“Knowledge of the Flesh”

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Here’s something I’d really love to attend: as part of the upcoming annual meeting of The Bibliographical Society of America at The Grolier Club on Friday 23 January 2009, some papers from the BSA’s New Scholars Program are being presented, one of which is by Timothy L. Stinson (from North Carolina State University) and called “Knowledge of the Flesh: Using DNA Analysis to Unlock Bibliographical Secrets of Medieval Parchment“. Having said that, I might be able to save you the fare to New York: here’s a link to an article that summarizes what Timothy Stinson is doing – basically, he is trying to use vellum DNA as a tool for localising individual manuscripts (rather than have to rely on anything so wobbly & interpretative as palaeography)… once he’s built up a large enough corpus of DNA samples.

This is not hugely far from something I have long thought about (for the Voynich Manuscript). I suspect that DNA comparison of the material used in its bifolios could yield a solid first step towards the original page-order, by reconstructing the likely original quire groupings (there is no obvious reason to think that its quires would have been constructed in anything apart from the conventional manner). Back in 2006, I also used matching skin flaws (along the spine) to predict how one of the original quires was cut from an animal skin – it would fascinating to have a parallel DNA data track to compare this kind of analysis with.

In short, while Stinson is interested in inter-textual DNA comparisons, I’m interested in intra-textual DNA comparisons. However, even though the latter might be the kind of techy humanities project you’d half-expect to pop up somewhere like the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, I don’t actually think it will happen any time soon. Unless you know better…?

Update: Bill Walsh sent in a link to a nice National Geographic story with more technical detail on Stinson’s DNA research. Thanks, Bill – neat! 🙂 And here’s another one from SciAm.

Ukrainian Voynich theory…

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In the good old days, we seemed to be in a “long boom”, blessed by an apparently unlimited supply of fringe Voynich theories, like so many babies’ socks effortlessly churned out by a deranged knitter. Oh yes, we’ve definitely seen plenty of knitters over the years. 🙂

But of late, it’s hard to avoid noticing that a Voynich theory drought has apparently taken hold. It’s not that all the good theories have already been nabbed: the nature of most Voynich theories is they are intrinsically bad but non-trivial to disprove, while simultaneously playing out a subtle wish-fulfilment role in the theorist’s personal psychodrama. A bit like an Action Man toy for intellectual introverts. 🙂

But why should this ‘silence of the flim-flams’ be happening now? My suspicion is that the VMs cultural meme has subtly drifted over the last few years  into a kind of no man’s land. Whereas it used to be something for everybody, I think that the ‘analysis paralysis’ of the Wikipedia Voynich page has spread, virus-like, through mainstream culture: and that the VMs’ status as a wacky para-historical mystery has been displaced by a kind of diffused epistemological ennui, as if the very need to understand it is somehow misjudged – that it’s not that kind of girl.

However, here’s a tolerably recent Voynich theory I’d missed, courtesy of “Michael the friend of D.” (who appears to be from the Ukraine), first posted to sci.lang in 2007. By plucking characters from a rotating sequence of three lines, Michael is able to pluck out a single non-word (“gracieg”) from the VMs. Where less than three lines are available, he suggests that stuff is hidden (Trithemius-style) in every other word. Of course, he’s not actually using the VMs for this, but a cleaned-up page of VMs text from omniglot.com: which isn’t so very different from Gordon Rugg relying on the statistical properties of the transcription. On the bright side, Michael is at least self-aware enough to notice that that he’s probably falling into a trap. 🙂

The Tepenecz f1r signature…

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Back in February 2005, I decided to use my m4d image-processing 5k1llz to try to see how much of the erased owner’s signature at the bottom of f1r (the very first page) of the Voynich Manuscript I could reasonably reconstruct.

tepenec-raw

The reason the signature is so invisible is because some (probably early 17th century) owner physically scrubbed that part of the page really, really clean, to the point that there’s basically no ink there, nada, zilch. All that remains is no more than a subtle half-shadow, a ghostly echo that you have to enhance over and over and over to snatch even a vague glimpse. Well, that’s what I did four years ago – and here’s what ultimately came out of the process:-

tepenec-fake

By a twist of fate, I discovered this week just how correct my interpretation of the signature is (it’s actually surprisingly close). But that’s actually someone else’s story, which I hope to blog about at a later date…

Other Euro Voynich books…

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Having just blogged on up-to-the-minute German Voynichiana, what of the rest of Europe? Here’s a quick sampling to whet your appetite, should you ever wish to feast on such morcels…

Having worked with Enrique recently (he generously translated my History Today telescope article so that it could appear in Astronomia magazine), I’m very much looking forward to the forthcoming English translation of his novel… even if I do still have to wait until June 2009. *sigh*

Elderly professor, Voynich manuscript, high-level Vatican/Jesuit conspiracy, corrupt cardinal, people learn of the VMs and then they get killed, how will it all end?, la-di-da.

Yes, once again it’s those pesky Templars and their accursed book (what, the VMs? Quelle surprise!) *sigh*

The VMs, the Philosophers’ Stone and quantum physics all get woven together here: though any Voynich book without evil Jesuit priests and lost Templar treasure will always move swiftly to the top of my list, who’s to say what this will be like? All the same, first-time novelists probably have more than enough things to worry about without lumping the weighty baggage of the VMs onto their camel’s back.

According to Dennis Stallings, Maugenest’s story describes how Roger Bacon wrote the VMs during his 13-year confinement – and how Bacon’s ideas are so powerful that anyone who now tries to read them falls into an irreversible coma. Hmmm… though I must confess that Jacques Derrida’s “Of Grammatology” did give me a headache for a week afterwards, Maugenest might just be stretching believability past its breaking point here. Oh well!

German Voynich books…

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While adding categories to some old blog posts just now, up popped a mention of the Karlsruhe Virtual Katalog (KVK). I normally use KVK to find specific non-fiction holdings: but today I wondered what otherwise-unknown Voynich masterpieces it might be able to tell me about. At Dennis Stallings’ prompting, I’ve just started to add non-English Voynich novels to my Big Fat List, so this was a good opportunity to expand its scope in a rather more , errrm, “Teutonophile” direction…

What can 32.60 euroes buy you these days? Not a lot of explanation about the VMs, if the Amazon blurb for Roitzsch’s book is anything to go by. Somewhat unbelievably, its Unique Selling Point is that mainstream Voynich researchers will be eternally grateful for any insight readers might have into this mystery. Sadly, “condescending and hostile” might be a better prediction. Oh well. 🙁

Again, 19.90 euroes for a “Mystikthriller” might seem a little steep (particularly for those in the UK looking at the pound’s current 1:1 parity to the euro), but what the hey.  As with The Voynich Enigma, a Templar seal on the cover flags what you’re getting – a Euro-zone admixture of Church, Templar secrets, and (I’d predict fairly thin) cryptography. Ah, bless.

Alexander the Great, Persia, Voynich Manuscript, terrible secret, sexy archaeologist, Yale, bla bla bla. Sorry to be so immediately negative, but when will these people learn?

A bit of an oddity: 34 pages long, 8 euroes, a German-language magazine devoted to cryptozoology puts out an issue focusing on cryptobotany – and no prizes for guessing which bizarre manuscript is invited to the party. Might possibly be an interesting read – but I’ll admit to being somewhat skeptical.

The real curiosity of the day: a book describing the life and (odd) works a German mystic called Frederika Hauffe (1801-1829) whose convulsions and visions led to bizarre trance-like writing in both a “spirit language” and a “unique coded alphabet”. DeSalvo’s putative link between Hauffe and the VMs is anyone’s guess – but perhaps it would be worth having a look at his 224-page, pleasantly-affordable book. 🙂

Arthur Wallis Exell…

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Sometimes a passing comment can open up a brief window onto an otherwise lost world. A 2002 email I made to the VMs mailing list I stumbled upon earlier today brought to mind one such instance, and six years on I found myself wondering just what had been said, what had been going on in a very particular context. Let’s start with the email, which quoted Mary D’Imperio’s book “An Elegant Enigma” (as copied by Luis Velez):-

A.W. Exell, in his letter to Tiltman, August 1957, refers to a theory (not further specified) that early Arabic numerals were built on from one, two, three, four or more
strokes in a similar Oriental manner; he suggests a sketchy and incomplete correspondence between Voynich symbols and conventional numerals along these lines. No one has, to my knowledge, worked out a “stroke” theory of this kind in sufficient detail to test it out as a hypothesis (p.24)

Of course, D’Imperio’s work was built squarely on Tiltman’s foundations, so it’s entirely unsurprising that a letter to Tiltman should end up in it. Yet Exell was a botanist working at the Natural History Museum: so what was he doing talking about possible Arabic numerals in the VMs?

I followed up the post with a short post about ladybirds (the subject of Exell’s final book in 1991), somewhat amused by the fact they are known to Italians as “The Devil’s Chicken”, concluding that Exell died some time after 1991. But far more information is quickly available now than was the case in 2002 (though no English-language Wikipedia page): for example, the Natural History Museum archives have this to say about him:-

  • Exell; Arthur Wallis (1901-1993); Botanist in the Department of Botany;
    2nd class assistant 11 Aug 1924
    1st class assistant keeper 1934
    Deputy keeper 1950
    Retired 1962

So at the time of the 1957 letter, Exell was the NHM’s Deputy Keeper in the Department of Botany, having worked there for 33 years (more than half his life).

What fascinates me about all this is the notion that a whole group of people probably linked to the Natural History Museum (of which Exell was merely one) must surely have been looking at the VMs circa 1955-1957. Perhaps if someone looked at Exell’s correspondence from around that date (at least some of which is held in the NHM’s archives), a whole “invisible college” of Voynicheros might well present itself.

This isn’t just an academic exercise on my part: I genuinely believe that the kind of broad (yet classical) education you would need to understand the VMs has become a rare thing in modern education, to the point that there may be plenty we can learn from what Exell and his friends thought about the VMs. In fact, I would argue that probably the most useful writer on the subject is Lynn Thorndike (and he died in 1965). Is it coz we are too modern to unnerstand it?

“Voynich Volume 1” in BookLand…

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Something new just pinged on Cipher Mysteries’ bank of cultural radar screens: “Voynich Volume 1” by Hiromi Taihei (a manga artist who has previously published works in the young adult / science fiction genres) is due for release on 20 January 2009 – let me know if you see a copy.

Back in 2005, Elmar Vogt mentioned some German manga in Blotch magazine which used Voynichese for the monsters’ language: though the picture he uploaded has long since disappeared, the speech bubbles said “dar shes shokey” (from f68v1), “ykeey ykeey” (from f89v1), and “ees aiir olcho” (probably made up).  We’ll have to wait and see what line Hiromi Taihei’s manga takes…

As an aside, I looked up the 13-digit EAN number (ISBN-13) for Voynich Volume 1 on a UPC database: to my surprise, it came up as being registered to the country of “BookLand” – this turns out to be a fictional country invented in the 1980s to hold article numbers for books (EAN codes have a country prefix, e.g. Indonesian barcodes start with “899” etc). Having recently spent so much time reading about the sixteenth century Republic of Letters, I found this wonderfully ironic – a 20th century Republic of Books, right under our book-reading noses, but disguised as numbers and hence invisible to our eyes. The secret life of numbers, eh?

The secret of “aiin” and “aiir” revealed…

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Here’s a novel explanation for the curious “aiin” and “aiir” pattern found throughout the Voynich Manuscript’s curious text (AKA Voynichese) that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

In my 2006 book, I pointed out that the Voynichese stroke conventionally transcribed as “n” (in EVA) is actually far closer to a “v” with an embellished right stroke: I then went on to suggest that these lettergroups might well be pretending to be page numbers: “iiiv” for “2v” (i.e. folio 3 verso), “iir” for “2r” (i.e. folio 2 recto), etc. Yet however appealing an idea this might be, it fails to explain the preceding “a” sign (“i”-groups are almost always preceded by “a”). And so the follow-on question is this: why do “iiv” and “iir” appear as “aiiv” and “aiir” in the text?

The answer I now propose is brutally simple, and (dare I say it) possibly even obvious to anyone who has seen my recently posted page on the Voynich Manuscript’s own unusual quire numbers. Though quires were usually “signed” (i.e. they had signs added to them to allow a binder to be able to bind them together in the correct order) with quire numbers in the late Middle Ages, these quire signatures normally used quire letters in the early Middle Ages – a, b, c, etc. And so what “aiiv” would have most strongly resembled to a would-be reader circa 1450 is simply a rather old-fashioned reference to “quire a, folio ii verso“.

Having said that, not for a minute do I think that this kind of page reference is what the lettergroup actually represents – instead, I strongly believe that this is all part of the slightly convoluted rationale for the VMs’ cover cipher (i.e. what the cipher is pretending to be, rather than what it actually is), a deceptive surface arrangement of faux-historical letter shapes that attempts to tell/sell a misleading story to the casual observer.

All the same, I should mention that I did briefly wonder whether lettergroups such as “aiiv” apparently highlighting a page might simply be standing in for a letter hidden in plain sight on that very page, encoded (for example) as the shape of the plant or root there. In this manner, f1v could just about be read as “t” or “f” or “v”; f2r might conceivably be “m” or “e” (in the roots); f2v  “p” or “o” or “q”; f3r “v”; and so on. What is so intellectually appealing about this is that it would make the first quire nothing more than a huge one-page-per-letter steganographic cipher dictionary. Though this isn’t something I could myself accept, I thought I ought to flag it as a novel idea: errrm… neat, but rubbish. 🙂

New page on Voynich Quire Numbers…

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I’ve just added a new page to the Cipher Mysteries site that looks at the (historical) mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbers. This is an aspect of the VMs that has had relatively little coverage (apart from pp.15-18 of my book, *sigh*), yet which should form one of the key dating data.

Should be plenty there both (a) to pique the interest of any passing mainstream historians and (b) to annoy late Renaissance hoax theorists. Enjoy! 🙂

Review of “The Voynich Enslavement”…

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This is a weird one: The Voynich Enslavement by Hank Snow is a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-themed experimental novel, in an alternative society built around whipping, slaves, S&M and all that jazz. I’m hardly giving away my personal orientation to say that, ummm, this isn’t really my bag: but there you go, it is what it is.

The story stops after seven chapters (which was when Hank Snow died), though most readers will likely give up after a page or two: despite the full-on mix of bravado, bravura and braggadoccio, the majority of the pleasure was probably more for the writer than for the reader.

So far, so nothing: but what struck me is how this casts a raking light across the age-old advice to “write about what you know”. Given that hardly anybody in the big scheme of things actually knows anything about the VMs, under what circumstances could an author ever sensibly weave the VMs into their novel? “Write about what you don’t know” doesn’t seem so much postmodern as deliberately obtuse, if not actually foolish. As I have said many times, trawling through the sustained paralysis of the Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page yields nothing of great substance: yet this is surely what most novelists seem to rely on when constructing their great works.

My own advice to the legion (well, certainly cohorts) of would-be Voynich novelists is that, whatever your postmodern / ironic / amused take on this  “unreadable book”, the VMs is actually a very poor hook to hang a fine coat upon, let alone to catch a fine fish with. Find yourself a big theme (or two) for the actual story, and work hard to keep a very light touch on both the history and the mystery – the point at which these stop being secondary to the plot is the point at which you will lose your readers.