H C Reynolds – we now have a date of birth!

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Cheryl Bearden & I have managed to eke out lots more tiny details in our hunt for the elusive merchant seaman H C Reynolds, including his precise date of birth! And I’ve also exchanged some intriguing emails with the Anonymous Lady who put forward the ID card in the first place. But all in good time…

First things first: given that the three ships Reynolds worked on during his 18 months at sea were all owned by the Union Steam Ship Company (a sprawling Australasian shipping company known as the “Southern Octopus”, and at one point the largest private employer in New Zealand), I thought we might be able to find something in the USSCo’s archives. Having eventually tracked down the bulk of them to the City Archives of Wellington City Council, a very helpful archivist managed to find a short record relating to H C Reynolds in AF019:1:1 (“Pursers records [1-4] – 1879-1925“), which she noted seemed to be “the log book [listing] pursers holiday leave”. It said:-

Reynolds, H.C.:

Appt [appointed] ass [assistant] purser: Manuka 12/11/17

Jnr [Junior] Hobart Branch

50 pound Birthday 8/[2]/1900

Asig [Assigned] Koonya 15/4/18

Shore mate £75 as from 1/11/17

Resigned

Hence, I think we can now be reasonably sure that the H Charles Reynolds on the ID card was born in Hobart, Tasmania on the 8th February 1900. Curiously, this is also precisely the same date of birth listed on ancestry.com for the Horace Charles Reynolds who was born in Triabunna, Tasmania (a mere 50 miles away): which you have to say is either an extraordinary coincidence, exactly the same person, or crossed archival wires. (I’m not offering an opinion here – I prefer to find evidence rather than inflict yet more speculation upon you.)

Unfortunately, a more detailed follow-up search of AF020:1:1 (“Record of pursers services – 1883- 1919“), AF050:3:1 (“Register of employees (shore staff), no. 1-699 – 1909-1976“) and particularly AF050:4:1 (“Register of employees (shore staff), no. 700- 1399 – 1909-1976“) which “covers the year a shore staff member joined service between the years 1917-1919” failed to find even a single mention of Reynolds. Which is, of course, a great shame. 🙁

I also recently discovered PapersPast, an online archive of New Zealand newspapers: though it doesn’t have quite as flexible a search interface as Australia’s Trove, it’s still pretty good. So, now that we know Reynolds was appointed to the Manuka on the 12th November 1917, I tried trawling through the shipping columns on the editions around that date to see if he was mentioned at all (there was often a “Personal” section that mentioned appointments etc). And indeed, in the Evening Post of 14th November 1917, the shipping column noted, plausibly enough, that:

Mr H. Reynolds has joined a vessel as assistant wireless operator in place of Mr. R. K. Lewis.

However, I was unable (as always, it would seem) to find any other obvious references to him there. Cheryl Bearden was also unable to find any reference to R K Lewis. Once again, it seems that archives are mainly characterized by their solid brick wall construction, with special internal brick walls for researchers to conveniently hit their heads against repeatedly. 🙁

I also recently found an online “Index to Vessels Arrived, 1837 – 1925” in the NSW archives, listing all the Koonya’s arrivals in Sydney, which corresponded very closely to the manifests Cheryl Bearden already found, except for a missing 8th December 1918 arrival. This turned out to be another “Chas Reynolds” signature:-

* 08 Dec 1918, Koonya, arr Sydney NSW (from Melbourne). Chas Reynolds, 18 years, born Hobart, Purser.

This inspired Cheryl to look once again at the same archives whereupon she intriguingly discovered that while H C Reynolds was filling in on the RMS Niagara, a certain “M Reynolds” was working on the Manuka:-

* 02 Apr 1918, Manuka, arr Sydney NSW (from Hobart). M Reynolds, 17 years, born Tasmania, Boy.

Now, H C Reynolds couldn’t sensibly be on two ships at the same time: so could this possibly be HCR’s younger brother, covering for HCR while HCR was away on the big mail ship? If that’s right, then we may possibly now have another Reynolds to go looking for – one hopefully not quite as elusive as HCR has proved to be so far. However, Cheryl Bearden was yet again unable to find any other reference to an “M Reynolds”, so this too would seem to be a dead end (for now). 🙁

Incidentally, one thing that has bothered me was how H C Reynolds managed to get fast-tracked to a full purser’s job at such a young age (18). There seems a good chance that he had some assistance, some insider track or external accreditation to recommend him to the management. So, I dug up a couple of additional connections between Reynolds people and USSCo, one of which might possibly offer this link:-

(1) There was a well-respected Captain Reynolds, who sailed numerous ships (such as the SS Glaucus and the labour vessel Helena) around Wellington & Adelaide. Here’s a news report from the Evening Post of Captain Reynolds arriving from Surprise Island in 1917.
(2) A company called “T A Reynolds & Co” or “T A Reynolds & Partners” in Hobart bought some ships from USSCo but then sold them back to them later that year (1896). T A Reynolds were “loosely associated with USSCo” and had the contract to build the Strahan to Zeehan Railway, according to this page.

All very interesting, but sadly not even close to helpful as yet. Ah well, I’ll keep on chipping away at the mountain…

Finally, as I mentioned at the top I’ve exchanged some intriguing emails with the Anonymous Lady, who (I think it fair to say) has quite a lot on her mind, with the Unknown Man merely one of many things she is trying to resolve. She’s the person who owns the H C Reynolds ID card, and it was also her who sent that off to Professor Maciej Henneberg. As far as many of the open questions on the ID card go, she noted that:

“The underside corner of the photo was signed and matched that shown on the front. Initially I tried to remove the photo to see if any other information was there,but it was stuck down so hard it would not budge. I thought something this old would give way easily. Glues used in 1918 would be inferior to what’s around now surely? Also HCR photo has the appearance of a dimple or cleft on the chin. I almost did’nt send it due to that, however Maciej found on examination that it was only a mark on the photo. I don’t know if it was placed there deliberately. The back of the I.D.,where it states “Port of……….is empty. His status…Division 1 …….2 ……..3 is unmarked and is unsigned by the Immigration Inspector. If the I.D. was dodgy though, why not just fill it in?”

In a separate email, she mentioned that her father had somehow implied that Reynolds was some kind of artist. Interestingly, I discovered a pavement artist called Ernest Reynolds in some old Australian newspapers, who seemed a curious mix of talent, chutzpah and delusion: he called himself “King of the Pavement Artists”, and traced his lineage back on his father’s side to none other than Joshua Reynolds. There’s even a 1908 interview with him reproduced on a blog here.

In 1933, the same Ernest Reynolds also claimed to have invented a car that could travel at 100 miles an hour over poor ground [I checked AusPat, but he appears not to have patented this]. Also in 1933, he was living in Cassidy Street, Kalgoorlie, way over in Western Australia.

Really, you couldn’t make this stuff up. More as it happens…

Alternative Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page…

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Here’s what I think the Voynich Wikipedia page ought to look like. Enjoy! 🙂

* * * * * * *

History of a Mystery

Once upon a time (in 1912) in a crumbling Jesuit college near Rome, an antiquarian bookseller called Wilfrid Voynich bought a mysterious enciphered handwritten book. Despite its length (240 pages) it was an ugly, badly-painted little thing, for sure: but its strange text and drawings caught his imagination — and that was that.

Having quickly convinced himself that it could only have been written by one particular smart-arse medieval monk by the name of Roger Bacon, Voynich then spent the rest of his life trying to persuade gullible and/or overspeculative academics to ‘prove’ that his hunch was right. All of which amounted to a waste of twenty years, because it hadn’t even slightly been written by Bacon. D’oh!

Oh, so you’d like to see some pictures of his ‘Voynich Manuscript’, would you? Well… go ahead, knock yourself out. First up, here’s some of its ‘Voynichese’ script, which people only tend to recognize if they had stopped taking their meds a few days previously:

A nice clear example of Voynichese

Secondly, here’s one of the Voynich Manuscript’s many herbal drawings, almost all of which resemble mad scientist random hybrids of bits of other plants:-

Finally, here’s a close-up of one of its bizarre naked ladies (researchers call them ‘nymphs’, obviously trying not to mix business and pleasure), in this case apparently connected up to some odd-looking plumbing / tubing. Yup, the right word is indeed ‘bizarre’:

voynich f77v central nymph Q13 and Voynich balneology sources...?

Did any of that help at all? No, probably not. So perhaps you can explain it now? No, I didn’t think so. Don’t worry, none of us can either. *sigh*

Back to the History Bit

Anyhow, tucked inside the manuscript was a letter dated 1665 from Johannes Marcus Marci in Prague, and addressed to the well-known delusional Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Marci’s letter said that he was giving the manuscript to Kircher both because of their friendship and because of Kircher’s reputation for being able to break any cipher. The manuscript seems then to have entered the Jesuit archives, which is presumably why the Jesuit college near Rome had it to sell to Wilfrid Voynich several centuries later, just as in all the best mystery novels.

But hold on a minute… might Wilfrid Voynich have forged his manuscript? Actually, a few years back researchers diligently dug up several other 17th century letters to Kircher almost certainly referring to the same thing, all of which makes the Voynich Manuscript at least 200 years older than Wilfrid Voynich. So no, he couldn’t have forged it, not without using Doc Brown’s flux capacitor. (Or possibly the time machine depicted in Quire 13. Unless that’s impossible.)

Incidentally, one of those other letters was from an obscure Prague alchemist called Georg Baresch, who seems to have wasted twenty or so years of his life pondering this curious object before giving it to Marci. So it would seem that twenty lost years is the de facto standard duration for Voynich research. Depressing, eh?

So, Where Did Baresch Get It From?

Well… Marci had heard it said that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had bought the manuscript for the ultra-tidy sum of 600 gold ducats, probably enough to buy a small castle. Similarly, Wilfrid Voynich discovered an erased signature for Sinapius (i.e. Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, Rudolf II’s Imperial Distiller) on its front page. You can usefully assemble all these boring fragments of half-knowledge into a hugely unconvincing chain of ownership going all the way back to 1600-1610 or so, that would look something not entirely unlike this:-

Which is a bit of a shame, because in 2009 the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum was radiocarbon dated to 1404-1438 with 95% confidence. Hence it still has a gap of roughly 150 years on its reconstructed CV that we can’t account for at all – you know, the kind of hole that leads to those awkward pauses at job interviews, right before they shake your hand and say “We’ll let you know…”

Hence, The Real Question Is…

Fast-forward to 2012, and Wilfrid Voynich’s manuscript has ended up in New Haven at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yet many Voynichologists seemed to have learnt little from all that has gone before, in that – just as with Wilfrid himself – they continue to waste decades of their life trying to prove that it is an [insert-theory-here] written by [insert-historical-figure-here].

If repeatedly pressed, such theorists tend to claim that:
* the ‘quest’ is everything;
* it is better to travel than to arrive; and even
* cracking the Voynich might somehow spoil its perfect inscrutability.
All of which, of course, makes no real sense to anyone but a Zen Master: but if their earnest wish is to remain armchair mountaineers with slippers for crampons, then so be it.

Yet ultimately, if you strip back the inevitable vanity and posturing, the only genuine question most people have at this point is:

How can I crack the Voynich Manuscript and become an eternal intellectual hero?

The answer is: unless you’re demonstrably a polymathic Intellectual History Renaissance Man or Woman with high-tensile steel cable for nerves, a supercomputer cluster the size of Peru for a brain, and who just happens to have read every book ever written on medieval/Renaissance history and examined every scratchy document in every archive, your chances are basically nil. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Honestly, it’s a blatant exaggeration but near enough to the truth true: so please try to get over it, OK?

Look, people have been analyzing the Voynich with computers since World War Two and still can’t reliably interpret a single letter – not a vowel, consonant, digit, punctuation mark, nothing. [A possible hyphen is about as good as it gets, honestly.] Nobody’s even sure if the spaces between words are genuinely spaces, if Voynichese ‘words’ are indeed actual words. *sigh*

Cryptologically, we can’t even properly tell what kind of an enciphering system was used – and if you can’t get that far, it should be no great surprise that applying massive computing power will yield no significant benefit. Basically, you can’t force your way into a castle with a battering ram if you don’t even know where its walls are. For the global community of clever-clogs codebreakers, can you even conceive of how embarrassing a failure this is, hmmm?

So, How Do We Crack It, Then?

If we do end up breaking the Voynich’s cipher, it looks unlikely that it will have been thanks to the superhuman efforts of a single Champollion-like person. Rather, it will most likely have come about from a succession of small things that get uncovered that all somehow cumulatively add up into some much bigger things. You could try to crack it yourself but… really, is there much sense in trying to climb Everest if everyone in the army of mountaineers that went before you has failed to work out even where base camp should go? It’s not hugely clear that even half of them even were looking at the right mountain.

All the same, there are dozens of open questions ranging across a wide set of fields (e.g. codicology, palaeography, statistical analysis, cryptanalysis, etc), each of which might help to move our collective understanding of the Voynich Manuscript forward if we could only answer them. For example…
* Can we find a handwriting match for the marginalia? [More details here & here]
* Can we find a reliable way of reading the wonky marginalia (particularly on f116v, the endmost page)? [More details here]
* Can we find another document using the same unusual quire numbering scheme (‘abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals’)? [More details here].
* Precisely how do state machine models of the Voynich’s two ‘Currier language’s differ? Moreover, why do they differ? [More details here]
* etc

The basic idea here is that if you can’t do big at all, do us all a favour and try to do small well instead. But nobody’s listening: and so it all goes on, year after year. What a waste of time. 🙁

A Warning From History

Finally: I completely understand that you’re a busy person with lots on your mind, so the chances are you’ll forget almost all of the above within a matter of minutes. Possibly even seconds. And that’s OK. But if you can only spare sufficient mental capacity to remember a seven-word soundbite from this whole dismal summary, perhaps they ought to be:

Underestimate the Voynich Manuscript at your peril!

Now ain’t that the truth!?

Massachusetts Voynich talk this Saturday…

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The Western Gateway Heritage State Park in North Adams, MA, describes itself as:

A former railroad yard, this urban park uses historical artifacts and exhibits to bring to life the controversial and danger-filled construction of the Hoosac Tunnel, one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century.

What’s there not to love about that? But as if celebrating the Hoosac Tunnel wasn’t already more than enough, at 3pm this Saturday (3rd March 2012) they’re giving an “illustrated lecture” on the Voynich Manuscript at their Visitors Museum. This is part of their regular series of ‘Mystery Night’ talks: last week’s was on the fabulous Amber Room.

No word yet on who’s giving the talk or if it’s just Wikipedia on a projector *sigh*, but let’s hope for the best, eh? 😉 If you’re not too far away and do drop by, let us all know how it went!

Beale Papers trivia update…

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I thought I’d take a brief sideways step over to the Beale Papers, a cipher mystery I haven’t mentioned in a while here. Most of you probably already know about my Big Fat List of Voynich Novels, expanding almost monthly with yet more Voynich-appropriating titles. But is there much fiction based around other well-known cipher mysteries?

Well… I recently bought a copy of Tom Harper’s (2007) “Lost Temple” solely because of the Phaistos Disk lookalike overlaying the front cover… but that was as close as it got. It’s actually quite a good read, with the first Minoan half touching on the same kind of sources as Gavin Menzies “The Lost Empire of Atlantis” (but more believable), and the second half moving onto Greek mythology, Achilles’ shield, and Harper’s version of Unobtainium. Sorry Tom, the house rule here is: no cipher, no review. 😉

Which reminds me that at some point, I really need to read Stephen King’s “The Colorado Kid”, as that gives every impression of having been inspired by the Somerton Man “Tamam Shud” case.

And here’s another novel that does count: Alexis Tappendorf and the Search for Beale’s Treasure (Volume 1), by Becca C. Smith.

[…] Upon arriving in Virginia, Alexis discovers that for the last hundred years the townspeople of Summervale and Bedford County have been searching for a lost treasure buried somewhere in the area by a man named Thomas J. Beale. More importantly, the only clues to finding the fortune are in the form of cryptograms, codes that, when properly translated, tell the exact location of the bounty. In a heart-pounding race to Beale’s Treasure, Alexis and her new friend, Olivia Boyd, join forces to solve the Beale ciphers before the dangerous family, the Woodmores, beat them to it…

So, yet another cipher mystery gets subsumed into the Young Adult Fiction cultural Borg. (No, I still haven’t managed to finish The Cadence of Gypsies, or The Book of Blood & Shadow.) What will be next, Alexis Tappendorf and the Vaguely Heretical Rohonc Codex? [*shudders in a sudden cold draft*]

However, such cultural flimflam may well all be in vain, because – according to the webcomic ‘I Can Barely Draw’, the Beale Cipher has finally been solved. Apparently, it reads: “I accidentally the rest of it“. Well, well, well – who’d have thunk it, eh? 🙂

Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s papers at the Marshall Foundation…

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Nearly all Voynich researchers (I think) will have heard of William F. Friedman: it was WFF who formed the First Study Group during the Second World War, who set computer transcription and analysis of the Voynich Manuscript in motion, and even got Brigadier John Tiltman involved.

But what of his wife Elizebeth (they married in 1917)? Actually, she was a highly accomplished code-breaker in her own right, and it was she who introduced WFF to cryptology: during the First World War, the pair of them were directors of an unofficial US Government code-breaking team. She moved on to breaking thousands of rum runners’ codes in the 1930s and the famous Velvalee Dickinson “Doll Woman” Japanese spying case in the 1940s, all the while researching, writing and even occasionally lecturing on such cipher mysteries as the Beale Papers and the Voynich Manuscript. There’s a nice summary of her life in the NSA Hall of Honor (she was posthumously inducted in 1999).

Similar to the way Chaucer dominated the relationship between John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert (here, here & here), Shakespeare was a recurrent theme for the Friedmans. The couple first met while employed by Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallop to hunt for the Baconian ciphers allegedly embedded in Shakespeare’s works: while Elizebeth Friedman returned to the theme of Shakespeare in the 1950s, finally concluding that the person masquerading as Shakespeare was none other than – shock horror – William Shakespeare himself.

William Friedman’s papers were donated to the Marshall Foundation in 1969 (WFF died the same year), while Elizebeth Friedman’s papers were donated to the same foundation after her death in 1980.

Anyway, just in case anyone happens to find themselves near the Marshall Foundation in Lexington VA with an unaccountably strong urge to go through her papers relating to cipher mysteries such as the Voynich Manuscript, here’s a brief listing of things I’d be fascinated to read:-

Box 7, File 17 – Philological Quarterly article on W.F. Friedman and the Voynich Manuscript.
Box 8, File 23 – Beale Treasure Material
Box 10, File 30 – Voynich Correspondence
Box 10, File 31 – Voynich Notes
Box 10, File 32 – Voynich Material
Box 10, File 33 – Article: “The Voynich Manuscript: A Scholarly Mystery” (parts 1-3) [by Mary D’Imperio, if I remember correctly]
Box 10, File 34 – Philological Quarterly: WFF and Voynich – October 1970
Box 10, File 35 – Voynich Seminar Proceedings 1976
Box 13, File 22 – WFF – John M. Manly Correspondence
Box 18, File 34 – ESF – Voynich Manuscript Article

The Voynich Manuscript, the ultimate Nigerian scam?

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Greetings, most dearly beloved [insert-name-here],

I bring you a message of great urgency and yet colossal financial benefit. My name is Seko Mugu Alberti, and thanks to ancestry.com I have discovered that I am the sole descendant of Renaissance polymath genius Leon Battista Alberti. This means I am in line to inherit the architectural and consulting fortune he deposited at the Medici Bank long ago. Yes, I do believe I was indeed just as surprised to find this out as you are now.

Through close reading of my ancestor’s published works, I have discovered that he kept a copy of his bank account details hidden in plain sight. All I now need to do is present the proper authentication to the modern successors of the Medici Bank (the Rothschilds, of course) and they will be compelled to give me my rightful inheritance of (with compound interest) 48.9 billion US dollars.

As a result I have been looking for an exceptional historian and code-breaker to assist me – for a modest 15% finder’s fee – in deciphering Alberti’s greatest work, the Voynich Manuscript. (I wasted a lot of time on the disgusting and perverted Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii, and the less said about that monstrosity the better). The nice gentleman at Cipher Mysteries sold me a list of mugus cipher researchers for a thousand US dollars “to put behind the bar in Frascati” (whatever that means), which is how I now find myself with your most excellent contact details.

The ridiculous Voynich Manuscript is, as I am sure you have already worked out, 240 pages of nonsense constructed with the sole purpose of concealing and disguising Alberti’s bank account details. Sadly, when I contacted Rothschilds with the important passphrase “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” to identify myself, the teller refused to hand over even 100 dollars of my staggeringly large inheritance. I tell you, it is a shameful and degrading thing to be escorted from a bank building at gunpoint when you have committed no crime, no crime at all.

So you see, the fate of my inheritance is now in your hands. Research, research, research it! Find my ancestor’s hidden number or identification phrase, and you and I will be rich beyond all Renaissance dreams!

I remain your excellent friend and accomplice in research,
— Seko Mugu Alberti

Like, what is that whole “Voynich Manuscript” thing? I don’t get it.

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So some Jesuit place near Rome ran out of money in 1912 and sold off some rare books to this Polish-British-American bookdealer dude called ‘Wilfrid Voynich’. And like one of them is a handwritten manuscript written in a messed-up language that nobody can read, even though it looks really simple.

Now the bookseller guy thought this had been written by Roger Bacon, a medieval monk who was like Sean Connery in “The Name of the Rose” (but for real), but it turns out it wasn’t so that was a bit of a bummer. Anyway, a hundred years on still nobody knows who made it so people call it “The Voynich Manuscript”, even though all Voynich did was like buy it and send scratchy copies round to professors and stuff.

The weird bit is like everyone goes la-la-la about whether it’s a lost language (yeah right, like some idiot’s going write down a lost language in code? Duh!) or a hoax (yeah right, what kind of an idiot’s going to pretend to write a book in code?), when it’s just written in some kind of special cipher thing but everyone’s way too proud to say that the Voynich is smarter than they are.

Sure it’s got a load of weird drawings but how can you cipher drawings without making them weird too? Like, duh! So, I don’t get it.

Two Italian Voynich novels for you…

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The relatively low level of interest in the Voynich Manuscript in Italy has long puzzled me, when to my eyes (and plenty of other people’s eyes too), it looks to be an artefact grounded in some obscure byway of Italian Quattrocento culture. Perhaps they’re just too busy worrying about the economy or where they’ll find a Prime Ministerial ego extraordinary enough to replace Berlusconi’s to really be that bothered about the Voynich’s centenary this year?

Anyway, I’ve just had a nice email from Anna Castriota telling me about a new Italian Voynich novel she recently stumbled upon by the name of “I Custodi Della Pergamena Proibita” (The Keeper of the Forbidden Parchment), allegedly written by a priest pseudonymously calling himself Aldo Gritti.

As is grimly conventional for this kind of thing, Gritti’s grittily gritty story kicks off with three near-simultaneous murders in Florence, London and New Haven, where (surprise, surprise) “the victims were about to reveal to the world the true, shocking content of the dark Voynich manuscript, which for a century had resisted every attempt to interpret it. But [Inspector Elda Novelli] will be able to decrypt it by following the tracks left by the three dead researchers“.

Apparently Gritti’s story features not only the Titanic and the secrets behind several notable deaths of the early 20th century, but also the final revelation of the Voynich’s real-life secrets, hidden there by, dan dan daaah, Wilfrid Voynich himself. [SFX: Rizzoli’s PR people chortling into their hands] *sigh*

Well… if Gritti’s tiramisu of tragedy didn’t tweak your tarpaulins tighter, here’s another one to curdle your Kindle. “Voynich: Il Segreto Del Barabba (il più grande segreto su Gesù)” by Barbara Cesa wraps a Voynich Manuscript story around a three-chord eternal-guardians-of-the-heretical-secret Barabbas-twin-brother-of-Jesus murderous-conspiracy-brotherhood plot. You can also buy the first ten chapters for 0.92 euros (it says here), though doubtless you’ll then be so eager for The Big Plot Twist at the end that you’ll gladly pay the balance to Find Out What Happens At The End.

Regular Cipher Mysteries readers will already know how I feel: that there’s a corner of my soul that seems to die a little whenever I read yet another dismal Voynich novel plot summary, as if I’m using up one of my spare Chrestomanci lives. One day, though, I’m sure I’ll read a truly great Voynich novel, that will make all this treacle-swimming retrospectively worthwhile…

I can dream, can’t I? 🙂

“Between Vellum and Prague” seminar session…

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I’m just starting to put together my talk for the upcoming Voynich centenary conference. The session is provisionally titled “Between Vellum and Prague”, with a summary along the lines of…

“The Voynich Manuscript first pinged on the cultural radar in Prague circa 1600, yet its vellum has recently been radiocarbon dated to the first half of the 15th century. So… what happened inbetween? Nick Pelling has long been intrigued by this wide-open question, and in this session presents a summary of a wide range of codicological evidence that holds the promise of answering it.”

In many important ways, I don’t care much for Voynich theories (not even my own): the important thing for me has long been developing an evidence base that we can use to eliminate bad theories (long-time Cipher Mysteries readers will no doubt recall various times I’ve ranted about Popperian ‘falsification’, Karl Popper’s notion that theories are there to be knocked down, not puffed up).

But what would such usable ‘evidence’ look like? Mainstream history as currently practised is predominantly based on close reading of original documents within the context of large bodies of parallel evidence – even Art History falls within this methodology, as it places tiny observed details within an overall historical canon of evolving technique and materials.

The Beinecke’s splendid scans have enabled us to closely read the original document’s surface, so in some ways we’re halfway there: but as for “the large bodies of parallel evidence” part of the equation, we have at the same time too many and too few such bodies to choose from – by which I mean too many possible, too few probable.

As a result, the Voynich Manuscript remains an uncomfortable topic for historians, because even after a century of study it resolutely resists being pigeonholed within any cladistic strand or tradition. Basically, it is this core uncertainty about its internal nature and external tradition that dissuades many academics from wading too deeply into the Voynichian swamp… and frankly, I don’t blame them, because you’d need a wetsuit, not wellies.

It therefore seems much more prudent to me to go hunting for evidence than for yet more speculative theories. However, you need to have a really clear research question in mind when you do it, or it is likely that your efforts will be for nothing. For me, the best questions by a mile all relate to the Voynich Manuscript’s life before its apparent appearance at Rudolf’s Imperial Court in Prague: and so the class of evidence to look for is that which helps to bring out this otherwise invisible history.

As a result, I’m not hugely worried about things such as letters hidden in Voynich plants except insofar as they suggest links between the Voynichese hand and the marginalia hand. Similarly, the parallel hatching used in some of the drawings is not in itself important except for the way that it apparently directly conflicts with the radiocarbon dating (and indeed it would seem we have various 15th century hands in play, as John Matthews Manly noted over 80 years ago, which would seem to stop any kind of 16th century theory dead in its tracks).

The Voynich’s unusual quire numbers are puzzling too, and perfectly consonant with a mid-to-late 15th century dating. Yet frustratingly nobody has yet discovered a single example of another document with the same abbreviated longhand Latin ordinal numbering scheme: finding even one document using that same numbering style would surely open up a fascinating door into the manuscript’s early past.

But personally, I think there’s a high chance that the final page (f116v) marginalia will turn out to be some kind of scrappy French Secretary Hand, with “michiton oladabas” perhaps even saying nichil or even nichil obstat. The top marginalia line of f116v could also be a dedication or note to a “Simon Sint”, it’s hard to tell. These offer such tangible promise of connecting the Voynich to real people or places, yet so many speculative readings have been proposed that it’s all too easy to just ignore them.

And yet all the same, perhaps the richest vein to tap has been the raw internal codicology of the Voynich drawings themselves. If we could only find some ingenious way of connecting pages together (comparing DNA fingerprints of different bifolios, multispectral scans of inks or vellum, mapping the varying thicknesses of pages along their edges, etc), we could make a really great stab at reconstructing the original page order.

As examples, I discussed Q9 (“Quire 9”), Q13 and various out-of-order herbal pages at length in “The Curse of the Voynich”, while I’ve also discussed Q8 and Q20 here (as well as Q20’s paragraph stars), and indeed on Glen Claston’s thoughts on the nine-rosette foldout Q14 as well the ‘chicken scratch’ marginalia on its back.

But as should be apparent from the constellation of links strung through the preceding paragraphs like fairy lights, this remains an utterly fragmented research area. In each individual case, I can tell a speculative story about what I think happened to the manuscript to leave a particular set of details in the curious manner we find them arranged today, but I’m completely aware that that’s simply not good enough, even if I do try to take the totality of evidence into consideration at each point.

All the same, I continue to be of the opinion that it may not be to everyone’s tastes but studying the Voynich Manuscript’s codicology is pretty much as good as we can get – that finding historical parallels for individual drawings or indeed matching the roots of individual plants will never be enough to snip through its Gordian knot. Finding out what happened is the most pragmatic stepping stone back in time we have – so we should try harder to make what we have solid enough to step on, right?

The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher…

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While writing about Julian Bunn’s carroty crib ‘otaldy’ yesterday, it struck me that I haven’t properly posted much about the mystery of the Voynich’s cipher for some time.

To which the right reply is: errr, what mystery are you talking about, Nick? I’ll explain…

At the start of “The Curse of the Voynich”, I noted that the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher…

…appears almost childishly simple, the kind of thing any competent code-breaker armed with pencil and paper would expect to crack in a summer afternoon.

All the same, despite a century’s worth of lazy summer afternoons since Wilfrid Voynich swooshed it out of the Villa Mondragone, none of the legions of cryptologers who has tried to crack it has found so much as a vowel, a consonent, a digit, a comma or a full stop. So much for it being simple!

To a modern cryptogram solver’s eyes, the Voynich appears to be an aristocrat (i.e. with the ciphertext divided up into words) rather than a patristocrat (i.e. with the ciphertext unhelpfully divided up into fixed blocks): and its relatively small number of high frequency symbols makes it seem very much like a simple substitution cipher, with a handful of occasional special symbols creeping in. Really, there seems no reason that it should be anything but a simple substitution cipher. But it’s not! Pause for a second to think what the presence of a phrase such as page f78r’s “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” implies… yup, if that’s written in a cipher, it’s definitely not a simple cipher.

From an historian’s point of view, if the radiocarbon dating of the vellum accurately reflects the age of the cipher itself, it would predate the first known polyalphabetic cipher (Alberti 1467) by 25 or more years. The famous castles in the Voynich’s nine-rosette page clearly seem to have the swallow-tail merlons familiar from 14th and 15th century, pointing to a European (possibly even Northern Italian) origin. Historical logic would therefore seem to imply that that it could only use the kind of simple cipher tricks found in European ciphers in the 14th or early 15th century. But it doesn’t!

To a manuscript historian, words written in the Voynichese alphabet contain a number of shapes familiar from medieval manuscripts: for example, aiir and aiiv are page references to the third (‘ii-recto’) and fourth (‘ii-verso’) page of the first (‘a’) quire, and we see these appear throughout the text. Similarly, the letter pattern ‘4o’ (which I’m sure was a scribal shorthand used in 14th century Northern Italy, possibly in legal documents) appears at the start of many Voynichese words. But their curious usage statistics (-iv words massively outnumber -ir words, for example) tell us whatever these letter groups are, they are not what they seem!

The mystery of the Voynich’s cipher, then, is that everything obvious about it is just plain wrong.
* It looks simple to crack, but it isn’t!
* It looks like an ‘aristocrat’ simple substitution cipher, but it’s not!
* It looks too early to be particularly sophisticated, but it is!
* It looks like a mid-to-late 14th century European technical text, but it’s not!

So, what we have here is a right old Gordian knot, exactly the kind of thing you’d have thought Intellectual Historians such as Professor Anthony Grafton would be queuing around the block to bring their Massive Historical Brains to bear upon. They love historical paradoxes, because all it normally requires is subtlety, nerve and quickness of mind to bring whatever unspoken assumption or presumption happens to be blocking the logic to the surface – the fine hairstrand holding the whole knot in place. “The merest of snips and my work is done! Bwahaha… and back to Princeton I go“.

At least, that’s how the Intellectual History script is supposed to go. In reality, the Voynich Manuscript laughs at people’s puny attempts to untie its cipher’s tangly knot: it’s smarter – in fact, much smarter – than that.

Specifically, anyone who tries to pitch the whole postmodernist it’s-a-hoax-so-it-is brick at the Voynich’s shiny windows deserves to be shot, basically for not taking something so clever seriously. Look, guys, Voynichese has so much structure on so many levels, it’s almost fractal: only gibberish generated by a computer could ever exhibit such a convoluted set of rules.

Ultimately, then, the mystery of the Voynich is why any explanation has to satisfy such an apparently paradoxical set of multidimensional constraints. Lord knows I’ve tried to do this (and I remain convinced that what I presented in “The Curse of the Voynich” will turn out to have got 90% of the way to the right answer, even if the last 10% is still unbelievably hard), but it’s a rare Voynich researcher who faces these full on and still manages to be productive.

Do you? 😉