Voynich pub meet – Summer 2010…

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It’s coming up to that time of year when I invite UK Voynicheros [*] of all creeds (hoax, language, cipher, glossolalia, etc) to converge upon an historic London pub one Sunday afternoon for a not-at-all-formal chat about all things cipher-mystery-related over a couple of drinks, and perhaps to borrow or return some books from / to my own overstocked VMs / cipher library.

So, out goes the shout to (in no particular order) Philip Neal, Barbara Barrett, Marke Fincher, Tony Mann, Bunny, John Kozak, Peter Howard Mason, Keith Body, Gerry Kennedy, Jeff Haley, and indeed to anyone else who might like to come along – please email me to let me know what dates you prefer. Also, if you’re an overseas Voynichero who (it just so happens) plans to be in London around the end of August / early September 2010, email me your dates too and I’ll try to fit it around them.

As always, looking forward to it! 🙂

[*] Just so you know…

  • “Voynich researchers” – deluded souls whose methodological rigour is of little use against this cryptological Everest
  • “Voynichians” – people immersed in the VMs world for so long they probably have their own private pronunciation for EVA
  • “Voynicheros” – those who don’t take the Voynich quest hugely seriously, perhaps even preferring travelling to arriving. 🙂

Chaocipher updates…

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Like hourly buses on a wet winter morning, here’s a pair of Chaocipher pages that arrived at my stop one after the other, both discussing how to break John Byrne’s Exhibit 1, and both strongly recommended reading for those interested in the Chaocipher.

First to arrive was Carl Scheffler’s page on Exhibit 1 (but you might perhaps want to read his introductory page on the Chaocipher first, complete with nice coloured disk diagrams). By looking for long sequences of repeated symbols, he managed to reduce the staggeringly-large search space down to a mere ~457,000 permutations to check: in fact, he further managed to reduce the space to only 444 permutations, which would probably be achievable even without the aid of computers. Furthermore, once he had discovered the initial ring state, Carl went on to reverse engineer the keyphrase used to set the disks up (‘THINKTHINK’, with the sequence of letters applied to the disks with the pattern LLRLLRLRRLR). He has a further page planned on Exhibit 4 – I’ll let you know when he posts this.

Subsequently, Moshe Rubin’s near-definitive update on Exhibit 1 turned up. As usual, Moshe’s 12-page PDF manages to answer more or less every question you find yourself asking along the way (though admittedly he doesn’t yet know to whom Byrne’s enciphered “CORDIALTHANKSTOLO” was referring). From this, you can also see that Byrne used ‘Q’ and ‘W’ for ‘,’ and ‘.’ (plus ‘Z’ for ‘end-of-line’), hence the plaintext begins “ALLGOODQQUICKBROWNFOXESJUMPOVERLAZYDOGTOSAVETHEIRPARTYW“.

Incidentally, though the idea of encoding punctuation as rarely-used letters is a well-known cipher trick, I find the historical question of when this mechanism was first used particularly intriguing. This is because I’ve long wondered whether the “am” letterpair frequently found at Voynich line-ends might also encipher a rare letter (such as ‘X’). True, there are some Milanese ciphers with letters for scribal abbreviations and contractions (the 1450 cipher for Tristano Sforza enciphers ‘-9’, while the 1455 cipher for Ludovico Petronio Senen has a cipher for ‘subscriptio’), but these seem to belong to a quite different family. I can’t see this in Kahn or al-Qalqashandi, so… what was the earliest cipher to replace punctuation with rarely used letters?

The Voynich silly season is upon us (which is a shame)…

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Rather than spam your (no doubt already dangerously close-to-overfilled) inboxes with a stream of inane posts about edgy Japanese musicians producing conceptual albums inspired by the VMs’ illustrations (e.g. …

Limited edition Merzbow (Masami Akita) pressed on lime green vinyl, a work inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript, in a bootleg style cover.

…), Cipher Mysteries will be gently snoozing through most of this year’s silly season, and I cordially suggest you do the same!

You know, it really is about time the Next Big Thing happened in the VMs world (and I don’t mean the radiocarbon and ink papers finally being published in a proper journal). Why hasn’t some tenacious Yale art history student picked up on the codicological mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s marginalia and done a proper spectroscopic analysis of them? Why hasn’t anyone really gone looking for a mid-15th century abbot (for who else would have their own scriptorium, producing documents for him to sign?) not too far from Savoy and called something not too far from “Simon Sint…”? The closest I’ve found so far is Abbé Simon du Bosc (who died in 1418, but was an abbot in Northern France), but probably isn’t much of a match… oh well! =:-o

Edith Rickert, revisited…

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The century since Wilfrid Voynich unearthed his now-eponymous manuscript has seen many groups of codebreakers take a tilt at its cryptographic windmills. The most famous of these was William Friedman’s “First Study Group” of WWII cryptologists: but I’ve recently become interested in finding out to what degree WWI codebreakers tried to get in on the act. Those were the halcyon days of what modern crypto people now call (perhaps with a touch of disdain) “non-machine ciphers”, and so we shallow computer-centric moderns might have plenty to learn from what they had to say (if they left any notes for us to find, which we don’t currently know).

Did the Voynich manuscript, then, have a Zeroth Study Group circa 1920? John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert were part of the same American First World War codebreaking team, and certainly had far more than a passing familiarity with the VMs (Rickert briefly corresponded with WMV, for example). However, their attention subsequently turned to producing critical edition of Chaucer’s work, a challenge which was to occupy them both for many years.

Not that much has been written about Edith Rickert: when I blogged about her before, I found only a few online sources (such as this one) to work from. However, a very nice 2009 paper by William Snell just turned up on the Net – A Woman Medievalist Much Maligned: A Note in Defense of Edith Rickert (1871–1938) – which seems to meet this lack well.

Probably the most telling comment on Manly’s relationship with Rickert was this:-

…Manly’s remarks written in April 1934 to David H. Stevens, the English teacher at Chicago who worked on the cipher team with them during the First World War, two years before Rickert’s final heart attack: “Miss Rickert is working twenty-five hours a day, as usual, and is on the verge of a breakdown, but she won’t break. She never does.” (Qtd. in Ramsey 1994: 77)

But then she did, alas. 🙁

Review of Enrique Joven’s “The Book of God and Physics”…

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(I’ll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don’t have star ratings & I’m not one to hide what I’m thinking, so this connection shouldn’t affect the following in any significant way.)

A thing I hear again and again from Cipher Mysteries readers is that they just aren’t into buying novels: for the most part, they’re non-fiction addicts hooked on the subtle adrenaline rush of research and who mostly feel bemused (and possibly even slightly alienated) by my fiction reviews. What, they say, can we possibly learn from a novel?

My angle on Voynich novels has never really been that of a lit crit: which is possibly just as well, it ought to be said, because most are little more than medium-boiled airport novels. Rather, I’m interested in how the idea of the Voynich Manuscript (and/or other historical cipher mysteries) is perceived and passed on by non-Voynich-researchers. Do novelists and/or their research assistants just read the Wikipedia page and make up the rest (as per the basic ‘lazy writer’ stereotype), or do some of them actually engage with the VMs, with the messy Voynich research process, and perhaps even – shock horror – with the historical evidence?

To be honest, few VMs novelists give the impression of their even having reached halfway through the Wikipedia page (however understandable that is), while a surprising number give a strong impression of having relied on even less helpful VMs information sources (such as “The Friar and the Cipher”, ugh). Even in this glorious era of Internet research, the ancient ‘GIGO’ rule (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”) works the same as it ever did. *sigh*

Yet Enrique Joven falls squarely into the engagement camp with his novel “The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery”, in that he has plainly done a lot of reading on the subject and is even well aware of the Voynich mailing list. His fictional treatment of the Voynich mystery is also pretty much the first one I’ve read that treats Jesuits in a fairly sensible, non-tokenistic way (doubly impressive given that his protagonist is a teacher at a Jesuit school), and he constructs his narrative around the VMs’ thrice-APODed page f67r1 and the astronomical sparks showered over the Imperial Court by the tense relationship between Brahe and Kepler (a subject I happen to know a fair amount about).

Yet curiously, the limitations of Enrique’s book arise not from the cipher or from the history, but instead from his treatment of those (fictional) Voynich mailing list members his protagonist gets caught up up with, many of whom apparently suffer from multiple-(virtual)-personality disorder. Now, I’m no great fan of the Voynich mailing list as it has become (has any genuinely useful research appeared there in several years? I don’t think so), and it is true that some listmembers post under deliberately false or whimsical names, as if they were secretly emo teenagers. But to make this aspect so central to the story has all the feeling of a false modern mythology, a kind of ‘Hollywood Internet’ where Everyone (apart from the straight-as-a-die protagonist) Is Online In Order To Hide Some Important Aspect Of Themselves That Will Be Revealed Later In The Plot.

That aside, Joven writes pretty well – and it was a pleasure to read a Voynich book where the Long-Hidden Secret Power It Contains is in fact not About To Destroy The World As We Know It, where the main character is not a charmlessly bionic version of Anthony Grafton, and where there are neither hordes of competing three-letter-agencies nor quasi-mystical Church-backed Conspiracies all fighting each other for ownership of the VMs’ boringly heretical secret.

Long-time (if not actually long-suffering) Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly point to my high opinion of Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum and Lev Grossman’s Codex (both of which have much the same kind of ambitions and restrained execution as Enrique’s book) as correlative evidence that I’m down on Voynich airport novels: but actually, given that Max McCoy’s “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” is still firmly my #1 (why don’t Voynich novelists ever read this first?) on the Big Fat List, it really is all a matter of personal taste. OK, I still think Enrique’s publishers should have dug deep inside themselves to find the sense to keep the rather nice original Spanish title “The Castle of the Stars” (which actually chimes nicely with the story on many different levels, while also being pleasantly reminiscent of the linguistic hack “The astronomer married a star”), but then again it is what it is, and perhaps a clunky title alone isn’t enough to make or break a book these days.

One slightly odd coincidence is that just about the time that the paperback version came out recently, an entirely new Voynich theory came out (courtesy of P. Han) linking Tycho Brahe and historical supernovae to the VMs by way of China (but more on that another day). All of which just goes to show that there really is, errrm, nothing new under the sun, and that the boundary between historical hypothesis and fictional supposition can be surprisingly thin!

Isaac Casaubon’s “Ephemerides”…

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I wonder if anyone has ever looked at Casaubon’s letters and his monumental diary (called the “Ephemerides”, and written in Latin) with a Voynich-informed eye?

Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) was regarded as one of the most learned men in Europe: and what is perhaps interesting to us (and that I didn’t know until a few days ago) is that though he started his career at the Academy of Geneva, he worked for a while at the University of Montpellier (1596-1598), before moving on to Lyon (1598-1599) at which point he was summoned to Paris by King Henry IV. In fact, though Dee researchers know him for his pursuit of John Dee’s papers, Casaubon only lived in London from 1610-1614 (and he couldn’t actually speak English), while Dee himself had died only in 1608 or 1609 (depending on who you ask).

Casaubon’s Latin correspondence (“Casauboni epistolæ, insertis ad easdem responsionibus“) was printed in Rotterdam (1709), while his Ephemerides were printed somewhat later (1850). Though I don’t think there is a critical edition of the Ephemerides available (nor indeed a translation, sadly), there are online editions of his letters here (I),  here (II), here (III), here (IV), and here (V), courtesy of the University of Mannheim.

OK, I’ll freely admit that the chances of anything turning up from this are small (Casaubon doesn’t really seem the type to gossip about a mysterious unreadable herbal that was doing the rounds). But because (given the VMs’ apparent links with Southern France / Savoy I’ve blogged endlessly about) we’d perhaps be more interested in 1596-1599 when he was in Montpellier and Lyon, you never know! 🙂

Voynich chicken scratches…

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As a Voynich Manuscript marginalia cognoscente, I’m always alert for new angles on the various incidental marks apparently added by its later owners. So, when Tim Tattrie left a comment about the “chicken scratch” marginalia on my recent Voynich-frontiers-circa-2010 post, I thought it was probably time to revisit them here.

Tim’s query was whether anyone had pursued the initials scribbled on f66v and f86v3: he noted that these were “clearly the same downward swept doodle of two or three letters (h?r), and because it is repeated in two folios, leads one to speculate its the initials of either the author, or an owner.” This almost exactly echoes what Jon Grove said on the Voynich mailing list (11 Sep 2002), that “It seems to consist of three connected downstrokes followed by a longer upstroke with a loop and final flourish, almost like ‘wR’ but not quite. It’s certainly not a random scribble. If it is a signature or monogram then it might help to establish dates and/or locations for the MS. ” To which Dana Scott replied at the time: “Notice that the single line ‘signature’ in f66v is essentially the same as the top line ‘signature’ in f86v (there are some differences to the right of each line).”

OK, so let’s look at them in all their hi-res glory. Firstly, the chicken scratches on f66v:-

And now here are the chicken scratches on f86v3. Palaeographically, I think this is much more interesting, because you can see what looks like a scribal line ending stub (in red), and lots of places where the quill has opened up under pressure in different directions (in blue). Some years ago, I suggested that these scratches might be an ink blot transfer of Georg Baresch’s signature, because if you rotate and flip them you can see letter-sequences that vaguely resemble “g///g”:-

However, there is a codicological nicety to consider here, which is that if you reorder Q8 (Quire #8) to place the astronomical (non-herbal) pages at the back, and also follow Glen Claston’s suggestion by inserting the nine-rosette quire between (the reordered) Q8 and Q9, what you unexpectedly find is that the f66v and f86v3 chicken scratches move extremely close together. If this is correct, it would imply that the doodles were added very early on in the life of the VMs, probably earlier even than the fifteenth-century hand quire numbering (and hence probably early-to-mid 15th century). And this would rule out Baresch by a couple of centuries or so. 🙂

But I have a possible bombshell to drop here. If I once again rotate and reverse the f86v3 chicken scratch, this moves the ornate scribal line-ending to the start, implying that it was the start of a line. Following the lines through from there on a Retinex-enhanced version of the page, I now suspect we know enough to separate out the letters one at a time:

If I’ve got this correct, then the letter sequence here is:-

  • (blue) “S“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (red) “i“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (orange) “m“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (purple) “o” / “n” / “t” [though it’s not entirely clear which]

So, something like “Simon”, then. What is particularly curious is that I have elsewhere suggested that the top-line marginalia on f116v reads “por le bon simon sint” in what I suspect was the handwriting of either the original author or someone very close to him/her. If that is right, then we can piece together a little bit of the VMs’ early 15th century provenance: that what we are looking at here is the ink blot signature of someone named (something close to) “Simon Sint”, who was very possibly the person to whom that original author gave the manuscript. Though it’s hard to be sure, this person may well be the same one who added the earliest set of quire numbers (which I called “Quire Hand 1” in The Curse)… but we’ll leave that issue for another day, that’s probably quite enough wobbly inferences for one post! 🙂

OK, as explanations go it’s not 100% convincing as yet, but all the same it’s a pretty joined-up historical hypothesis that could (and indeed should) be codicologically tested, which is more than can be said about most speculative VMs theories. I’m pretty sold on the idea that this is telling us we should be looking for someone (possibly a monk) in Southern France / Savoy called something not too far from “Simon Sint” circa 1450, and that this is his signature (i.e. he cared so little about the VMs that he used it as blotting paper, shame on him). Jeez, how specific do I need to be? 🙂

A Beautiful Infinity…

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There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand…

* * * * * *

The Brazilian girl’s plan is stone-cold in its vision, fractal in its detail, awesome in its thinking. Yes, the organizers have put the necessary overnight protection squad in place: but the two guards merely notice a curious mélange of hard-to-pin-down antique odours: spirit of hartshorn, hepatic air, green vitriol, all distinct yet merging awkwardly between one another, like jelly and ice cream in a child’s pudding bowl. They both feel the nausea slowly roll over them, but neither thinks to raise the alarm, as the aqua tofani weaves its dizzying, nauseous, near-fatal spell on them both. Of course, we don’t intend killing them: tonight’s sacred mission is one of life, not death.

Our filter masks firmly in place, we silently ease out of the concealed block behind the disabled toilets and past the sabotaged air-conditioning unit. The girl’s preparation has been good, for there is no klaxon, no lights, no alarm: following her confident lead, I guide the wheely bag carefully past the two tumbledown security-suit mannequins and onwards through the exhibition. Looking ahead, always ahead, we glide swiftly past countless Ouroubos-filled stands and up the wheelchair ramp to the locked glass plinth in the arena’s central raised area – yes, to the book. Or rather, to ‘The Book’.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the diamond-edged ring we made together over the shimmering orange dawn-lit fire on the mountainside: looking in her eyes, I take it and slide it quickly onto my middle finger. The girl – is she young, or old? Suddenly I can’t tell any more – nods, flicking her renegade, emptily-hungry eyes at me, and deftly touches my shoulder, her fingertip feeling for all the world like a butterfly landing and quickly gently launching itself away, far away into the curious half-light. On cue, I turn my attention to the security glass, and carefully use the hard-edged symbol of our union to etch its front face with four good-size concentric circles.

The hall is starting to fill, now: our small army of alchemists is emerging one by one from their hiding places behind occult bookstalls, beneath pagan stall covers and carefully-positioned wizard cloaks, each with a red or yellow hood and a surgical mask tightly fastened down, just as she had specified. As the last of the twelve completes the circle around us, I step sharply forward and punch the ring’s diamond tip right at the centre of the design. The glass buckles a little, yet doesn’t quite give way – No, I think, something is wrong, and for an instant a cloud of burnt cinnamon doubt swirls around me, enveloping me in the riptide of fears I’ve worked so hard to suppress these past three years.

Yet perhaps sensing my edginess, the alchemists start to clap and chant, and before long I feel their resolve coursing through my veins. The bull in my soul charges forward and I punch, punch, punch the toughened glass until it starts to yield to my attacks, and its etched central circle finally gives way. Impatiently, I widen the glassy gap with my bare hands just enough to remove the book and to raise it over my head in triumph, tersely spattering its centuries-rigid vellum cover with my blood as I do so. The alchemists swoop in too to hold it aloft and to turn it to The Page, that one, marvellous page we have been waiting to see all our lives.

I look over to the girl: she nods once again and I bring out the ceremonial firebowl from the bag. Adam – dear, ever-reliable Frater Adamus – deftly removes the page with his pocket knife, folds it to shape, fills it with regulus of antimony, and ties up its gathered top using aqua vitae-impregnated handmade blue twine from his workshop. We are all trembling now, for everyone (even Baresch) was right – the Philosophers’ Stone is indeed hidden inside The Book: yet this is neither a metaphorical truth nor a pharmacological truth, but instead a literal truth. For once you have – as we have, over so many decades – worked to decode its carefully layered and allusive visual symbolism, the Voynich’s pages form a map spiralling in on itself… all pointing to one place, the single slightly-thicker-than-average vellum herbal bifolio inside which the tiny fragments of Stone were sealed all those centuries ago. We, then, are its 21st century liberators, its alchemical revolutionary freedom front: all we have to do now is light the blue touchpaper, and see the long-promised fireworks. And this ceremony marks the end of alchemy’s epic struggle, the chequered flag at the finishing line of two millennia of The Work. My queen nods once more for me to step forward with my lit taper, so that we can all make the ultimate step – beyond History, beyond pain, beyond Time itself. And I do, but…

* * * * * *

There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand… In this moment, I don’t know if I’m living forever or dying forever, if the girl is really human or some selfish dark spirit that is guiding me I know not where. Am I releasing her or creating her? Is she part of me or am I part of her? A flash from the the burning vellum page suddenly lights up our faces and I lay down beside her on the floor, the alchemical king and queen finally together, just as the Ancients foretold. A fire alarm finally goes off, its sprinklers lurch into action with a indoor cloudburst, but it is all too late, far too late, the Stone is here, The Stone Is Here! For all the burning, twisting sensations, we know for certain that the Stone is merely giving us a taste of ultimate Death to deliver its promise of ultimate Life. Yet though the colours in its flames are more intense than ever now, so too is the agony: I turn to the girl and see the same things I’m feeling reflected in her sprinkler-soaked face, and as we hold each other tightly I know it is both the end and the beginning, and our eternal future together lies in and beyond the Stone…

* * * * * *

Why on earth, mused the firemen, policemen, and paramedics, would anyone have gone to the trouble of placing all those strangely-posed lifelike statues in the middle of the hall? And why was just a single page missing from the precious Voynich Manuscript, on a rare two-day loan to this alchemy conference? File it under ‘M’ for ‘mystery’…

Some Voynich short stories…

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For a change, here are some links to short-ish Voynich stories not actually written by me. 😉

Mataoaka has posted up two chapters of “Infernobella’s Adventures: the Voynich Manuscript” you might enjoy. Here’s Chapter 1, and here’s the (only-just-posted but fairly short) Chapter 2 – if you want to read more, tell the author to write some more! And yes, capturing “moonlight in a box” would indeed probably be easier than solving the VMs. 🙂

Secondly, here’s a link to Google’s cache of a nice little short story called “Ganthua” – though this only briefly name-checks the Voynich Manuscript, I rather like its characters and its oddly religious narrative spirit, revolving as it does around an implausibly large creature’s appearing on the beach on day and attracting a curious cult following. I don’t know why the author deleted his “Bit Gild” blog – if you happen to know him, tell him I liked Ganthua! More, please! 🙂

Codes on film!

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I think that there will always be films based around codes because they give screenwriters such an “easy in”. Just saying “code” conjures up…

  • Dark secrets (e.g. heresy undermining The Church, free energy undermining The Market, occult powers, any old stuff really)
  • Powerful interests (usually multiple conspiracies fighting each other behind the scenes for control of ‘The Secret’)
  • A central McGuffin that is small enough to be concealed, smuggled and fought over in hand-to-hand combat in an implausible (often underground) location
  • Highly motivated central character(s) who, though technically prepared for the challenge, rapidly find themselves out of their depth in every other sense
  • (and so on)

Do you need to know much more than the title to construct the film poster? No wonder film companies like codes so much! I’m immediately reminded of Mercury Rising (which I saw again recently, and sort-of enjoyed), but also the 2010’s The 7th Dimension which is just being premiered. Personally, I tend to avoid films where any of the main characters are billed as “hackers” like the plague, but then again that might be because I’m a computer programmer by trade – if I was a dentist, perhaps I’d have done the same for Marathon Man, who knows? 🙂

Anyhow… an historical cipher-themed film I’m genuinely looking forward to is The Thomas Beale Cipher, a short animated film by Andrew S. Allen that has already premiered and should be out on the international festival circuit during the rest of 2010. Details are (probably deliberately) sketchy right now (for example, the YouTube sampler video for the film has been withdrawn), but there is a Facebook page to whet your appetite a little – I’ll let you know of any screening dates.

Not quite so high on my list of upcoming historical code films to look for is The Ancient Code, to be distributed by Warner Brothers. This has apparently been in production for a couple of years, and gives every impression – from the fairly PR-centric set of materials on the website – of being a set of talking heads talking their heads off about different aspects of holism, surrounded by faux-psychedelic video editing effects. It’s true that the film-makers have  assembled a fairly, well, eclectic set of heads to do their talking thang: but it’s hard to see how Nick Pope, Tim Wallace-Murphy, Philip Gardiner, and even Johnny Ball (the former children’s TV presenter who you may recall attracting some criticism in late 2009 for his particularly colourful denial of climate change) amount to a gigantic hill of gravitas re ancient wisdom and codes concealed through the ages. But all the same, I’ll continue to try hard to swim against the tide of unconvincingness the film seems to be sweating from every pore, so wish me luck in that endeavour. 🙂

And finally… clicking onwards from The Ancient Code’s not-so-ancient website leads us neatly to Philip Gardiner’s upcoming The James Bond Code, which struggles valiantly to connect Ian Fleming’s (anti)hero James Bond with alchemy and gnosis (apparently via voodoo and numerology). There’s even a fan music video based on the book, which frankly even I’m struggling to grasp any kind of rationale for. Doubtless there’s some kind of film optioning angle going on here too. Honestly, would anyone apart from a rather fevered PR hack call this “The Thinking Man’s Da Vinci Code“? [Nope, not a hope, sorry.] But all the same, there you have it, so feel free to add it (or not) to your own personal list of, errm, ‘hysterical historical hypotheses’, along with Gavin Menzies’ 1421 & 1434, Edith Sherwood’s “Leonardo da Vinci wrote the Voynich Manuscript” theory, etc.