Early modern palaeography source books…

by ⋅ 4 Comments

For ages, I’ve been planning to devote a day at the British Library solely to the task of looking for matches for the Voynich Manuscript’s unusual quire numbers. There’s a long description of these quire numbers elsewhere on this website, but the short version is that they are “abbreviated longhand Latin ordinals in a fifteenth century hand”, and are one of the key things that point directly to a 15th century date:-

If we could find any other manuscripts with this same numbering scheme (or possibly even the same handwriting!), it would be an extraordinarily specific way of pinning down the likely provenance of our elusive manuscript, more than a century before its next mention (circa 1610). It would also give an enormous hint as to the archive resources we should really be looking in to find textual references to it.

But let’s not get too carried away – how should we go about finding a match, bearing in mind we haven’t even got one so far?

To achieve this, my (fairly shallow, I have to say) research strategy is to trawl through the following early modern palaeography source books, as kindly suggested by UCL’s Marigold Norbye:-

  • F. Steffens, Lateinische Paläographie (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929)
  • New Palaeographical Society   Facsimiles of Manuscripts &c., ed. E.M. Thompson, G.F. Warner, F.G. Kenyon and J.P. Gilson, 1st er. (London, 1903-12);  2nd ser.  (London, 1913-30)
  • Palaeographical Society   Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions, ed. E.A. Bond, E.M. Thompson and G.F. Warner, 1st ser. (London, 1873-83);  2nd ser. (London, 1884-94)
  • S.H. Thomson, Latin Bookhands of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1969)
  • G.F. Hill, The Development of Arabic Numerals in Europe exhibited in sixty-four Tables  (Oxford, 1915)
  • Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, by Charles Samaran and Robert Marichal. etc.

To which I would add (seeing as it was written by Michelle Brown, who was for many years the Curator of Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, so it seems a little ungracious not to include it)…

  • Brown, Michelle. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts: From Antiquity to 1600. London : British Library, 1990.

…as well as the Italian equivalent of Samaran and Marichal’s work…

  • Catalogo dei manoscritti in scrittura latina datati o databili per indicazione di anno, di luogo o di copista. Torino, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1971 Bird-Special Collections Z6605.L3 C38 f

…and a more general bibliographical reference work…

  • Boyle, Leonard E. Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

Even though this might seem like a very large set of source books to get through in a day, no more than 5-10% of each is likely to be acutely relevant to the 15th century, so it should all be (just about) do-able. And I think that several of them may well be on open shelves in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Room at the BL, which should help speed things along.

Yet all the same, do I stand any significant chance of uncovering anything? Well… no, not really, I’d have to say. But that’s no reason not to try! And the bibliographic side of the trawl may well yield a more specific lead to follow in future, you never know.

All I need to do, then, is to free up an entire day from my diary… oh well, maybe next year, then. =:-o

Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Filarete… aha!

by ⋅ 8 Comments

Right at the start of (1970) “Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions” (pp. xi-xiii), Frank Prager summarizes Gustina Scaglia’s research into how Brunelleschi’s ideas for machines spread. They posit a key missing manuscript (dubbed “The Machinery Complex“): but their discussion is fairly specialised, and so it is quite tricky to follow. Here’s my attempt at representing the argument – green boxes represent manuscripts that still exist, red boxes represent lost works, while blue boxes I’m not sure about:-

machinery-complex

Which is to say: while all the early Renaissance machine ideas ultimately stemmed from Brunelleschi, later machine authors (such as Francesco di Giorgio) relied not just on Taccola’s De Ingeneis but also on the missing “Machinery Complex” manuscript. However, nobody knows who wrote this or what subsequently happened to it – we can perceive it only by its shadow, hear it only by its echo in other manuscript and copyworks.

I think the reason that Prager & Scaglia’s text is a little confused is that, because the Machinery Complex ms has disappeared, they can’t quite make up their minds how much it influenced subsequent writers on machines such as Bartolomeo Neroni, Antonio da San Gallo, Oreste Biringuccio, and Pietro Cataneo. It’s an open question.

But here’s where it becomes a cipher history issue. As I mentioned here a few days ago, the text around what Prager and Scaglia call “the secret hoist” is written in an simple substitution cipher (one letter back in the alphabet) – but because this would have been seen as a childishly simple cipher by 1450, I infer that this ciphertext was not only present in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original (but now lost) Zibaldone, but also that he probably wrote it in the 1430s or, at a push, the 1440s.

There’s also a cipher / codicological element to this argument, based on the observation that the pages containing the secret hoist are separated by several pages in the later copy of the Zibaldone (by Lorenzo Ghiberti’s grandson Buonaccorso Ghiberti). My suggestion is that Buonaccorso received the folios out of order, but copied them in precisely the same order – had he deciphered the two “secret hoist” pages and grasped that they were referring to the same thing, my guess is that he would have put them back into their correct order.

All in all, then, my inference here is that the simple cipher on the secret hoist was in place in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original Zibaldone, and that even though Ghiberti himself died in 1455, we can probably date his missing Zibaldone to around the 1430s purely from the simplistic cipher used in it. (Of course, scientists hate this kind of art history “probabilistic proof”, but that’s how history works.)

So far, so marginal: but here’s my “aha” moment of the day, that propels all this into a different league.

One of the things I flagged in my book “The Curse of the Voynich” (pp.141-142) was that Antonio Averlino (Filarete) may have based his (now-lost) book of Engines (“when the time comes, I will mention all these engines“, etc) on this (also now-lost) Machinery Complex – and that some of these engines may well be visually enciphered in the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal-B pages.

However, on further reflection, it seems I really didn’t go far enough: because Antonio Averlino almost certainly started his career in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s workshops, before suddenly leaving Florence in 1433 for Rome. If we were looking for someone to carry Brunelleschi’s ideas (via Ghiberti’s Zibaldone, probably written in the 1430s) into the world, we could surely do no better than look to Antonio Averlino – I strongly suspect that he was the intermediary.

So, the question then becomes: was Antonio Averlino the author of the Machinery Complex? I strongly suspect that he was, and that the Machinery Complex will turn out to be a synthesis and development of Ghiberti’s ideas as seen from Averlino’s edgy and ambitious perspective – that is to say, that the Machinery Complex will turn out to be Averlino’s missing book of Engines. And if it also turns out (as I suspect it will) to be the case that this Machinery Complex lies visually enciphered in the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal-B pages, what an extraordinary story that would be…

PS: as a footnote for further study, the only other paper I have found on the Machinery Complex was on The Art of Invention bibliography webpage: Gustina Scaglia’s (1988) “Drawings of forts and engines by Lorenzo Donati, Giovanbattista Alberti, Sallustio Peruzzi, The Machine Complex Artist, and Oreste Biringuccio“, Architectura, II, pp. 169-97. Definitely a paper to go through to see what conclusions Scaglia had reached about this intriguing missing document. But please let me know if you find any other references!

Excellent Codex Seraphinianus article…

by ⋅ 8 Comments

Too much typing yesterday, hence this ultra-brief post. 🙂

If (like me) you’re fascinated by the Codex Seraphinianus, I think you really, really need to read the article “THE CODEX SERAPHINIANUS – How Mysterious Is A Mysterious Text If The Author Is Still Alive (And Emailing)?” by Justin Taylor from the May 2007 edition of The Believer magazine.

Taylor even includes something which hadn’t previously appeared in print – part of an English translation of the French translation of Italo Calvino’s introduction (entitled “Orbis Pictus”) to the original Italian edition of the Codex Seraphinianus. Plenty of nice discussion of parallels with J. L. Borges’ works, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the playful machines of Serafini’s fellow Milanesi Bruno Munari, and even Leo Lionni’s “Parallel Botany” (of which I have a copy on my bookshelf).

Enjoy! 🙂

Review of “Stigmata”…

by ⋅ 7 Comments

The film Stigmata (1999) presses a whole lot of my buttons. At the time it was originally released, I had been researching my own novel built on broadly the same premise:  a globetrotting protagonist hunting down miraculous statues and people claiming to have duplicates of Christ’s stigmata (though that’s basically where the similarities ended). And so I was fascinated to see how the film-makers went about bringing this to life.

stigmata-small

Even though the story and script (by Tom Lazarus, the not-quite-so-famous brother of Paul Lazarus III, director of Westworld & Capricorn One) didn’t itself think far out of the [confession] box, something magical happened in the art direction and cinematography: the use of colour, focus, light, time, sets, costume, and even make-up were all exemplary. For me, watching Stigmata was at times like being artfully collaged to death, machine-gunned with photographically (and geometrically) perfect moments: a tick on a piece of paper, Patricia Arquette lying underwater, a blood drop in a pool, blood being drawn, a blood centrifuge – all elegant, spare, swift, and focused. I highly recommend the film to anyone purely to enjoy its five-star visual treatment.

As a writer myself, however, I think the film’s problems stemmed right from the initial plotting – basically, having a priest-scientist (Gabriel Byrne) investigate the stigmata being suffered by a young atheist-hairdresser (Patricia Arquette) beneath a Vatican conspiracy managed by his control-freak boss (Jonathan Pryce) never worked as a setup for me… all too staged / stagey. The walls between the characters stopped the emotional side of the film from developing in a satisfactory way: I also didn’t much like the St Francis of Assisi (arguably the most famous stigmatic?) resolution, but you’d have to see that for yourself to see if you agree or disagree.

Watching this film a decade on, it feels a bit dated: could it be that the Da Vinci Code (and its flood of [make]-me-[rich]-too ripoffs) made the whole notion of devastating-secrets-that-would-topple-the-Church-were-they-to-be-made-public seem lightweight? And I kept wondering: was Holy Blood Holy Grail ultimately to blame?

Regardless, the film set me thinking about the kind of ur-story towards which Tom Lazarus was reaching, with his ancient Aramaic codex (based loosely on the Coptic Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas) triggering high-stakes factional infighting within the Vatican, with the supernatural subtext that The Truth Will Out (even beyond death).

Yes, it’s undoubtedly a cliché: and the overarching literary / cultural template at play is pretty easy to sketch out:-

  • concealed message left by an ancient (implicitly perfected) person, that requires…
  • deciphering and translation by (extremely proficient) domain experts, to expose…
  • long-held lies behind contemporary doctrinal messages, which are supported by…
  • powerful present-day conspiracies trying to maintain the (morally untenable) status quo.

Historically, does this sound familiar? After all, it is not vastly different to the entire back-story of the Renaissance (particularly during the Quattrocento). There, you had people scouring the known world for lost or concealed messages left by the Greco-Roman civilizations, to be deciphered by humanist scholars for their presumed wise (and frequently contrarian) messages.

And so I would argue that HBHG-style searches for enciphered traces of a ‘real Jesus’ are arguably little more than back-projecting our present-day cultural insecurities onto early Renaissance cultural insecurities – their search for lost classical wisdom was no different. One irony, though, is that things like the Turin Shroud (which I blogged about here and here) offer us glimpses of an entirely parallel kind of lost Christian history, far beyond the conceptual reaches of most contemporary conspiracy theorists.

What I personally fail to understand, though, is how this whole wonky ‘enciphered anti-doctrinal message’ meme has managed to endure the centuries as a literary conceit. Even my new best friend François Rabelais satirized this none too subtly in Chapter 1 of Book 1 of his alcohol-obsessed Gargantua and Pantagruel:

The diggers struck with their picks against a great tomb of bronze… Opening the tomb at a certain place which was sealed on the top with the sign of a goblet, around which was inscribed in Etruscan letters, HIC BIBITUR, they found nine flagons, arranged after the fashion of skittles in Gascony; and beneath the middle flagon lay a great, greasy, grand, pretty, little, mouldy book, which smelt more strongly but not more sweetly than roses.

Rabelais goes on to offer (“with much help from my spectacles“) his translation of the “Corrective Conundrums” found in that stinky little tome, all of them nonsensical and presumably meant to resemble some kind of vaguely prophetic quatrain-based literary genre popular in France at the time (Nostradamus fans, take note):-

The year will come, marked with a Turkish bow,
And spindles five and the bottoms of three pots, […]
This age of hocus-pocus shall go on
Until the time when Mars is put in chains

So… even though this concealed-text plot pattern was a hoary old chestnut by 1530, can anyone really explain to me how come it continues to drive a low-brow literary industry nearly five centuries later? For me, the big mystery here centres on the apparent lack of cultural progress: does Dan Brown’s success actually prove that we have learnt practically nothing in half a millennium?

Consider that your cipher mystery for the day… 🙂

Early American ciphers…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

It’s not really my historical bag, capice?, but some early American ciphers popped their heads over my virtual parapet in the last few days, and I thought I ought to pass them on…

(1) On Christmas Day 1801, Thomas Jefferson received a cipher challenge from “Pennsylvania mathematician Robert Patterson”, that remained unbroken for two centuries. Here’s the cipher itself: according to a comment and example given by “A nonny bunny” on Bruce Schneier’s blog, for “helloworld”, the plaintext would first becomes columnar-transposed to “lrhweollod”, which secondly gets shifted into positions 3 and 2 (the “3” and “2” of the key), and padded with nonsense, before finally being read off in the same c0lumnar-transposed kind of way

1 hw 3 lr 32 ablr
2 eo 1 hw 11 khwl
3 lr 2 eo 20 eoyu
1 ll 1 ll 11 llty
2 od 2 od 20 odtr

I’ve underlined the plaintext (“helloworld”), the key sequence (32,11,20) and the ciphertext (akelobholdlwyttrluyr) to make it a little clearer what’s going on (the original comment lost the formatting). But it’s nice to see a relatively pure transposition cipher out in the wild. 🙂

(2) Here’s a ciphered letter from John Adams  to John Jay dating from 1783-1785. There are a fair few web pages on John Jay’s codes and ciphers, as well as on Thomas Jefferson’s own codes and ciphers. John Jay and the agent Silas Deane also used invisible ink-style trickery (according to this CIA page, followed by more on the various ciphers used).

Cod. Pal. Germ. 597’s cipher…

by ⋅ 19 Comments

Yet another interesting comment from Rene Zandbergen yesterday (to my flying potions post) sparked off a furious flurry of bloggery here at Cipher Mystery Mansions. While browsing through a large set of online manuscripts digitized (and hosted) by the University of Heidelberg, he found Cod(ex) Pal(atinus) Germ(anicus) 597 – an alchemical manuscript where a large amount of it is written in cipher (which you can download as a 15MB PDF file). Rene writes:-

Now this is a clear example of a MS where cipher has been used to hide secrets. It leaves me with the question:

Why does the Voynich MS not look like this?

My tentative answer: the Voynich MS isn’t actually just a cipher MS. FWIW.

(–Actually, I have my own answer to this, but we’ll get to that in a minute.–)

It seems to me that (unless Augusto Buonafalce happens to know better) the literature on Cod. Pal. Germ. 597 is pretty thin: even the Karl Bartsch catalogue entry for it (marked 287 here) isn’t much use. The Ms also merits the briefest of mentions on p.355 of the 1994 book “Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart” (it’s in Google Books). None of which, however, addresses its cipher aspect… but I guess that’s my job. 🙂 So, let’s have a look at it…

The Ms commences on folio 2r with some crossed-out ciphertext above some commentary in a different hand. (Some later pages hold only a few lines of ciphertext, so it seems likely that this originally contained just the ciphertext.) And then on folio 4v, the ciphertext (interleaved with Latin and German plaintext) starts in earnest:-

cpg597_f4v

This is a basic-looking system comprising about 23 symbols, that shows every sign of being a simple (i.e. monoalphabetic) cipher consistent with its date (1426).  The cipherbet was designed not for convenience of writing (for there are numerous fiddly characters, including a blocked-in black square), but around an apparently improvised ‘personal shape alphabet’. This points not to a cipher professional (working, say, in a Chancellery) but rather to an amateur cryptographer designing his/her own ‘homebrewed’ system:-

cpg597_main_cipherbet

The letter shapes fall into three rough groups (as per the lines above):-

  • Abstract shapes / known shapes
  • Dots and containers
  • Semi-representative (aide-memoire?) shapes (hammers, spade, rake?)

But then, just as you’re getting the hang of that, a completely different monoalphabetic cipher appears (from folio 6v onwards). This looks to be a refinement of this first system… but this post is getting a bit too long, so I’ll defer discussing that to another day.

Is this a “cipher mystery”? Yes, but only a very temporary sense, for I find it terrifically hard to believe that this wasn’t picked up by one or more of the numerous 19th century German codebreaking historians and cracked in a trice (or perhaps even a millitrice). Tony Gaffney would surely munch such a light confection before breakfast. 🙂

Finally, to respond to Rene Z’s question: why does the Voynich Manuscript not look like this? I’d prefer to start by looking at what this does resemble: Giovanni Fontana’s lightly-enciphered books of secrets, which were also from very same period. This mixing of text and ciphertext also occurs in Buonaccorso Ghiberti’s copy of his famous grandfather’s Zibaldone, which has some sections in a simple cipher, most notably what Prager & Scaglia call the “secret hoist” (on folios 95r and 98r of BR 228, for which see “Brunelleschi: Studies of his Technology and Inventions”, pp.67-70). From the simplicity of that cipher (“use the previous letter in the alphabet”), I’d suggest that Buonaccorso probably copied this from an older document, one probably made in the 1430s or 1440s (Lorenzo Ghiberti died in 1455).

Remember that this was the century when paper began to become affordable, and when ordinary people began to develop their own ciphers: and although it has become fashionable to criticize the development of individualism in the early Renaissance, I think it is fair to say that the desire to keep secrets for personal / familial gain runs in close parallel with this. Ghiberti, Fontana and the author of Cod. Pal. Germ. 597 all seem vastly similar in this respect.

Returning to Rene’s initial question, then, I suspect the correct question to be asking should be: why does the Voynich Manuscript not look like any of those ciphered manuscripts?

My own answer is that it is probably because the VMs will turn out to be from circa 1460 (i.e. 20-30 years after all of the above), and its author seems to have benefitted from contact with the sophisticated code-makers in the Milanese Chancellery, who developed and refined ideas in their own cryptographic bubble. Really, the VMs is from a very specific time and place – far too clever to be early 15th century, but still strongly mindful of what earlier ciphers looked like.

Johannes Hartlieb and flying potions…

by ⋅ 6 Comments

Following my recent post on modern per-degree astrology, Rene Zandbergen very kindly left a comment here pointing to online scans of a 15th century German translation of some of Pietro d’Abano’s works on astrology. While idly flicking through that, I noticed (starting on folio 132r) a short book by Johannes Hartlieb on ‘Namenmantik’ (onomancy, using names to tell fortunes). Dating right to the middle of the 15th century, this shows circular volvelle-like things that remind my eye of Alberti’s speculum (his rotating code wheel):-

hartlieb_132r_cropped

Cod. Pal. germ. 832 Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch, folio 132r

Given that this kind of thing was in the air round that time, was it mere chance that Alberti happened to devise it first? It’s true that Hartlieb’s ones (like the one for Ptolemy above) probably didn’t rotate at all… but all the same, I do honestly think it wouldn’t have involved a vast leap of mid-Quattrocento imagination to make them do so.

But the mention of Hartlieb reminded me of another research strand I’ve been meaning to blog about – flying potions. You see, it was Hartlieb who first wrote (in 1456) about witches’ flying potions, in his puch aller verpoten kunst, ungelaubens und der zaubrey, i.e. on “forbidden arts, superstition and sorcery”.

Reading up again on this subject just now, I was somewhat disappointed to discover that Ioan Couliano’s colourful account of how the handles of broomsticks were used to administer the hallucinogenic unguent turns out to be only supported by a single (and fairly unreliable) source. Mainly, the ointment seems more likely to have been administered to the armpits and absorbed into the bloodstream from there. Still, it probably beats flying cattle class on a charter flight, right?

To me, the bizarre thing about the historical sequence is that in the early Middle Ages it was heretical to believe witches’ descriptions of flight (because they were clearly delusional), while during the Early Modern period it became heretical to disbelieve witches’ descriptions of flight (because they were clearly possessed by the Devil). So much for the continual march forward of knowledge! 😮

For much, much more on this fascinating subject, I heartily recommend Shantell Powell’s set of pages on flying potions. Enjoy!

Per-degree astrology, old and new…

by ⋅ 17 Comments

For years, it has been suggested that the structure of the Voynich Manuscript’s “zodiac” section (where each 30-degree sign has 30 nymphs / 30 stars linked to it) might be encoding some kind of per-degree astrology information. Famously, Steve Ekwall claimed that an “Excitant Spirit” had told him the types of star here denoted the outcome of conception (i.e. a male birth or female birth). This would have been either from the precise degree that the moon was passing through at the time of conception, or from the precise time when the question was asked of the astrologer.

libra-small
Voynich Manuscript page f72v1 – Libra (contrast-enhanced)

Interestingly, there is also a substantial modern literature on per-degree astrology, usually known as “Sabian Symbols”. The best-known set of these was drawn up by Marc Edmund Jones in San Diego in 1925 (you can see it on pp.10-26 of this Italian PDF): this was later refined and popularized by Dane Rudhyar (and others).

Yet Jones was building (to a certain degree, one might say) on the work of two nineteenth century astrologers / psychics: Charubel [John Thomas] (1828-1908) and the colourful Theosophist Sephariel [Dr Walter Gorn Old] (1864-1929). There’s a 1998 biography of the latter by Kim Farnell called “Astral Tramp” (Blavatsky’s nickname for Walter Old). [Review] Charubel & Sephariel’s 1898 “The Degrees of The Zodiac Symbolized” contains two 360-degree lists that are, it has to be said, wildly different.

On the surface, this would appear to be two completely parallel, relatively modern, and entirely unconnected re-inventions of the sort of (probably originally Arabic) per-degree astrology described by Pietro d’Abano – and so something Voynich researchers should perhaps strive to walk around rather than to engage with.

Certainly, Charubel’s list was specifically described as having been channeled:  yet Sephariel claimed that he had actually translated the symbols from a very old book called “La Volasfera”, by Antonio Borelli (or Bonelli) – and so there is, right at the core of the whole modern Sabian Symbol tradition, a very specific claim to a lost Renaissance parentage. Unfortunately, nobody has (as far as I can tell) since tracked down this lost author or this lost book, so Sephariel’s claim might… just… possibly… not be entirely truthful. Really, it’s hard to say, particularly as Sephariel was so, well, unreliable. Oh well!

If you want to read more about Sabian Symbols, there is a surprisingly large amount of literature: the Astrological Center of America maintains a pair of webpages (here and here) listing numerous books on Sabian Symbols and on other per-degree systems (respectively).

Finally, here’s an example of modern astrologers’ describing and using Sabian symbols, which might help make it clear how they are broadly intended to be used.

Voynich newsbites…

by ⋅ 14 Comments

News arrives from the New Journal Magazine at Yale (via Jeff Haley on the Voynich Mailing List and Elmar Vogt’s Voynich blog, thanks to you both!) that “two outside specialists” at the Sterling Memorial Library have been “analyzing the pigments in [the Voynich Manuscript’s] ink and carbon dating a tiny sample of its vellum“. Hooray!

Though Yale was perhaps spurred on to do this by the documentary that is currently being made, it is not clear whether the lack of results or details published as yet is because of some arrangement-to-withhold with the film-makers, or perhaps because the results are so astonishing that it’s taking ages to write them up. 🙂 Hopefully we’ll find out soon…

The 2009 Kalamazoo medieval congress continues apace (until tomorrow) – did anyone see Angela Catalina Ghionea’s Voynich plant presentation? I should perhaps comment here that her ongoing dissertation topic “The Occult Origins of European Science” seems hugely ironic to me, given that I view a lot of Renaissance & modern occult practices as being built on top of misunderstood proto-science – so if I was writing a dissertation, it would be on the “The Scientific Origins of European Occultism“. But which of us, then, is the contrarian? 😮

Finally… after a period of domain transition, my compellingpress.com site is now back online: there’s still a small boxful of copies of “The Curse of the Voynich” sitting in the corner, all awaiting owners. 😉

Calcagnini letters book at auction…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Twice a year, the Leiden antiquarian bookseller Burgersdijk and Niermans hold a book auction – the one coming up shortly is on 19th-20th May 2009.

Flicking idly through the listings, I noticed that going for (what seems to me a very reasonable) 300-ish euros is a 1608 printed edition of the 365 letters of the philosopher / astronomer Celio Calcagnini of Ferrara (1479-1541) – his Epistolarum criticarum & familiar. There’s more on Calcagnini here and his claim to have preempted Copernicus (Thorndike even discusses him [Vol V], so he can’t be all bad). He gets a brief Wikipedia mention, and was a major influence on Rabelais (of all people). Hmmm… if I was filthy rich, this book is exactly the kind of historical frippery I’d fritter away my hard-earned money on. I might even go up to 310 euros, you never know. 🙂

(Note that a copy of the Basel 1544 edition of his letters (Opera Aliquot) is also on sale on the Internet, though 12,500USD isn’t quite such a bargain. Conrad Gessner once had a copy of it, too.)

Calcagnini wrote on many subjects: on the significantly cheaper end of the scale (i.e. free), there’s an online scan of his 1534 book “De imitatione eruditorum quorundam libelli quam eruditissimi puta” here and another of his books here, both courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. There’s a 2006 paper on Calcagnini by Jan Papy: and he merits a good page-and-a-half in the 2003 book Contemporaries of Erasmus (yes, he knew and corresponded with Erasmus too), which you can see on Google Books.

Alternatively, if you haven’t yet been inspired to make a mad impr0mptu telephone bid, you might possibly be more tempted to splurge an an early printed set of Libavius’ works (including Paracelsian and Rosicrucian controversies in the appendix), a B&N snip at an estimated 3800 euros! As always, your choice…