Just so you know, replacing vowels by their next letter in the alphabet is known as “the magical cipher”: though Caterina Sforza used it in a few of her recipes in the 15th century, it was centuries old even then. This kind of cipher is used not so much for secrecy, but instead for ritual and wonder. All of which is simply a thin cryptographic pretext for me to say: K hppf ypx hbve b mbgkcbl Chrkstmbs! 🙂
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. 🙂
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! 🙂
Here’s a quicky list of books I’m looking forward to reading in the near future, some of which will doubtless already have been gift-wrapped by oddly-familiar elves. Of course, those with book tokens or pockets wadded full of spare cash may prefer to wait until January/February 2009 to read my reviews first, but where’s the fun in that? 🙂
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale. Though it was pricy in hardback (I first mentioned it here), it looks to be a must-read in softback. A fascinating historical take on the birth of modern forensics under the mass-media gaze in Victorian England (with awards aplenty for the writing).
The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution by Deborah Harkness. I just saw this briefly mentioned in the Guardian Review section last Saturday: it deals with the proto-scientific community in Elizabethan London. Plenty of old friends of ours (L’Obel and co) pop up, so should be a fascinating slice of historical pie.
John Dee’s Conversations with Angels by Deborah Harkness. Another fascinating slice of broadly the same historical pie by the same author. I have long said that the full story of Dee’s angelic discussions has yet to be written (though Renaissance Curiosa had a good attempt): perhaps this will take us a step closer? I hope so…
Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood. This is something I’ve covered in the blog before (I reviewed Russell’s “Inventing The Flat Earth” a while back, for example) and thought nobody apart from me had much interest in it, but (to my surprise) here’s a brand new book on the subject.
The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 by Stephen Gaukroger looks interesting too. Publishers now think that the word “magisterial” in any review is supposed to be some kind of kiss of death, but when the subject matter presses so many of my buttons, I don’t really care. 🙂
At the end of the year in which John North died, I’m also thinking about doing a completist thing in 2009 and working my way through his works: specifically, rereading The Ambasssador’s Secret and God’s Clockmaker (of course), but also going through some of his articles I haven’t seen.
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.
I’ve had a number of off-blog posts, all commiserating with my apparent Voynich research burnout. All very kind, thank you for your support – but it ain’t actually so. Rather, what has happened is that I’ve been facing up to the shape of Voynich research to come – a change of direction so huge that I simply can’t carry it all on my own shoulders.
How will you recognize this Voynich Research 2.0? Once you fully accept the VMs’ basic art history (that it was made sometime between 1450 and 1500), the logical conclusion is that we should stop looking in the easy-but-wrong places (1.0, red below) and start looking in the hard-but-right places (2.0, green below)…
The reasoning is simple: because the VMs is a mid-Quattrocento object, the right place to be looking for contemporary mentions is in Quattrocento diaries and letters circa 1450-1475, the right place to be looking for sources for the imagery and secrets in the VMs is in the Trecento (specifically the Florentine Trecento), while codicology and palaeography now need to give way to multispectral forensic evidence. As for “whodunit”, I still think that it will turn out to be Antonio Averlino (as per my efforts within the Voynich Research 1.0 paradigm), but it will take a whole new kind of concerted search to uncover the full story behind the VMs.
My prediction is that 2009 will be the year when Voynich researchers will start to make the transition over to Voynich 2.0 thinking (and a whole lot of academics will join the party too), while by 2010 the whole 1.0 paradigm will be lost on the fringes.
So, what’s it to be? Where are you headed next?
I know, I did indeed say that I wasn’t going to post anything for a while… but then this wonderful translation (from the Russian) of Evgeniya Taratuta’s (1957) “Our Friend Ethel Lilian Boole” popped up, made by Séamus Ó Coigligh (who retired as Curator of Cork Public Museum as long ago as 1981). Uhhh… whatever keep-going-forever potion he’s using, I think I’d like the recipe…
Taratuta’s article (which I first read about in Andrew Cook’s “Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly”) beams a whole medley of archival lights onto ELV’s and WMV’s early lives, particularly on the adumbral period before 1900. There is also a mention of a short 16mm film clip that ELV sent to Taratuta – wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to put on YouTube? Just a thought… 🙂
I suppose this is the review I’ve spent two years steeling myself for. No matter what book critics may say, reviewing other people’s books is an easy word-game to play (typically revolving around inserting themselves into the commentary): whereas putting your own writing under the same spotlight is something closer to therapy. What, with the benefit of hindsight, do I now make of “The Curse of the Voynich“?
“The Curse of the Voynich”, by Nick Pelling
Firstly, the title didn’t work. To an avowedly rationalist commentator such as myself, a “curse” is merely a kind of game a community plays with itself when its members all willfully look away from the ball while wondering why nothing is moving. Fair enough: but the Voynich’s own mythology is so close to fiction that the word’s far stronger associations with literary curses (the Curse of Blackadder, for example) predominates. This means that people’s first reaction is normally to wonder whether the book is some kind of curious historical fiction: so, a bit of an own-goal there.
Secondly, the cover didn’t work: Alian Design did an excellent job of interpreting the brief I sent them, and produced something that was evocative and uncertain in all the ways I intended. But, again, people have a low tolerance for uncertainty: and typically “read” the cover as somehow implying that the book lacks focus. Cover art has a rigidly defined set of conventions, which publishers (even small ones) can only pragmatically subvert, not replace: the absence of a picture of the VMs on the cover (quite literally) sent out the wrong message to buyers. This was own-goal #2.
Thirdly, the editing didn’t work. Though my friend Tabby Magas splendidly subedited my clausally-complex original draft, the overwhelming pay-per-page commercial model for digital print meant that I was forced to squeeze the whole thing into under 240 pages to keep the final price under £10 – roughly a hundred less pages than the content dictated. More pictures to support the visual arguments would have been nice, but these too used up too much of my limited page budget. And so the writing suffered.
Fourthly, the content didn’t work. Even though modern historians now routinely make use of a hugely multi(ple-)media set of influences / evidences when forming their arguments and discussions, few would dare to take on the Voynich Manuscript as a subject because of the overwhelming variety of strands that would need tackling and integrating (let alone try to draw a conclusion based on such a multi-disciplinary approach). “The Curse” set out to build an entirely new research field: while it is true that many elements of “forensic codicology” had been carried out before, I was trying to bring them all together in perhaps the most concerted way yet attempted. Essentially, I was trying to do to the many historical methodologies what mechatronics did for mechanical engineering and electronics – bring them together in parallel and direct their focus on a tangible problem. But, almost inevitably, this was too ambitious a project – to do this properly would require an entire history department, not some baldy bloke in his second bedroom with a wallful of old books, no matter how persistent he happens to be.
Finally, nobody wanted an answer. People inside the Voynich research field seem blissfully content with the irascible status quo that lays upon everything like a stifling smog: feathers get hugely ruffled if anyone so much as suggests a century for the manuscript, let alone a country, town, or (heaven forfend) an individual, never mind if they try to back it up with anything approaching an argument. At the same time, few VMs outsiders have any great interest in such questions: to most people, it’s just a historical curiosity (if, indeed, it is anything at all).
I also received some hostility about my openness to Steve Ekwall’s claims: yet only three people had written anything particularly cogent about the VMs (Rene Zandbergen and Mary D’Imperio were the other two). To me, Steve Ekwall poses a greater mystery then the VMs itself: while I have a rational explanation for everything in the VMs, I have no such explanation for Steve Ekwall. All I can do is observe that his claims about what the VMs actually is do chime to a remarkable degree with what it took me years to grasp, despite the fact that he apparently has no useful art historical grasp of the object at all. And your own rationalization for all that is… what, exactly? Of course, I could (just like everyone else does) simply pretend Steve doesn’t exist: but what is there to be scared of?
No matter: probably the biggest single criticism of my book project is that I exceeded the amount that readers could accept all in one go – it was all too much, all too soon. Yet even if (as is always possible in historical research) the whole Averlino hypothesis is somehow proven wrong, I’m pretty sure I will turn out to be at least “the right kind of wrong” – looking in the right place for the right evidence for the right reasons should be nothing to be ashamed of. In time, people will doubtless catch up and overtake me, to the point that everything in “The Curse” will stop looking like some kind of mad hallucinatory multi-dimensional take on an enigmatic Renaissance curio, and instead become high historical orthodoxy. When you’re ready, I’ll still be here.
Anyway, here’s the first punchline of the day: a brief appendix to “The Curse” that you probably weren’t expecting.
Following my recent post on Giovanni Fontana, Augusto Buonafalce kindly pointed me towards a recent single-page note he wrote for Cryptologia, suggesting that a memory machine called a “speculum” (resembling a set of concentric disks with alphabets on) designed by Giovanni Fontana might well have somehow inspired Leon Battista Alberti’s famous code wheel. But how did that idea travel? In the Quattrocento, hardly anybody knew about Giovanni Fontana’s secret works – even his encyclopedia (composed around 1450) didn’t appear in print for a further century.
In my book, I argued that when Antonio Averlino left Milan in 1465, he went to Rome, and was there when Alberti was researching and writing his little book on ciphers. I further argued that Alberti’s book has a dialogue-like summary of his debate with a different cryptographer (who, like Averlino, favoured transposition ciphers over substitution ciphers), which I argued was probably Averlino. That is to say, I concluded that the two men were probably looking at revolving cipher machinery at the same time and place. In much the same way that I don’t believe three Dutchmen independently invented the telescope at the same time, I don’t believe that Averlino and Alberti both happened to invent revolving cipher machinery at the same time and place – I believe that they were at least aware of each other, if not actually working in some kind of edgy collaboration.
But how might the idea of a “speculum” have travelled to Rome? Fontana lived until 1454, probably in Padua or nearby Venice – yet we can directly place Averlino in Venice and Padua in 1450 and 1461. What are the odds that the secrets-hungry Averlino, broadly the same kind of freelance “travelling master” as Andrea Mantegna, learned of Fontana’s mnemonic wheel directly from Fontana himself in Padua, and then brought the idea with him to Alberti in Rome? In the absence of any better information, this is now what I believe probably happened.
The odds that the secretive (and secrets-obsessed) Averlino was the person behind the VMs have already been shortened, thanks to my recent discovery (from a brief mention by Lynn Thorndike) that Averlino showed off his elegant (but now lost) herbal written in the vulgar tongue in Bergamo – and if there is a better candidate for the plaintext of the VMs’ herbal pages, I have yet to find it.
So now, here’s the second punchline of the day, which is, frankly, as hallucinatory as anything I’ve encountered.
One thing Steve Ekwall repeats over and over is the VMs’ enciphered text’s reliance on the “mirror”. The problem is that Steve has no idea what that actually means – basically, what could a “mirror” be in this kind of context? Somewhat disturbingly, the Latin for mirror is “speculum“. Could it be that it is Fontana’s letter-rearranging “speculum” that Steve Ekwall has been referring to all these years? Myself, I wouldn’t really like to say – but it’s a coincidence that makes me shudder at the thought.
My final bombshell of the day is that all of this basically closes the loop for my whole research programme – that, within the limits of the evidence currently available, I feel I have performed as complete an intellectual pathology on the VMs as is currently possible, which sharply reduces my level of curiosity about it.
I’m therefore now taking a long-term break, both from the VMs and from the blog (though please stay subscribed, as I shall still occasionally post book reviews). I’ll leave my various research leads (on dating, on f57v, and on the zodiac section) open for another day, they’ll probably still be there when I return. 🙂
But all the same, let me know if you find anything good!
Even though people often assert (rather lazily) that the Voynich Manuscript is the only artefact ‘of its kind’, this is false, because there are plenty of similar documents. For the most part, the significant difference is merely one of scale, not of type – for example, the similar enciphered Quattrocento documents that do exist are neither as well-encrypted nor as large as the VMs.
The critical concept here is, of course, similarity: for Art History is a discipline built around discerning similarities between artefacts not just in terms of content [i.e. that-which-is-being-represented], but also in terms of style, gesture, technique, and approach (though, as Charles Hope points out, this falls over when art historians reconstruct an underlying linking mythology that wasn’t originally there). So, putting our art historian hats on, what are the best matches for the Voynich Manuscript?
Of the various Quattrocento enciphered manuscripts, the ones that really leap out are the books of secrets by Giovanni Fontana, for which the best edition by far is Battisti and Battisti’s (1984) “Le Macchine Cifrate di Giovanni Fontana”. This includes Latin decipherments of the passages in (simple monoalphabetic) cipher, together with a parallel translation into precise modern Italian. My Italian comprehension remains only middling, so making a suitably careful reading of this remains more of a long-term project for me than a short-term one.
Fontana’s manuscripts trace a merry criss-cross pattern across the map of my research interests: ciphers, fountains, alchemy, cars, weapons, and even optics. For the last of these, it was interesting to see folio 70r of Fontana’s Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber reproduced by Sven Dupre in a recent paper: the Latin plaintext says “Apparentia nocturna ad terrorem videntium“, while the Latin ciphertext reads “Habes modum cum lanterna quam propriis oculis[ocolis] vidi<i>sti ex mea manu fabricatam et proprio ingenio“.
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 70r
Also optically interesting are the mirrors on folio 41v “Speculum ingeniosum et admirabile, cuius una pars super alteram ducitur, et clauditur quando opport<et>. Et ex calibe fit ad formam hanc cum foraminibus incident<i>e radiorum, Ymagines aparent deformes, turtuose, inequales, ambigue. Sed eius compositio hic aliter non describitur, nisi sub brevita<te>, ita ut me intelligas. Pars comcava fit sicud specculum combustivum archimed[ni]dis, convexa vero sicud speculum meum de multiplicate formarum.”
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 41v and 42r
But I suspect that it is Voynich researchers who will have most to gain from Battista & Battista’s wide-ranging scholarship. For sheer similarity with the balneological / water section, few would surely disagree with the nymphs bathing in the “Fons Virginum” on folio 43v, with the fountain on folio 31r, and particularly with the “Fons Venetus” (also with a water nymph!) on folios 22v and 23r. [Note to self: remember to get a copy of Frank D. Prager’s “Fontana on Fountains“, Physis XIII, 4, 1971, p.347.]
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 43v
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 31r
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 22v and 23r
As with the VMs, even though some adjacent folios are definitely in the correct order (such as folios 59v and 60r), I do wonder whether the page order has at least been partially scrambled: to my eyes, the rocket-powered roller-skateboard on folio 16v really ought to sit opposite the rabbit on a rocket-powered roller-skateboard on folio 37r (my favourite Fontana drawing!)
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 59v and 60r
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 16v
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 37r
In short, there are plenty of similarities between Fontana’s enciphered book of secrets and the Voynich Manuscript: the key difference between the two is simply that heavyweight art historians take the former seriously, but the latter cum grano salis.
What I’m trying to do (in my own slow way) is to construct a proper art historical account of the VMs – a Battista & Battista for the VMs, if you like. However, with only Rene Zandbergen’s site and D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma” to rely upon, this is really quite a daunting challenge, particularly because (as the absence of reaction to my first book would seem to imply) even Voynich researchers appear not to be interested in this kind of research programme. Perhaps because this looks too much like hard work?
I would even go so far as to say that anyone interested in the art history of the VMs should buy a copy of Battista & Battista’s book, simply because of the wealth of notes and thoughts embedded throughout it, nearly all focused on the right kind of areas. There are a few non-stratospherically-priced copies on BookFinder… so what are you waiting for? 🙂
The high point of the Medieval Studies conference calendar is undoubtedly the International Congress at Kalamazoo, Michigan: but career academics have long demonstrated reserve about (if not outright fear of) presenting anything there on the minefield that is the Voynich Manuscript.
For a start, even its name is historically imprecise: if it turns out to be post-1450, it’s not really medieval per se but “early modern”, and so shouldn’t technically be called a “manuscript” at all. Yet given that its stylistics arguably point to the late 1440s at the very earliest, while its quire numbering hand remains resolutely 15th century, it probably falls just on the wrong side of that particular line. Still, Kalamazoo is a broad church, with plenty of room for all denominations, so nobody’s going to get too picky about that.
Yet though the VMs does occasionally raise its head above the swallowtail merlons in Kalamazoo specialist sessions (such as the 2005 and 2006 “Codes and Ciphers Through The Middle Ages” panels which I mentioned here), it seems a very long time indeed (ever?) since anyone took it on in a full presentation. So all credit to the courageous Angela Catalina Ghionea, who has just announced her Voynich Manuscript-centred session scheduled at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies on 7th-10th May 2009, called “The Alchemical “Voynich”. New Evidence for a Genuine Alphabet, Shamanic Imagery, and Magical Plants“.
Might this be the start of something big? If 2008 was the Novelistic Year of the Voynich, could 2009 turn out to be the Academic Year of the Voynich? Right now, I’d probably instead punt my armchair pundit’s virtual wad on 2010 being the year it finally goes mainstream: but it would nice to be proven wrong for a change. 🙂