Overhauling the Wikipedia Voynich page…

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A few days ago, I was emailed by Gerry Scott from Cornell who recently, with the help of a friend, started putting together his own Wiki (a set of webpages editable by anybody) to try to give structure to the seething mass / wobbly jelly that is Voynich Manuscript research. Here’s a direct link to what they’ve done so far.

One of the nice things about this is that Gerry has tried to take my (many) criticisms of the Wikipedia page on board, and so has consciously…

“tried to segregate facts and speculation. The wiki includes separate sections for textual, linguistic, provenience [sic], and art-historical research, and uses distinct “theory” and “fact” subsections within each section.“

He’s aiming high, which is admirable: but it has to be pointed out that the challenge involved – basically, building an online ‘Encyclopaedia Voynichiana’ – is nothing short of gargantuan. It’s at least a decade’s work, and with Wilfrid Voynich’s 2012 centenary looming, we only really have a year before the next tsunami of documentaries hits our virtual shores.

Personally, I think there’s a better way: fix the Wikipedia entry. It’s the #1 resource served up by just about every Voynich-related web-search, as well as the #1 link given by just about every inane half-troll writing up their own gee-whiz account of the VMs: whether we like it or not, it’s going to remain the public face of Voynichology for quite some time yet.

The problem is that it’s, well, pants – it’s overlong, overcondensed, underreadable, and a reader coming to the topic fresh doesn’t really leave the page any the wiser. Structurally, the page’s core problem is that it has no clear distinction between facts, evidence, observations, hypotheses and suppositions: at the same time, over time its text has expanded to about 55K, which is just about the right point to start splitting it up into smaller, more useful pages. But how should it be split?

Personally, I think the content has been squeezed out by a barrage of meta-content – most of the text now seems to be taken up with theories about theories. Honestly: the moment any Wikipedia page fixates so heavily on theories that the thing itself gets lost, something has gone badly wrong.

But what to replace it with? I think there should be a guiding strategic principle in play: no theories on the root page, just facts and evidence. Furthermore, I’d split it up so that Voynich theories (Bacon, Filarete, Leonardo, Ascham, Dee/Kelley and, errrm, Bacon again, etc), Voynich meta-theories (hoax, glossolalia, exotic language, artificial language, hybrid language, shorthand, ciphers, etc), and Voynich history/provenance each have their own page. Which is not to say that those topics are not interesting in their own right: but rather that they’re secondary topics, and not essential to building up a primary understanding of the object itself.

At this point, some might say… “but take away all that stuff, and what would be left?” Actually, I think a surprisingly large amount would remain, pretty much all of which is what people new to the VMs primarily want to know about.

The Wikipedia page is the shopfront to our community and our research, and it’s not serving us well… so it’s time to fix it. If you would like to have a say in what happens next, please join in the debate on the Voynich Wikipedia talk page, or just leave a comment here.

Voynich-themed art installation in Germany…

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I really don’t know how I managed not to pick up on it, but last year a group of German artists put on a VMs-themed installation at the Grauerhof in Aschersleben entitled “DAS VOYNICH MANUSKRIPT: eine künstlersicht auf ein rätsel” (an artist’s view of a mystery), featuring pieces by Rüdiger Giebler, Moritz Götze, Olaf Holzapfel, Alicja Kwade, Daniel Lergon / Gregory Carlock, Via Lewandowsky, Johannes Nagel, Jorinde Voigt, and Ralf Ziervogel. If you go to the site, clicking on any of the pictures launches a pop-up 32-slide slideshow tour of the exhibition, which is rather nice.

I particularly like Lergon and Carlock’s ‘book object’, with its spurious botany and implausible fold-out page arrangement. But perhaps the standout contemporary art piece of the show was by Berlin-based Via Lewandowsky (1963-) called “Okay“, formed of the Voynichese letters spelling ‘okay’ (in EVA) in striking green neon.

If you want to see ‘Okay’ for yourself, it’s currently on display at the Galerie Karin Sachs in Munich until the 3rd March 2011 as part of a show of Lewandowsky’s work called “Archäologie der Ähnlichkeit“.

Voynich-style challenge cipher from Tony Gaffney…

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Here’s a bit of fun for you that’s only running for a few more days: a Voynichese-style challenge cipher courtesy of everyone’s favourite hirsute cipher reclusive Tony Gaffney. Here it is (click on it for a more detailed image):-

Tony Gaffney challenge cipher

He says:-

The above could almost be a missing page from the VM. If anyone cares to have a go at deciphering it, it is the start of a very well known Italian story – the plaintext is Italian and it reads left-to-right and top-to-bottom in the normal fashion.

What kind of cipher is it?

Here’s a basic transcription (into EVA) to get you going, assuming that is indeed a genuine cipher:-

p aiin deey eedy lched otoched r qochedchedy aiin eedy chedeed otoeed ch
qochedy lched otochedy chy cthey dchedy siin chdy daiin otoch dcthey cthey
otochedaiin eedy qo otod aiin lched eedy lched otochedoto qochedaiin etey
qochedee dotochedy otoaiiny daiin otocheds daiin eedy chedeed eeds qochedy
aiin eeotochedy
p l daiiny lched otochedy s eedr r otochedchedeed dy eey chedeed daiin eey
dchched dcthey otochedchedeed dy lched eedoto qochedy oto dotochedy eey
eedaiin eedy otoaiiny daiin otoch dcthey cthey otochedaiin eedy qoched siin
eedaiin s otoched
p chedeed eedaiiny r qochedy s otoched qochedy eey chedeed dch l qochedy
lched otochedy m otol l dy qochedy l daiiny daiin dchedy aiin dcthey
eedy otoched ry oto qochedeey cthey otochedcthey otochedaiin eedy
lched otochedy chedeed dch cthey dy chedeed eedr eedch dcthey eedy 
p chched dch eedy otoched lched otochedeey l qochedcthey cthey otochedy
dy chedeed cthyched otochedy eey dch dy chedeed dcthet cthey otoched
oto eedy qochedy eey dee eedy daiin oto eedaiin eedy chedeed eedaiiny
chedeed cthyched otoched s otochedt lched otoched chedeed qoeeed odaiin ch
doto eed 
            *          *          *          *          *          *
            |          |          |          |          |          |

Enjoy! 🙂

Who will solve the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript?

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I’ve had some nice emails in the last few days from all kinds of historical codebreakers, which set me thinking: what kind of person would be able to solve any of the mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript? I mean, anyone can look at it – but what kind of a mind would stand any chance of being able to solve it?

Perhaps the first thing to consider is whether you can genuinely appreciate it: not as a ‘work of art’ (only someone who hasn’t been to a proper art gallery could call the VMs ‘beautiful’), but as an artefact of puzzling beauty. I find the way that it manages to encompass so many opposites simultaneously analogous to ultra-complex chess problems (such as V.Korolkov’s near-unbelievable 1937 study):-

  • Left-to-right and right-to-left aspects… but neither dominating
  • Features that suggest Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, French, Occitan, Slavic… but none dominating
  • Old and new, traditional and contemporary, medieval & Renaissance… but none dominating
  • Language, shorthand, cipher… but none dominating

…and so on. The knee-jerk academic reaction to each of these aspects is reductivist: to reduce the problem space by forcing a choice, for how can (for example) a thing be both medieval and Renaissance?

Yet my personal Voynich “moment of Zen” came when I stopped trying to wrestle with these opposites, i.e. when I stopped trying to force the evidential pendulum to swing to a single side. The way I now see it is that all these complex aspects are not inherently contradictory or paradoxical, but are instead just different sides of the thing itself, if not also different sides of the person behind it.

I therefore think that the people who will solve the VMs will be those who can manage to abandon their intellectual need for certainties, for I believe the answers will ultimately emerge from combining and working with all these ambiguities and uncertainties, not in fighting against them.

Realistically, however, very few people can manage this trick, as it goes against almost everything you’ve been taught. Perhaps the key attribute you’d need to cultivate is intuition: I’ve blogged elsewhere about how entrepreneurs need intuition, which I define as “the means by which we combine uncertainties” – perhaps Voynich researchers are utimately much the same?

Navajo Voynich theory…

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Could the Voynich Manuscript really be anything to do with the group of supernatural beings who allegedly visited the Navajo homeland in 1996, as documented by Maureen Trudelle Schwarz in her 1998 Ethnohistory paper “Holy Visit 1996: Prophecy, Revitalization, and Resistance in the Contemporary Navajo World“? Her abstract begins:-

“In the spring of 1996 supernaturals visited the Navajo homeland to deliver a prophetic message of potential import to all Navajo people. In response, thousands of Navajo made pilgrimages to the site, while others had ceremonies conducted in their home communities and ceremonial practitioners made pilgrimages to the Navajo sacred mountains. In national recognition of the event, the Navajo Nation Unity Day of Prayer was established.”

Now, this other person’s “Restore The World” website thinks that the Voynich Manuscript (specifically the Quire 13 “balneo” section) documents the Navajo belief that the “First Man” escaped the flood by planting a cedar tree, then a pine tree, then a male reed, then finally a female reed. So somehow the VMs is caught up with an impending (2012) world flood, these visiting supernaturals, and the Navajo: a pretty potent cocktail of concepts to be mixing together!

OK, visual correspondence with some Q13 pages is a pretty thin reed to be building end-of-the-world-flood theories upon, but… it is what it is. Enjoy!

Jan 2011 Voynich pub meet…?

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It’s time once again for that dizzying [*] highpoint of the Cipher Mysteries calendar – the London Voynich Winter pub meet.

As normal, I’m more than happy to adjust the precise date to fit around any visiting Voynichero’s schedule (or perhaps if you just happen to be stuck in one of our wonderfulle historycke aero-portes), so please say ASAP if you plan to be passing through London over the next 2-4 weeks and would like to come along too.

The current plan – as far as it goes – is to meet up at the historic Dog And Duck in Soho one Sunday afternoon in January (i.e. the 9th, 16th, or 23rd), and to then go on for a Chinese meal at the excellent New Mayflower on Shaftesbury Avenue, where a certain ‘Mr Voynich’ once had his antiquarian bookshop. Unless you have a better idea?

If you’d like to come along, drop me an email saying which dates you can do, and I’ll try to set something up accordingly.

Hope to see you there – cheers!

[*] if you drink too much alcohol, that is. Though I try not to…

A Merry Cipher Mysteries Christmas to you!

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This is the point in the calendar when it’s traditional for bloggers to gloss over how miserable the preceding year has been, by devising some clever rhetorical formulation which gives all the appearance of optimism for the coming year, but which actually says nothing of real substance. I’ve even done this myself in the past (*sigh*), but now I’m solid enough with blogging to really grasp its tropes and limitations, I can aim to transcend all that faux positivism and to tell it like it is.

For 2010, ‘The Year In Voynich’ has been somewhat disappointing, particularly relative to my predictions for it: last Christmas, I was convinced that proper write-ups of the VMs’ vellum radiocarbon dating and of its McCrone ink microscopy (both following on from the ORF VMs documentary) would be major steps forward for the field; that these would clear some dead wood from the research forests; and, when considered together, might just form a tasty enough dangly maggot to tempt a big fish from the pool of contemporary historians to take a punt on the Voynich Manuscript. All plausible ideas on my part: but all so wrong, all brutally pareidolic.

Well… I now hear news that Dr. Gregory Hodgins at the University of Arizona is writing up the radiocarbon dating for submission in an (as-yet-unspecified) journal during January 2011, so perhaps things will start moving back on track then. Perhaps not, of course, but we shall see… fingers crossed, all the same. Just pretend I got the year wrong in my previous post, OK?

Finally, there’s a recent quote from Victor D. Huliganov that “the only way to win as a linguist with the Voynich manuscript is not to play” (appropriating the famous quote from the film War Games that “the only winning move [in nuclear war] is not to play”). Now this worries me: even though I’m 99% certain that linguists are on a losing game with the VMs (it’s an historical ciphertext, not a language, duh), it concerns me that other types of academics might use this as an excuse not to engage with it. So if anyone unexpected happens to ask you about the VMs during 2011, can I please ask you to tell him/her that:-

  • It’s a genuinely old object, so normal forensic historical techniques should apply perfectly well to it
  • We continue to untangle its complicated codicology and (probably 15th century) palaeography
  • We’ve also made reasonable progress in grasping its provenance back to circa 1600-1610
  • Though it’s anomalous in many respects, it’s not as if it’s alien – it’s just a damnably tricky artefact
  • Contrary to widespread misinformation, there’s no direct evidence that it is a hoax because…
  • Absence of evidence (of meaning) is not evidence of absence (of meaning)

Anyway, I’ve actually got far more interesting research leads to follow than I did last December, so I’m looking forward to 2011 in my own sweet way. Which is not to say I’m massively optimistic that they’ll bear fruit, but I’m going to keep on trying regardless, and I hope you do too. So have a Merry Christmas and – however you choose to spend your time – a revealing New Year! 🙂

Well, here’s where the answer may be found…

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For a while, I’ve had an itch (a Voyn-itch, if you prefer) I couldn’t work out how to scratch.

You see… about six years ago, I found an old history book digitized on archive.org (if I remember correctly): it related how Francesco Sforza assembled an ongoing ad hoc council of representatives of various city-states surrounding Milan, told them all the inside news of what was going on, and even asked their opinions on what Milan should do – Big Tent politics, Quattrocento-style. These representatives then wrote copious letters back to their rulers, passing on as many of Milan’s secrets as they could remember. Fascinating stuff, so I made a mental note to look the reference up again, because it would be a great place to see if I could find a critical edition of whichever of those despatches still existed, to use them to read around critical dates in my reconstructed Averlino/Voynich narrative, to see if any detail either strengthened or refuted my hypothesis.

But do you think I could ever find that book again? That’s right – not a hope.

So anyway, I’d practically given up on finding those despatches when, while (inevitably) looking for something completely different  this evening, I stumbled upon one stonkingly huge set of them. The sixteen volume series is entitled Carteggio degli oratori mantovani alla Corte Sforzesca (1450-1500), with each slab containing 500 to 700 pages of letters sent from Milan back to the Gonzaga court in Mantua. The ones that seem to have been published so far are:-

1. 1450-1459 / 2. 1460 / 3. 1461 / 4. 1462 / edited by Isabella Lazzarini
5. 1463 / edited by Marco Folin
6. 1464-1465 / 7. 1466-1467 / 8. 1468-1471 / edited by Maria Nadia Covini
10. 1475-1477 / edited by Gianluca Battioni
11. 1478-1479 / edited by Marcello Simonetta
12. 1480-1482 / edited by Gianluca Battioni
15. 1495-1498 / edited by Antonella Grati, Arturo Pacini 

For me, the two most interesting things to look at would be the reception in Milan of the De Re Militari incident which happened sometime in 1461 [Vol.3]; and also August / September  1465 [Vol.6], which is when Domenic Dominici the Bishop of Brescia rode into Milan with his copy of what is now known as ‘Vat. Gr. 1291’ (René Zandbergen’s favourite circular Byzantine nymph-fest, which Fulvio Orsini would then buy), before then leaving  for Rome with (I strongly suspect) Antonio Averlino in tow.

Of course, any other fleeting mention of Antonio Averlino / Filarete in the 1450-1465 volumes of these despatches could well turn out to be extraordinarily useful, never mind any rumours or talk of a mysterious unreadable herbal as well! 🙂 One day I’ll get a chance to go through these myself (because the British Library has a copy of all of the above), and who as yet knows what’s there to be found?

In the meantime, please leave a comment here to tell me if there are any other sets of despatches published or currently being edited that were sent out from Francesco Sforza’s ‘Big Tent’ in Milan circa 1450-1465, thanks very much!

Klaus Schmeh Voynich audio interview…

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Klaus Schmeh, a German encryption professional who over the last couple of years has become increasingly fascinated by the cipher mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, has just been interviewed by the sparky skeptics at Righteous Indignation for their Episode #76 – Klaus’ VMs section runs from 25:50 to 45:45, and gives a fairly pragmatic introduction to the Voynich Manuscript. This was prompted by his Voynich talk at the 14th European Skeptics Conference in Budapest earlier this year (2010).

In fact, it’s quite revealing to see how far he has come from a 2008 German skeptic conference he also talked at (discussed here) [where he fell in behind the mainstream 16th century hoax position] and a 2008 article he wrote (which I reviewed here): it’s nice to see that he’s moved from seeing pretty much everything Voynichese as a combination of pseudoscience and pseudohistory to a rather more nuanced (and realistic) position.

But all the same, looking forward, to where should Voynich skepticism go from here? From what we now know, I’d say there are no obvious grounds for a hardcore skeptical position any more – the vellum seems genuinely old, with the ink freshly written on it, and the radiocarbon dating broadly meshing with the kind of evidence I’ve been working on for the last 5+ years, vis-à-vis:

  • The ‘4o’ verbose pair’s brief appearance in various Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1456 (see The Curse Of The Voynich pp.175-179)
  • The parallel hatching which I suspect pretty much forces a post-1440 date if it was made in Italy, or post-1410 if Germany
  • The two 15th century hands in the marginalia which pretty much force a pre-1500 date for the VMs
  • Sergio Toresella’s very specific dating claim, based on his lifetime with herbal manuscripts – that it was made in Northern Italy (probably Milan or the Venice region) around 1460

The swallow-tail merlons on the two castle walls (on the nine-rosette page) that Klaus mentioned in the podcast have actually been debated for at least a decade: although these don’t prove that the Voynich Manuscript was constructed in Northern Italy (where they were an unmissable feature of many castles), they clearly do help to shift the balance of probability that way away from Germany (the #2 candidate region).

And I suppose this is where all this is going: by carefully combining all these pieces together, we can now try to think about the Voynich in terms of probabilities. Even if you discount my Antonio Averlino hypothesis, I don’t honestly mind being what I call “the right kind of wrong” – i.e. looking in the right culture, place, and time, but perhaps finding a false positive to match a very specific forensic profile. Just so you know, I’d currently rate the likelihood of the VMs’s origin’s being Northern Italy at ~80%, Savoy ~10%, Germany ~5%, and anywhere else ~5%.

Hence, if someone were to tell me tomorrow that they’d just uncovered a fifteenth century letter clearly describing the Voynich Manuscript as having been written by Giovanni Fontana, Cicco Simonetta, Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, or any one of the hundreds of other desperately clever Northern Italian polymaths who were right there at the birth of the Renaissance, I’d be utterly delighted: for I think that is the cultural milieu linking pretty much all the strands of tangible (as opposed to merely suggestive) evidence to date.

The notions that we know nothing about the VMs and/or that it is somehow destined to be proven a meaningless hoax are not ‘skeptical’ in the true sense of the word: rather, they are postmodernist non-positions, uncritical ‘meh‘s in the face of the interconnected mass of subtle – but nonetheless tangible – historical evidence VMs researchers have carefully accumulated. In the case of the Voynich Manuscript, I think the real “beliefs that are taken for granted by most of the population” at which skeptics should be pointing their weapons of mass deconstruction are not this kind of painstakingly-assembled gear-train, but the widely-disseminated (and utterly fallacious) claim that the VMs is a 16th century hoax for financial gain.

In a way, this would turn Klaus’ own skeptical research chain back on itself – and in so doing would hopefully set him free. “More Schmeh, less meh“, eh? 🙂