The Center for Cryptologic History’s 2010 calendar…!

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It’s not widely known that the US National Security Agency has a small section at Fort Meade devoted to the history of code-breaking: The Center for Cryptologic History. As well as making scans of a number of useful documents available on its website (most notably Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”), the CCH convenes its own history of cryptology event every two years: the 2009 conference had David Kahn, Elonka Dunin, Whitfield Diffie and loads of other well-known crypto people both attending and giving talks. Though the focus was mainly 20th century, the two notable exceptions were…

  • Kathryn Schwartz, Harvard University – “The Academic, Poetic and Militarised Impetuses behind Medieval Arabic Cryptology’s Development”
  • Richard Belfield, Fulcrum TV – “The Story Behind the Shepherd’s Monument Inscription at Shugborough Hall”

Note that though I didn’t rate Richard Belfield’s “Six Unsolved Ciphers” book very highly when I reviewed it here, the Shepherd’s Monument chapter was by far its best section, so his lecture on that same subject would probably have been well worth catching.

And now we have a new reason to be interested in the CCH: its 2010 calendar contains several pictures of the Voynich Manuscript, which is an especially good reason for Cipher Mysteries readers to want their own copy. But you can’t buy this in the shops (except on eBay, where you can buy pretty much everything that isn’t actually thermonuclear): according to the CCH’s Barry Carleen…

If any of your subscribers would like to order calendars, they can send an e-mail to [email protected] and we’ll be glad to provide them as long as supplies last.

So there you go – a happy 2010 to you all! 🙂

Proto-Swedish Voynich food theory…

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As far as theories of the Voynich Manuscript’s linguistic origin go, people have over the years proposed proto-Russian, proto-German, proto-Dutch, in fact proto-just-about-every-European-language-going… yet it seemed that nobody had tried Swedish as a possible match for Voynichese.

However, when I gave this a go, I found to my great surprise that the two meshed really well, particularly the unique “dinka-donka” (i.e. ‘verbose’) scansion they apparently share. After a bit of work, I managed to compile the following set of letter equivalences (EVA transcription in square brackets):-

chefese

(The full EVA key maps “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” →  “o–bmc–r-stxkeydnfu—-h-“, and
“ch / sh / ckh / cth” → “v / i / g / w“). This transforms the following Voynichese on f116v…

pchal larar al ckhal rain alol fchy rpchey shfy ches ar opche kan dlr
olkeey rain shey qoraiin shey ol lchedy rshey qokeedy chtain oly
soraiin ykeey rain sheeky qokain sheey qol cheds ar r arshe
qokain ar raiin shek okain yrshey qolchey okain shckhy qokam
shedy qokeey qoka qokeey lchey olkey raiin cthar shckhy qotar

…to the proto-Swedish plaintext…

yvot tonon ot got nork otet cvh nyvmh ich vmf on eyvm sok btn
etsmmh nork imh denorrk imh et tvmbh nimh desmmbh vuork eth
fenorrk hsmmh nork immsh desork immh det vmbf on n onim
desork on norrk ims esork hnimh detvmh esork igh desox
imbh desmmh deso desmmh tvmh etsmh norrk won igh deuon

I then needed to find a remote community where this (otherwise lost) proto-Swedish is still in use. After an extensive research trail, I uncovered rare video footage of the one person in the world who still talks this language: and, amazingly, I was able to link up the text in the Voynich Manuscript’s recipe section with a short section of the tape (as per the subtitles), proving without a shadow of a doubt that the eleventh starred paragraph on f116r contains the recipe for meatballs:-

SCmeatballs-subtitled-2

You couldn’t make it up. Nor perhaps would you want to. 🙂

Voynich quill forensics…?

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Not sure if anyone has suggested this before, but I was musing on Locard’s exchange principle (which proposes that “with contact between two items, there will be an exchange”) and how that relates to the quills used to write the VMs. Marxists are fond of pointing out how both people and machines are consumed by industrial processes (not just raw materials, the notional “consumables”), and so surely the same should be true of writing with a quill pen?

That is, because the process of writing with a quill pen blunts (i.e. consumes) the quill, Locard’s exchange principle suggests that we should in theory be able to find tiny fragments of quill pen embedded in or around the stream of Voynichese ink. All you’d need is an idea of what you’re looking for, a microscope, access to the VMs, and a fair bit of patience. 🙂

How might that help us? Well… a quill is a feather, and feathers are organic, so feathers have DNA. We might therefore be able to use the quill fragment DNA in conjunction with the vellum DNA to try to physically locate where the writing was done.

Of course, if you wanted to get a full genome from a feather (as per this paper), you’d need more than microscopic fragments to work with. But I’d guess a determined investigator would be able to identify the species even from a tiny piece. And if it turned out to be a dodo feather, we might be able to prove that the VMs was a spectacularly knowing hoax courtesy of insiders at Rudolph II’s court. 😉

More 1400-1500 dress sources…

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Just in case you think my take on VMs history is excessively Italo-centric, I should point out that Jacqueline Herald’s (1981) “Renaissance Dress In Italy, 1400-1500” has a sister volume in the series – Margaret Scott’s (1980) “Late Gothic Europe, 1400–1500“. Considering that Herald’s book goes for £400+, this is a relative bargain at a mere £120 or so. Doubtless both are excellent, with Herald’s opus probably having helped countless SCAdians to reproduce that much-prized Isabelle d’Este look over the years: yet given that the pair are a fine gold thread under thirty years old each, might there be something more current to which we could look?

For medieval dress, the answer could be (the very same) Margaret Scott “head of the history of dress at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and a consultant on historical dress for the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other museums“, according to this page. Her most recent book is “Medieval Dress and Fashion” (2009), though her (1986) “A Visual History of Costume: The 14th and 15th Centuries” and (2003) “Medieval Clothing and Costumes: Wealth and Class in Medieval Times” both seem likely to be just as relevant.

All the same, I do suspect that for Voynich research Jacqueline Herald’s book (summarised here) will ultimately prove to be the most useful of  all of these. As a starting point, Herald’s glossary of Quattrocento clothing terms has ended up online: I also liked Vangelista di Antonio Dellaluna’s practical page on Renaissance jewelry and her Garb Closet, plenty of good (if sometimes SCA-centric) stuff.

But then again, if you look for similar book recommendations to Herald & Scott in LibraryThing, you find “Dress in Italian painting, 1460-1500” (1975) by Elizabeth Birbari, the five-volume “Storia del costume in Italia” (1964-1969) by Rosita Levi Pisetzky, “The Dress of the Venetians, 1495-1525” (1988, Pasold Studies in Textile History) by Stella Mary Newton, and “Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing” (2005) by Carole Collier Frick, let alone the slightly earlier “Gilding the Market: Luxury And Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy” (2006, Middle Ages Series) by Susan Mosher Stuard.

In short, is there some kind of Quattrocento fashion / dress book glut going on here (but which we were collectively completely unaware of)?

“Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500″…?

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While searching for things to do with the humanist minuscule hand, I stumbled across a reference in a short 2002 paper by Jessica Wilbur to an oversized 1981 hardback by Jacqueline Herald called “Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500“. Now, I thought, that sounds like a book I’d really like to buy: only to find out from Bookfinder.com that copies now go for between £403 and £836. Ohhhh well…

However, according to the M25 Consortium and WorldCat there are at least 20 copies of it in libraries not too far from me (including the British Library, the Warburg Institute, Kingston University, Cambridge, Oxford, etc), so it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of this by some [hopefully legal] means.

Is this something any Cipher Mysteries reader has already seen? It seems almost the perfect book to have in one hand while examining the various Voynich nymphs’ costumes: and it seems strange that such a strong visual resource didn’t feature in the recent Austrian documentary. Maybe its very rarity has made it lost to a whole generation of researchers, who knows?

Update: having posted this, I settled down to continue reading the copy of Mark Phillips’ (1987) “The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence” that I bought yesterday in the very pleasant  Oxford Street Books in Whitstable. And in footnote 22 on p.40 there just happens to be… yes, a direct reference to Jacqueline Herald’s book. What are the chances of that, eh?

Happy New Year, and some predictions for 2010…

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Once again, it’s time to roll out and dust off the Cipher Mysteries crystal skull crystal ball (no, I didn’t buy it on eBay, nor did I nick it from the British Museum) to peer dimly ahead to 2010. What will it bring us all?

Of course, 2009’s big news was the radiocarbon dating of four slivers of the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum for the recent Austrian TV documentary, which yielded an oddly early date (1405-1438 at 95% confidence). We’re still waiting for the actual data to get a better feel for the historical reasoning: doubtless there will be more announcements to come during this year (some from the Beinecke Library itself), perhaps as the English version of the documentary edges closer to broadcast. Hence…

Prediction #1: by mid-2010, carefully combining the raw data from the documentary with what we already know about the Voynich Manuscript will move us to an entirely new and unexpected (though no less paradoxical or awkward) mainstream position.

Of course, hard evidence is doubly hard for some to swallow: while behind the scenes, quite a few people are silently beavering away with their own VMs-related stuff. For example, I can’t help but notice Jorge Stolfi pa-/de-trolling the Wikipedia Voynich:Talk page, which rather makes me wonder what he’s up to. Hence…

Prediction #2: throughout 2010, a whole bunch of Voynicheros will exit stage right, the arrival of hard evidence having spoiled their long-running soft evidence gig. At the same time, a whole scrum of other researchers will join in the VMs pool party. The Voynich research landscape will become more overtly historical, less wildly speculative (and about time too).

In 2009, we’ve seen quite a few academics looking at the VMs: but I think it’s fair to say that none to date has fully engaged with the breadth and heterogeneity of the evidence that plagues & intrigues us all. If Lynn Thorndike were alive, I’d be camping outside his office 🙂 but circa 2010 what kind of historian has the breadth and daring to take on the risk of rising to this challenge? Anthony Grafton? Charles Burnett [in 2010]?

Prediction #3: I suspect that late in 2010, we’ll see the arrival of perhaps the first truly heavyweight academic Voynich Manuscript paper for decades. I just can’t shake the intuition that something big is coming this way…

Combine all of the above with the conservative set of analyses carried out by Andreas Sulzer’s team, and I think you get:-

Prediction #4: throughout 2010, the Beinecke Library’s curators will receive many requests for specific art historical forensic tests to be carried out on the VMs, such as multispectral imaging on the marginalia / paints / inks (to try to separate out the different authorial and/or construction layers) and/or vellum DNA analysis (to try to reconstruct the original bifolio grouping). However, they will probably say ‘no’ to all of them (a shame, but there you go).

Ummm… here’s looking forward to 2011, then! 😉

Bacon = Shakespeare, 2009 remix…

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A modern day Baron Frankenstein (actually, a mild-mannered Norwegian) has wired up the electrodes to a monstrous-looking zombie most thought long dead. It rises! It stands! It lives! It liiiiives!!!!!

I’m referring, of course, to the whole idea of using wobbly cryptography to prove that Francis Bacon = William Shakespeare, that David Kahn somewhat derisively called “enigmatology”. Note that I’m not saying the end result is wrong (even though I personally suspect that Shakespeare collaborated rather more thoroughly than his “solo genius” biographers tend to claim), but rather that the kind of reconstructive Renaissance pseudo-cryptography usually employed to try to prove that end result is usually pants central highly questionable guff.

So… what of church organist Petter Amundsen’s “Sweet Swan of Avon – The Shakespeare Treasure” claims (which I found via the forum posts here)? It’s a pretty chunky bit of TV: four 50 minute episodes, of which part 1, part 2 and part 3 are available for viewing online (mostly in Norwegian).

It all (somewhat inevitably) starts with the original version of “Good frend for Iesus SAKE forbeare…” (the start of Shakespeare’s Stratford plaque, much loved by Shakespeare conspiracy novelists), with its camelcase and extraneous dots, all good grist to Renaissance cryptographers’ mills (they also loved hiding things with doubled letters). Only in this case, Amundsen reads them as our old friend the Baconian biliteral cipher:-

BAAAB - AAAAA - AABAA - AABBB - BAAAA
  S       A       E       H       R
AAAAB - AAAAA - BABBA - AABAA - AABAA - ABBBA
  B       A       Y       E       E       P
BAAAA - AABAB - BAABA - AAAAA - BABAB - AAAAA
  R       F       T       A       X       A
BAAAA - AAAAA - BABAA - AAAAA - BAAAA
  R       A       W       A       R

…which leaves him with the letters…

S A E H R
B A Y E E P
R F T A X A
R A W A R

…where he arbitrarily transposes the two coloured groups into “W SHAXPEARE” (blue) and “FR(ancis) BA(con)” (red). But what to make of the mysterious “YETA” in the middle? After some (frankly rather kabbalistic) meditation, Amundsen decides to add “DUST” to “YETA” (modulo 24, I think) to get:-

+   Y E T A
    D U S T
    C A N V

 …thus filling out the middle of his letter rectangle even further…

S A E H R
B A C A E P
R F N V X A
R A W A R

 …i.e. “FR(ancis) BACAN V(erulam)”.

OK, I’ll admit it: we’re only halfway through the first episode of four and my patent-pending “pants-o-meter” is already shrieking like a robotic pig fed AC rather than DC… not a good start. It goes on to talk about the School of Night, the importance of the number 53, freemason plots, Oak Island, la-la-la.

Ultimately, it comes down to the age-old question: cryptographically, do I think Amundsen is (a) onto something or (b) on something? Sadly for Baconian enigmatologists everywhere, I have to say that (b) is looking far more likely. But please feel free to watch all four episodes yourself, don’t let me stop you making up your own mind. 🙂

Roger Bacon & the Voynich Manuscript, revisited…

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When Wilfrid Voynich bought his (now eponymous) manuscript in 1912, it was accompanied by a 1665 letter from Johannes Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher. In that, Marci noted three things that Raphael Mnishovsky (King Ferdinand III’s Czech language tutor) had told him about the strange artefact:-

  1. “that the said book belonged to Emperor Rudolf“
  2. “that [Rudolf II] presented 600 ducats to the messenger who brought him the book“
  3. that Raphael “thought that the author was Roger Bacon the Englishman“

Voynich, perhaps seduced by a private ambition to sell a Roger Bacon manuscript, subsequently insisted that everyone should call it “The Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript”, and even went to the trouble of reconstructing a (probably completely wrong) Anglo-centric provenance based around John Dee’s selling a Roger Bacon manuscript to Emperor Rudolph II. However, since Voynich’s death, the whole notion that Roger Bacon was connected with the VMs has slipped ever further into the background, to the point that no Voynich researcher has considered Bacon a viable possibility for years (if not decades), basically because we all thought 1450 was the earliest workable date for it.

However, with the recent Austrian documentary vellum dating (1405-1438 @ 95% confidence), it seems we may all have been wrong about that. OK, not necessarily by much, but enough to be a tad annoying. Which is why I decided to revisit the whole Roger Bacon / VMs claimed linkage: might there actually be something in it, however tangential?

The first issue to consider is Raphael Mnishovsky’s idea that the VMs had anything to do with Roger Bacon. When did Mnishovsky form or conceive this opinion? There seem to be five main scenarios to consider:

  1. Mnishovsky had seen the VMs pre-1612 at court and had formed that opinion on his own
  2. Mnishovksy had seen the VMs in Jacobus de Tepenecz’s possession
  3. Mnishovksy had seen the VMs in Baresch’s possession
  4. Mnishovsky had seen the VMs in Marci’s possession and had formed that opinion only then
  5. Mnishovsky had not seen the VMs, and was passing on a second-hand opinion

The problem with Scenario #1 is that I don’t think Mnishovsky was quite old enough to have been at Rudolph’s court. Similarly for #2, my understanding is that Mnishovsky was essentially a post-1612 courtier, and de Tepenecz was never close to court after Rudolph II’s death. The problem with #3 is that Baresch doesn’t mention any link with Roger Bacon in his 1637 letter to Kircher: while the problem with #4 is that it seems inconsistent with Marci’s letter (unless I’m subtly misreading it).

Which leads me to point my stick of historical judgment at Scenario #5: and to assert that the manuscript was probably linked to Roger Bacon while still at Rudolph II’s court (though Baresch probably knew nothing of this). Might the VMs have been sold to Rudolph as having been composed by Roger Bacon?

Given that Roger Bacon (genuinely) constructed his own computus and that the first manuscript copies of the famous “Mirror of Alchemy” (Speculum Alchemiae) ascribed (falsely) to him appeared in the fifteenth century, the suggestion that the (early-to-mid-fifteenth century) VMs could also have been (falsely) ascribed to Roger Bacon is hardly that far-fetched. Yes, I agree the claim is false – but where and when did that claim originate?

I wonder… is there a list anywhere of lost (genuine or ascribed) Roger Bacon works? Perhaps there are references to a Roger Bacon herbal in correspondence close to the Imperial court 1600-1612 that might have been overlooked. Something to think about, anyway. 🙂

PS: here’s a 1928 article on Newbold’s claims that recently popped up in JSTOR. Enjoy (the first page, at least)! 🙂

“The Curse of the Voynich”, now back in print…

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Today’s brief news is that 100 copies of “The Curse of the Voynich” have just arrived from the printers, so those 20-odd people who ordered one from Amazon this month should be receiving it by the New Year (post willing). Alternatively, if you’d like your own shiny signed copy, order one via PayPal using the “Buy Now” [UK, Europe, R.O.W.] buttons at the top of the Compelling Press book page, let me know by email, and I’ll add a suitable anagram on the front page for you. 🙂

Pre-1450 German Voynich possibility…?

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The recent Austrian Voynich documentary gave a nice clear radiocarbon dating (1404-1438 at 95% confidence) for the vellum, and finished by suggesting (based on the swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle) a Northern Italian origin for the manuscript. But I have to say that as art history proofs go, that last bit is a little bit, ummm, lame: it’s a single detail on a single page, that might just as well be a copy of a previous drawing (or a drawing of a description, or an imaginary castle) as a real castle.

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of sensible art history reasons to suspect Northern Italy 1450-1470, for example:-

  1. Swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle are reminiscent of those on many Northern Italian (and Southern Italian, too) castles of the 14th and 15th centuries
  2. The rendering of the sun faces on f67v1 and f68v1 are reminiscent of the Visconti sun raza, most notably as per  in the Milan Duomo’s “Apocalypse” apse window (1420), so arguably point to a post-1420 dating
  3. Voynichese seems to be a more advanced version of those ciphers in Sforza / Urbino cipher ledgers that have the same verbose ‘4o’ character pair
  4. Handwriting is strongly reminiscent of Milanese “humanist” hands circa 1460-1470
  5. Dots on ‘pharma’ glassware (f89r1 and f89r2) are strongly reminiscent of post-1450 Murano glass decoration
  6. Decoration on barrels / albarelli is most reminiscent of 1450-1475 Islamic-influence maiolica
  7. The kind of baths apparently depicted in the balneo quire became most fashionable in Italy between 1450 and 1490
  8. The costumes and hair styles of the many Voynich ‘nymphs’ have been dated as belonging to the second half of the 15th century (and typically dated later rather than earlier)
  9. Parallel hatching only appeared in Florence in 1440, and in Venice (and elsewhere in Italy) from about 1450 onwards, before giving way to cross-hatching from about 1480 onwards.
  10. (etc)

But Northern Italy 1404-1438? Actually, apart from the first two above (which I have to say are probably the least persuasive of all), the evidence falls away to almost nothing, rather like an oddly disturbing dream fading away as you wake up in the morning.

But what about Germany circa 1404-1438? After all, Erwin Panofsky thought a German origin most likely (though perhaps he took a little bit too much notice of Richard Salomon’s readings of the marginalia), and there’s a touch of Germanic influence in the “augst” marginalia month name for the Leo zodiac page. Others have suggested Germany over the years, most recently Volkhard Huth (though I somehow doubt it’s Jim Child’s pronounceable early German, or Beatrice Gwynn’s left-right-mirrored Middle High German, while Huth’s 1480-1500 dating now seems a little adrift as well).

Art history links with Germany are thin on the ground in the Voynich Manuscript: it’s a (very) short list, comprising the general stylistic similarity between the VMs zodiac’s central rosettes and early German woodblock calendars, and the recent (but very tenuous) cisioianus comparison with f67r2: Panofsky also pointed to Richard Salomon’s reading of some clumps of marginalia as German, and to the fact the VMs eventually surfaced in Prague… but this is all pretty optimistic (if not actually hallucinatory) stuff. Basically, you’d need to do a lot better than that to build up any kind of plausible case. (Though I don’t know if Volkhard Huth added any new observations to this list).

But one thing that emerged since I wrote my parallel hatching history page is that the technique actually seems to have emerged in Germany before it appeared in Florence. I mentioned that there was a German master engraver known as “Master E.S.” (also known as the “Master of 1466”), who produced a number of hatched and cross-hatched pieces in the period 1450-1467: and I was content with the generally accepted art history notion that the technique probably spread northwards from Florence to Venice and Germany at roughly the same time (i.e. 1450).

However, the problem with this presumed ‘Italy → Germany’ model is that there was another German engraver (“Meister der Spielkarten”, “The Master of the Cards“) who was active (1425-1450) a generation or so before Master E.S., and who includes fine parallel lines in his work, most notably in the oldest known set of copperplate playing cards (1440). Anyone who wants to read up on this should probably rush to get themselves a copy of Martha Anne Wood Wolff’s 1979 Yale PhD thesis “The Master of the playing cards: an early engraver and his relationship to traditional media”. (Please let me know if you do!) Alternatively, you might well find things of interest in Martha Wolff’s paper “Some Manuscript Sources for the Playing Card Master’s Number Cards” , The Art Bulletin 64, Dec. 1982, p.587-600.

Of course, I don’t think for a moment that The Master of the Cards’ clear line and nuanced material rendering has anything directly to do with what we see in the VMs. Rather, it just seems worth noting that the existence of parallel hatching in the VMs is consistent with a post-1420 origin if German, with a post-1440 origin if from Florence , or a post-1450 origin if from elsewhere.