has to be A Very Good Thing Indeed.

What’s sort of appealing (well – to me, at least) is the way he casually slips the words “marginalia” and “forensic” into the cover blurb. However, this may well be a weakness, given that to keep him fed and watered in writerland, his book has to sell to a large number of non-Voynicheros, to whom such things are usually fairly alien (even if they do watch CSI).

Oh, and the stuff in the story about the manuscript decipherer being obsessive may also have alienated him from passing VMs-ologists. We’re not obsessive, I tell you: we count the number of stars on each section of each page for scientific reasons, damnit! Errrrrrrrrrm…

…maybe he’s got a point. Oh well… :-((((

CRASSH Secrets Conference…

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How did I manage not to notice this conference before now? “Secrets and Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Commerce 1500-1800” runs from 15th-16th February 2008 at CRASSH at Cambridge University, featuring such stars as William Eamon (whose epic “Science and the Secrets of Nature” sits by my right shoulder) and Lauren Kassell (with whom I briefly corresponded about the Book of Dunstan back in 2001).

It sounds like a fascinating, fantastic mini-event, and I just can’t wait… even though I’ll probably be the only Voynichologist there. Does anyone else see the VMs as a mid-Quattrocento example of the “books of secrets” genre too? Apparently not… *sigh*

Voynich Manuscript in existing novels…?

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From the apparent tsunami of Voynich fiction about to crash down on our literary shores over the next year, it might seem that the VMs had never previously appeared in a novel. Yet this is not exactly true…

For example, “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” (Max McCoy, Bantam Books, 1995) is based entirely around the Voynich Manuscript: set in March 1933, a mad scholar called Sarducci has stolen the VMs (which is actually a map), and so Indy chases him through Mussolini’s fascist Italy all the way to an amazing alchemical crypt in the desert… From what I’ve read of this book, it actually seems to be a pleasantly pulpy read, very much in tune with the actual VMs, and with a refreshing lack of power-mad Jesuit priests. However, I should warn you that it will be re-released on 29th April 2008, presumably to try to ride the whole 2008 Voy-niche publishing wave. *sigh*

Another pair of VMs-themed books came to my attention via the Bellairsia blog, which is devoted to books by the writer John Anthony Bellairs. His most famous novel was “The Face in the Frost” (1969), a fantasy novel in which Prospero and Roger Bacon fight against a mysterious grimoire that sounds not at all dissimilar to the VMs. After Bellairs’ death in 1991, his estate commissioned author Brad Strickland to complete and continue Bellairs’ various series: and it is in one of these that protagonist Johnny Dixon faces “The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost” (1999), which features the VMs in a starring role.

Connections between J.R.R.Tolkien and the VMs have been suggested in the past. According to Voynich mailing list member Anthony, Tolkien did indeed own a copy of at least one page of the VMs, which may have played a small part in influencing his choice of the fantasy scripts in his books. As I recall, there were a number of people in Tolkien’s Oxford circle that had an interest in early modern scientific manuscripts, so this does seem a perfectly sensible idea.

Many people have also wondered about the relationship between H.P.Lovecraft’s Necronomicon and the Voynich Manuscript: Colin Wilson based a short story called “The Return of the Lloigor” around this, and returned to the theme at the end of his novel “The Philosopher’s Stone”.

All the same, this modest pile of Voynich fiction looks set to triple in height this year… interesting times!

Comets in Quire 20…?

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After my recent (and unexpectedly extended) foray into Voynich-themed novels, I thought it would be a good idea to get back to proper manuscript research.

f112r-star-para1One small feature I’ve been mulling over is the “starred paragraphs” in Quire 20, the final gathering in the VMs (the one which famously ends with the “michiton oladabas” page). I posted about this section not long ago, discussing Vladimir Sazonov’s suggestion that it might originally have formed some kind of 365-paragraph calendar. But what I’m thinking about here is the possibility that the “tailed stars” used to mark the start of each paragraph here were actually comets, chosen on the basis of a Latin pun.

Back circa 1500, the named structures used for written works were often slightly different from now. What we moderns would call a chapter or part, would typically have been called a book: while a modern subsection (a block of continuous text with a descriptive header) would typically have been called a chapter, or capitulum (literally “diminutive caput“, “little head”). Ironically, the short punchy chapters in Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” are closer in spirit to this medieval world of text than most other modern books.

What we therefore see in Quire 20 is what I think would have been understood in context to be not so much a series of paragraphs, but a series of “chapters” within a “book”. With this in mind, might those little shapes that have usually been called the “stars” or “tailed stars” be instead iconic comets?

Our word “comet” originally came from the Latin cometes, which itself was a loan-word from the Greek kometes, “wearing long hair” (it’s in Aristotle). Similarly, the Latin term crinis means hair, or tail of a comet, or rays of sun: and so a comet may be called a stella crinita, a ‘hairy star’ (yes, really!)

So, when I now look at the starred paragraphs, I do think that the “stars” there are very probably comets comprised of a little head (capitulum) and a deliberately hair-like tail. This kind of punning visual / Latin iconographic word-play would be consistent with the view of the VMs as a high-culture cipher: but perhaps seems a little too ornate or too conceptually ‘fancy’ for a mere hoax.

Modern astrologers (even such mainstream ones as Jonathan Cainer) are still sent into a tailspin (if you’ll forgive the pun) by comets, seeing in them omens for, well, all sorts of things, such as the death of Benazir Bhutto, etc: which is, of course, no different to ancient, medieval and Renaissance astrologers alike, for whom comets had the power to invite speculation, wonder, and fear.

But for the VMs, where should this research thread go next? As far as art history goes, Giotto famously depicted the 1301 appearance of Halley’s Comet in his Adoration of the Magi: and if you subscribe to a likely Quattrocento origin for the manuscript (as I do), I would guess that there is a lot more to find in Roberta Olson’s (2000) “The Florentine Tondo” (ISBN10: 019817425X, ISBN13: 9780198174257, £85) – pricy (but supposedly fascinating). I would also suggest “Cometary theory in Fifteenth Century Europe” (Kluwer, 1985, also £80 or so) by Jane L. Jervis, and Lynn Thorndike’s (1958) “Some tracts on Comets 1456-1500” (in Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 11 (1958) pp.225-260), none of which I’ve seen myself but perhaps will one day soon (if I spend a day at the BL, or win the lottery). I’ve also read that Galileo discussed (in his “Il Saggiatore“) the three comets that were seen in 1417: and so there was presumably much debate on this at the time.

I don’t know: it seems possibly too lightweight an issue to devote a great deal of time to. And yet there is much in the VMs that points to astronomical and astrological thinking – enough that I can empathize with Enrique Joven’s novel “Castle in the Stars“, where the VMs is imagined as being part of that general tradition (No! Enough with the novels, already!). Maybe there is enough there after all…

"The Curse of the Voynich" gets cited!

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Sorry for posting like an overexcited puppy, but my Voynich book‘s first citation is surely worthy to me of a minor celebration: less than a backflip, but more than a raised eyebrow.

The just-published (January 2008) Cryptologia article where it is mentioned is “Cicco Simonetta’s Cipher-Breaking Rules“, by Augusto Buonafalce, who so generously reviewed my book in the same journal last year. It’s a nice little piece to introduce cryptologers and cryptography historians to Cicco Simonetta [there’s a nice Italian page on him here], with the added bonus of a good translation of his “regulae” (rules): it even has a black and white reproduction of a painting of Cicco I was not previously aware of.

Augusto rightly dismisses the thought of a powerful Milanese statesman “engaging in the encryption of the Voynich manuscript“: but that’s not really a summary of my book’s argument. What I actually argue is that the presence of the “4o” token in a good number of mid-Quattrocento Northern Italian cipher alphabets (including the Voynich Manuscript) points to a continuity of cipher thinking, one which seemed to travel around with the Sforza miltary caravan… just as Cicco Simonetta did from an early age.

To be precise, I don’t claim that Cicco wrote the VMs, or even designed its cipher alphabet. Far from it: rather, that its “4o” token points to a deep-rooted connection between its cipher-system and the ciphers constructed and used by the Milanese Chancellery. My book conjectures that this “4o” ‘verbose cipher’ trick may have been disclosed in the 1465 meeting between Antonio Averlino and Cicco Simonetta, at which the former placed his outstanding Milanese affairs in the hands of the latter before leaving Milan forever. But in the world of tenuous Voynichological hypotheses, this is one at least that did actually happen! 🙂

For all its merits, it would be wrong to characterize Augusto’s Cryptologia article as being the final word in the cryptographic history debate over Cicco Simonetta’s Regulae: the conclusions I (and others) draw from the available data are quite different, and (in the absence of more conclusive evidence) we can politely agree to differ – and that’s OK.

As a side-note here, when I cited (on my p.182) a 1970 article on Cicco’s Regulae, I contacted its very-much-still-alive author (Walter Hoeflechner) to see if anyone else in the intervening 36 years had shown an interest – and only the ubiquitous David Kahn had. From that, it’s easy to see that the discussion of the intriguing intersection between cryptography and politics offered by Simonetta is very much out of fashion: which is a bit of a shame.

And therefore, I think it would be very nice if Augusto’s article proved instead to be the first word in a rather more modern debate over the Regulae: the new generation of historians and researchers who have taken an interest in seeing what the Sforza-era bureaucratic archives have to tell us would almost certainly be bound to find new angles and approaches, and might well carry us all forward in new and interesting directions.

Finally… for me, what is nicest about Augusto’s citation is that it is one of those rarest of hen’s teeth: a Voynich-related book or paper getting cited outside of the Voynich literature. It is far too early to say that this marks the point where the VMs goes fully mainstream… but it’s a start, surely?

Magic circles at Treadwell’s…

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Anyone of a Voynichological leaning who is near London on Wednesday 19th March should consider popping by Treadwell’s in Covent Garden for a lecture by William Kiesel on “The Circle of Arte – Magic Circles in the Western Grimoire Tradition” (Ouroboros Press). It’s £5 (though reserve a place earlier if you can, it’s only fair): as normal with Treadwell’s, arrive there at 7.15pm for a 7.30pm start.

The reason, if you don’t already know it, is that there is a mysterious magic circle in the Voynich itself, on page f57v. In my book, I briefly (pp.124-125) discussed a number of similarities between this and folio 105v of Clm 849, the 15th century Munich manuscript analyzed in Richard Kieckhefer’s reasonably well-known book “Forbidden Rites“: but despite my best efforts, this probably only scratched the surface. I am thoroughly looking forward to learning more about this fascinating subject: let me know if you’re coming, and I hope to see you there!

And the new Kahn is… Kahn?

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For a while, I’ve been wondering about what “the new Kahn” (i.e. what the updated, 2007 equivalent of David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers“) would be. On a whim, I recently bought a couple of plausible-looking cryptography history books, just in case one of them might be that book…

“Codes, Ciphers, Secrets and Cryptic Communication” by Fred B. Wrixon is quite cool. In its 704 pages of cryptographic and cryptologic fun, it bounces along at a fair old rate, not only discussing plenty of different historical ciphers but also describing ways of cracking them – both making and breaking. It has two brief pages on the VMs (pp.555-556). Its weakness (in my opinion) is that it is somewhat fragmented (in an encyclopaedic kind of way), possibly because it was formed by merging two earlier books by the same author into a single larger book. Good if you want a quicky book to tell you how to break historical ciphers. But not Kahn.

“Codebreaker: The history of secret communication” by Stephen Pincock and Mark Frary is OK, but didn’t really work for me. Consistently misspelling Trithemius as Trimethius (even in the index) didn’t help in this regard: but the book has other merits, such as the glorious colour photograph of the Phaistos disk on page 5. It’s a well-illustrated piece of popular science journalism, with three colourful pages on the VMs (pp.49-51, showing f11r, f56r, and f67r1-2, though labelling them “Nature and alchemy” might be a little be off the mark). Random House obviously thought there was a need (in these post-Da Vinci Code days) for a colourful cryptography / history / journalism thing: I’m not so sure. I suspect the authors would have been better off telling a historical story than what they produced: beautifully produced, but not really enough of any substance, nor large enough to be a proper coffee table book. (Sorry!)

Which leads me back to David Kahn. If you are serious about reading up on the history of cryptography, I’d suggest searching on BookFinder.com for a copy of the unabridged (1136 page!) version of “The Codebreakers”. For now, Kahn is still king! 😮