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. 🙂

Here’s something a little bit more interactive than usual, please feel free to add your comments. 🙂

I woke up this morning in a Voynich Manuscript half-dream with the chorus of Belinda Carlisle’s 1988 hit “I Get Weak” (written by Diane Warren) looping round incessantly. As with most dreams it probably meant nothing (sorry Sigmund), but it did set me thinking… what would be the perfect soundtrack to the VMs?

Hmmm… with my songwriter hat on, I’d say it would have to be something evocative and uncertain, and possibly with some kind of cryptological / biological / astrological / nymph-ological theme running through it. Here are some suggestions to be going on with…

Rationalist theorists:-
Thomas Dolby – She Blinded Me With Science (“…and failed me in biology, yeah-eh“) 

Madman theorists:-
Talking Heads – Psycho Killer (“I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax“)

Romantic theorists:-
Robbie Williams – Angels (the most popular karaoke song ever, according to the PRS, and popular at weddings and funerals too). [Incidentally, this was originally written not by Williams and Guy Chambers but by Irishman Ray Hefferman, and was about his daughter who died at birth.]

OK, so it’s a pretty lame first attempt. But what would be on your perfect Voynich Manuscript soundtrack? Please comment below! 🙂

Back in January, I predicted that 2008 would be “the year of the Voynich” – not that it would get solved (don’t be so ridiculous, tcha!), but rather that we would be engulfed in a semi-tsunami of Voynich-related fiction, a novelistic response to the VMs meme as it seeps into mainstream culture. And this wave has indeed hit the shore: my big fat list of Voynich novels lists five new titles for the year (plus a couple of others held over until 2009) as well as a rerelease of Max MacCoy’s 1994 Indiana Jones / Voynich book.

And so to the latest one, William “Baz” Cunningham’s just-released third novel “The Voynich Enigma“. For connoisseurs of the genre, this runs on eerily familiar rails: the hero stumbles across a key to the Voynich Manuscript, eventually discovers that it encodes some kind of treasure map (in this case, to the much-speculated-upon Templar hoard), battles against someone else racing for the same treasure (in this case, an evil Mamluk), and so forth. I’m sure You Get The General Idea.

I also have to flag straight off that this is self-publishing at its most “self-“: the author inserts into his narrative a thinly fictionalized version of, errrm, himself (though changing his nickname from “Baz” to “Bones” ), his cousin, his wife, his dog, etc. Perhaps some passing Eng. Lit. grad student will let us know the correct academic name for such faux-autobiographical works (might it be “biographique”?): certainly, it takes the phrase “identifying with the hero” onto a whole new level.

Cunningham’s writing is a bit “Tom Sawyer, Detective” meets Simon Singh, a little bit like hominy grits festooned with lumps of historical meat. But for all the homespun backyardiness, it does have an undeniable charm that makes the 300+ pages an easy read. Mercifully, it is free of overblown Hollywoodesque fights and bad sex scenes, even if prizes are at stake nowadays (one gets the feeling Mrs Cunningham would not have been impressed).

It’s true that the book’s only joke – that, yes, college-educated Americans can actually be smart sometimes – does wear a tad thin by the end. And that its history research does often tend to the superficial. And that the historical dialogue is occasionally too modern-sounding for purists. And that Roger Bacon really, truly didn’t create the VMs (Cunningham relied mainly on Levitov’s book). But for all that, it’s perfectly OK.

Even classifying it as a “novel” rather misses the point: it is closer to some kind of Cunningham family pipedream, thin tendrils of historical smoke above a West Virginia farmhouse coiling together to form a novel-like shape in the still air: it’s a hopeful fantasy, blending past, present, and future into a home-cooked dish du jour.

Oddly, “The Voynich Enigma” most reminds me of Filarete’s libro architettonico. Back in 1465, the Italian architect Filarete concocted a strange ad hoc mélange of autobiography, architecture, fiction, and fantasy to try to promote himself to powerful patrons: without book distributors looking to its back cover for a helpful shelving genre to slot his book into, he was free to say just what he wanted, and in whatever way he wanted. To me, what links Filarete and Cunningham across the five centuries is simply an idiosyncratic self-publishing idealism, that really isn’t about the launch party, the PR, the film options, the points above the line, the Frankfurt & London circus, or even the making money.

Perhaps, ultimately, the Voynich Manuscript itself will turn out to be just as idealistic, a document whose hidden treasure will simply be what it says about its author – the ultimate piece of self-publishing, with a print-run of one. 🙂

The precise sequence of the invention of the telescope (and its early diffusion) remains cloudy: as an intellectual historian, the main issues revolve more around how the key ideas flowed – and, indeed, what ideas were even possible at different times.

I also have a professional interest in lens technologies, and so was fascinated when I recently came across a blog entry giving a French account of the invention of CinemaScope. Without knowing much about the subject, you might guess that it had perhaps been the brainchild of some curiously unfeted American inventor not long before its 1952/1953 debut? Nope, not even close. As even Wikipedia gets right, a “Hypergonar” system based on a distorting lens had been constructed by Professor Henri Chrétien in the 1920s. This was first used commercially by Claude Autant-Lara in 1929 (though only for a couple of months, before the other Parisian film-palaces had it shut down for making them look uncompetitive).

Autant-Lara then got hired by Metro-Goldwyn in 1931, took a number of Hypergonar lenses over to Culver City, waited, waited some more, before finally being told that the system “is of no interest and has no future”. It was only when “This Is Cinerama” opened in New York in 1952 (and caused a public sensation) did film studios start to look at anamorphic wide-screen technologies once more… and all of a sudden Chrétien’s lenses became the order of the day.

But Chrétien didn’t himself invent anamorphic lenses: he had merely “corrected and improved” the basic design from “the work of a German physicist of the 1880s named Lubke” (according to Autant-Lara, when interviewed in 1967). Others had done the same, most notably Professor Ernst Abbe and the Zeiss Company in Germany in 1898 (who called their system “Anamorphot”). In fact, the first patent on anamorphic lenses was far older, going back to Sir David Brewster in 1862 or earlier.

It would be nice to find out if there was anything written on Lubke, as he would seem to be the missing link in this story: however, a quick online search for 19th century German physicists called Lubke / Lübke turned up nothing useful. If anyone wants to pursue this elusive person, I would suggest looking at two publications by Francoise Le Guet Tully, both listed on the French Wikipedia page for Henri Chrétien:-

  • Henri Chrétien (1879-1956). Des Étoiles au Cinemascope. Texte redigee par JEAN-CLAUDE PECKER. Nice. (1987).
  • Henri Chrétien, un savant entre science est technique: réflexions à propos de l’invention de l’hypergonar. International Commitee for the History of Technology. Proceedings of the XVIIIth International ICOHTEC Conference, San Francisco. (1993)
  • If both of those fail to please, then perhaps you might look at a biographical dictionary of German scientists, and/or find out where Henri Chrétien’s papers are held (I already asked about the latter on HASTRO-L, because Chrétien is also famous for having been behind a design that is used by nearly all top-end optical telescopes).

    To me, the mainstream history of the telescope circa 1608 comes over very much as if you were looking at the “invention” of anamorphic cinema circa 1927: though it was very much “in the air” (and so pretty much anyone could have invented it), the simple reason that it was in the air at all was because the basic technological notion had already had more than 50 years of subtle circulation.

    Fancy a walk around London? There are some real scorchers to choose from at London Walks, a company offering fascinating pedestrian slices through the many-layered cake that is our dear Londinium. But for Voynicheros, one walk in particular stands out: “Anarchy in the UK – Mob Rule & Terror Tactics” hosted by writer Ed Glinert, and which should start at Goodge Street at 10:45 am on 17 Jan 2009 (I found it mentioned here on a weirdlondon blog).

    The walk is planned to cover “Voynich, Kropotkin, Maletesta, plus Orwell, Stalin, Lenin and even Hitler!“: so, not really your average Saturday morning walk around town, then. £7 for adults.

    Google recently put up a large collection of images from Life Magazine: and as you’d expect, various Netizens are poring over the visually-rich archive to find anything unexpected, such as this unidentified number-based ciphertext from 1957. Frustratingly, searches of the Life archive seem to be limited to a maximum of 200 results, so you have to use a little less brute force to find interesting things than you might otherwise employ.

    I found some pictures on simple steganography, such as a 1941 FBI demonstration showing a cover letter and the hidden UV message written between the lines, and even a message hidden in the lining of an envelope. Or perhaps you’d be like me and prefer seeing Groucho Marx hiding a message on a lady’s back?

    Hey, I’m only scratching the surface: the Entropic Memes blogger (“Nemo de Monet“) dug far deeper, and uncovered what appears to be a faked up FBI cipher (a monoalphabetic simple substitution cipher with fake text, nothing fancy) from 1944, and – far more interestinglyan early-WWII transposition cipher from 24 July 1940, complete with the encrypting worksheet all in place. Our chum Nemo suspects that the “Dunn” in the message was Fritz Duquesne, part of the Duquesne spy ring. Not really my period, but fascinating stuff nonetheless…

    I’ve mentioned Lev Grossman a few times on this blog (most notably here and here): so when I recently stumbled across a copy of his novel “Codex” (2004), I jumped at the opportunity to read it. (Thank you the charity shop by Virginia Water station).

    Though (strictly speaking) Codex isn’t a cipher novel per se, its protagonists stumble uncertainly through a historical / codicological fug that should be strikingly familiar to anybody with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript. Yet at the same time, Grossman counterpoints that whole manuscript-detective strand with a completely parallel narrative that is set inside a vividly virtual multiplayer online game: and it shouldn’t spoil anything much if I note that he has deft enough plot construction technique to bring the two worlds together at the end of his book in a reasonably satisfying way.

    For me, the biggest disappointment was the main character Edward Wozny, who – for all the action and potty plotty twists – remains a bit of a cipher, a blank canvas. He comes across as tweedy (if not actually just plain dull), so it’s hard to see what all the achingly-bright young things who sashay in and out of his orbit really see in him.

    Where “Codex”‘s central plot conceit most sharply departs from the real world is (for me) the notion that Certain Powerful People would have some kind of interest in controlling whether or not a lost ancient manuscript’s secret story is revealed – and (according to this kind of worldview) where Power and Knowledge collide, you get Heresy. Yet (back in the real world) heresy, like wine, lasts only a few decades (however well you make it), and quickly yields to the arbitrary ravages of time: (capital-H) ‘History’ is just an apologist’s gloss placed on that prolonged turmoil, trying to salvage theories of continuity (lineage, cycles, revolutions, longue durée, etc) in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Heresy, basically, is pretty much as short-term as any politician’s promises. Having said that, there’s an entire modern novel-writing industry premised upon heresy’s being a long-term phenomenon, so what do I know?

    As to the book in general, Grossman writes briskly yet engagingly: even his British characters have tolerably OK voices (which is quite a pleasant change). I enjoyed it, but at times (with my editorial hat on) the lack of internal dimension to the characters did make me wonder whether for Grossman it was an exercise more in novelized screenwriting than in fiction writing. Still, lots of book buyers continue to have an appetite for that kind of geometrical surface plottery, so who am I to judge?

    A final thought for the day: could it be that modern novelists who aspire to mass market sales too often succumb to the notion of pre-writing the film-of-the-book, perhaps to try to spin money from selling the film option (even if nobody buys the novel itself)? The problem is that screenwriting (with a few honourable exceptions) is largely about the external logic of a story (its “event topology”, if you like),  while literature is mainly about the story’s internal logic (its “emotional dynamics”): trying to serve both masters simultaneously is a thing that few writers do really well. So: perhaps writers should collaborate more? Oh well…

    Following on from my September 2008 article in History Today, I’ve just posted up an online Juan Roget bibliography listing the current set of primary, secondary, and tertiary references to Girolamo Sirtori’s claim to have met the “first inventor” of the telescope in Gerona.

    While my article received a lot of positive attention from the Spanish media (which was nice, particularly being interviewed in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford for TVE-1), I did however get quite a bit of negative attention (mainly online) from a few Spanish academics, who felt that I was somehow hijacking Simon de Guilleuma’s original 1959 research, which they claimed was well-known in Spanish history of astronomy reference works – and that I wasn’t actually offering anything new.

    Unsurprisingly, I don’t think this criticism is really very fair. I made it completely clear in my article that it was Simon de Guilleuma’s dogged research from half a century ago that formed the central core of the whole story, and that my relatively modest contribution was limited to suggesting plausible transmission mechanisms by which (a) the Spanish telescope became the Frankfurt telescope, and (b) the Frankfurt telescope then begat the Dutch spyglass. In short, I tried to find a sensible explanation that not only engaged with all the confusing documentary evidence (without being unduly selective, as is too often the case), but also didn’t seek to reduce the parentage of the telescope to some kind of arbitrary quasi-nationalistic either-or choice.

    My belief is simply that Simon de Guilleuma did not, some thirty years before Albert van Helden’s exemplary “The Invention of the Telescope” was published, have access to all the relevant documentary sources. If he had, I am quite sure that he would have been happy to suggest a more complete historical narrative broadly along the lines that I proposed.

    Even if my hypothesis turns out to be wrong, I do think that it will be (what I call) “the right kind of wrong”: which is to say that the narrative that ultimately emerges will likely be a similar kind of synthesis (as opposed to a set of theses and antitheses). To an intellectual historian such as me, the mainstream’s Lipperhey-vs-Janssen-vs-Metius framework yields answers that are “the wrong kind of wrong” – a false choice between three historically implausible narratives, where none of them sits comfortably with the rest of the evidence.

    A Quality Assurance auditor from Cross Plains, Wisconsin, Mark Sullivan has been thinking about the VMs since the 1970s… and now suspects he has possibly glimpsed at least part of the answer, putting his current notes on a newly-started blog.

    The key to it all, he believes, lies in the vertical column of Voynichese letters down the left-hand edge of page f66r: he thinks that the “9” character falls where vowels lie in the Latin alphabet, though when that pattern breaks down (at “O”), his idea is that the plaintext alphabet is somehow reversed (i.e. Z, Y, X, etc), which I take to mean something broadly along the following lines:-

    Voynich Manuscript f66r, vertical column rearranged
    Voynich Manuscript f66r, vertical column rearranged

    Furthermore, he believes that paragraph-initial gallows “reflect forms of hic and qui“; that there is “an underlying system” involving “three columns with multiple sequences of equivalent letter groups“; and that there is also a kind of (verbose) number system at play.

    Is this any good? To me, it hinges on what you make of the f66r vertical column. Though A, E and O do indeed match up nicely to the three “9” (EVA <y>) characters in the list, and “K” is apparently mapped to a rotated K glyph, the rest is fairly wobbly: F, M and W all map to the same “8” (EVA <d>) glyph, as do D and N (to the EVA <sh> pair), and the B and X (EVA <o>). Yet once you start introducing a degree of interpretation into a Latin-like text, you almost inevitably end up with something not too dissimilar to Brumbaugh’s ARABYCCUS and PAPERYCUS – fragmentary motes of Latin, evanescently bubbling to the surface in a sea of syllables.

    These days, I don’t really have any belief that someone is going to waltz in from the wings holding aloft anything resembling a monoalphabetic substitution key to the VMs: and as a possible source for such a key, the vertical column on f66r doesn’t really do it for me. Moreover, I don’t think “K” appeared in the Latin alphabet as used by Quattrocento cipher makers, which would rather throw this sequence out. But perhaps I’ve got all that wrong, and should instead heed the wisdom of sagacious songwriter George Michael, who back in 1987 sang “I gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith“. Oh, well!

    In glamorous Salford last year, the Early Book Society for the study of manuscripts and printing history held a conference called Codices and Community: Networks of Reading and Production, 1350-1550. Just after the “Weird Science” panel chaired by Toshi Takamiya, there was a talk by Teru Agata (an associate professor at Asia University, a private university in Tokyo) and Mari Agata on “Applications of Text Clustering to the Voynich MS”.

    Teru Agata subsequently gave a public seminar on the Voynich Manuscript in February 2008 at the University of Tsukuba, called “Judgment of the Possibility to break Undeciphered Documents -With the Example of the Most Mysterious Manuscript-“. And if the search box in Asia University’s website worked, perhaps there would be more I could dig up there.

    OK, so in the big scheme of things “Japanese academic gives at least two talks on the VMs” isn’t really huge news. But it did make me think that perhaps I should start compiling a page listing academics who are actively looking at the VMs, such as Angela Catalina Ghionea (who I mentioned here), Volkhard Huth (who I mentioned here), Gordon Rugg / Andreas Schinner, possibly Peter Forshaw (who seems to enjoy surfing the Renaissance foam surrounding the VMs), and so on. Perhaps at some point they’ll form some kind of critical mass, and the VMs will start being taken seriously?

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    …errr, fat chance. 🙁

    PS: Google Translate turned a Russian VMs webpage’s references to Rugg into “Ruggie”, “Ragg” and “Ragga”, which made for slightly surreal reading.