Review of “The Shakespeare Secret”…

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In many ways, I have to concede that “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell is a fun little novelistic riff on all things Shakespearean: a series of people die in recreations of famous First Folio fatalities, while the main character (who is chasing after a lost play called “Cardenio”) recoils from each gory death while girding herself for the next clue in the scavenger hunt.

Structurally, it’s built around a vaguely Oxfordian-Stratfordian axis (i.e. whether Shakespeare really was himself or not), with a bit of Delia Bacon thrown in for fun. There are all the obligatory twists and turns at the end (where various players reverse their roles): and it wouldn’t be a proper Shakespearean pastiche-y thing without a bit of cross-dressing along the way, so that happens too. Basically, all the right boxes get ticked in a broadly trashy-secrets-novel-that-you-can-pretend-is-a-bit-posh kind of way.

But there’s a problem.

For me, there’s just something about it which brings so many other novels I’ve reviewed here immediately to mind. For example, its underground finale echoes both Max McCoy’s “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” and Michael Cordy’s “The Source” (with a bit of Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum thrown in for good measure), while the book’s whole scavenger hunt motif has a parochial American angle to it (not unlike Lev Grossman’s “Codex”, which I’ll be reviewing soon).

Really, to me it’s as if these books are all reprising a single High Victorian cipher Ur-romp: but not even in a syncretic “Hero of a Thousand Faces” / Joseph Campbell way. Put them all together, and it feels as though you can perhaps begin to redraw the vague outlines of ye olde booke from whence they all flowed: and it goes something like this…

The main character begins the book in a kind of liminal state, floating between academe and pragmatism (but committed to neither). Yet he/she is quickly presented with a challenge arising from his/her personal life, which compels him/her to use apply both his/her mad research skillz and practical nous to a mysterious enciphered / obscured object. After an almost-interminable scavenger hunt across a number of locations (snooty rare book and manuscript libraries, draughty museums, improbably fantastic or rich archives, and odd church basements), chased by unconvincing (and frankly two-dimensional) protagonists who seem to have escaped from a penny dreadful, the main character realises the awful truth about both the codex / book and the agenda(s) of the people who have steered / guided / manipulated him/her to find it. However, despite being finally found in some underground location (with an unconvincing fight sequence whereby the truly evil character dies), for some mysterious reason the codex ultimately slips through the main character’s grasp, and (to nobody’s great surprise) a new optimistic chapter of his/her life finally opens up, with all that murky nonsense placed safely behind.

I’m not a historian of the novel, so I really wouldn’t know where to begin digging to find a (early Victorian? or slightly older?) prototypical cipher romp, where this basic template first appeared. It’s superficially tempting to see things like the liminality of the main character as a modern conceit: but actually, it all feels far older to me. Perhaps someone will recognize it and add a comment…

Pseudo-science and The Curse of the Voynich…

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A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).

In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂

With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.

I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.

So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮

As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.

If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.

The wisdom of a crowded forum…

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On the one hand, “Linus’ Law” asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple – hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library’s scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, the overall level of discourse seems to have gone dramatically downhill over that same period.

I used to believe that everyone’s contribution was potentially worthwhile, because anyone might see a connection that helps to unlock a door: but this inclusive liberal viewpoint isn’t tenable any more, basically because you have to be able to read the VMs’ pictures in a pretty sophisticated way to get even close.

The curious rubbed-through hole on f34r/f34v of the Voynich Manuscript

Even for the very brightest, there are numerous traps to fall in: such as Sergio Toresella’s belief that the hole rubbed through the tree-trunk-like thing on f34r signals the mad scribe’s sexual frustration (it would require a great deal of work to rub such a neatly arranged hole through vellum). Perhaps Sergio is right (he’s extremely close in almost every other way): but this presumes a very specific kind of irrationality – and so the observation relies very heavily on the hypothesis to validate it, which is a kind of circular argument.

All of which colours my reaction to Zachary1392’s post on the Facepunch Studios forums: when looking at the same hole rubbed through on f34r/f34v, he sees it as a representation of female genitalia. Which (having then thought about it some more) he then concludes we should perhaps worship, as part of a Voynich religion.

In some ways, it’s an optimistic moment: a very sophisticated opinion informed by Sergio Toresella’s lifetime of studying medieval herbals, being duplicated by some amusing forum troll. But it’s also a pessimistic moment, because it gets us nowhere: “Greeman” on the same forum similarly points out:

Haha it was probably some shmuck from 600 years ago who thought;

“I bet if I write some crazy letters and draw some real fucked up stuff on a book someone will find it years later and totally freak out.”

It worked, you all got trolled from an Ancient Pothead.

Good Game.

While “Trogdon” helpfully suggested that, because one word looks like “crop” (EVA chol), the VMs might instead be a Photoshop tutorial. And Draicia thinks the whole thing might be a viral advertisement (but for what? Another Dan Brown novel? Have book publishers suddenly evolved?)

I think that all this forum chatter demonstrates something quite basic: that Linus’ Law sucks for things you can’t easily decompose. Reductionism is such a fundamental tenet of scientific thought that nobody even thinks to mention it these days – but the awkward dizzying truth is that to get started on difficult problems, scientists actually have to actively exercise their scientific imagination to generate novel decompositions (which may or may not be right), within which the hard slog of execution can be split up amongst a virtual cloud of volunteers / academics /  workers. Hence string theory, etc.

Linus’ Law fails for the VMs because nobody wants to sign up to any apparently mad theory before committing any serious amount of effort to testing it. But the truth underlying such an odd object will most likely appear somewhat alien (if not outright demented) to our present day minds – and so any person proposing the hypothesis is naturally expected to do all the hard work of proving it.

The sad thing about the VMs is that we do now have a collection of basic art historical facts and observations which tell us broadly where and when the VMs came from: but these point to so prosaic a subset of answers that almost nobody wants them to be true. Far more interesting to put your trust in David Icke’s, Dan Burisch’s, or Gordon Rugg’s brand of alternate history: they’re scientists, aren’t they? (Errrrrrrm…)

Put it all together, and I think the wisdom of the crowded forums perhaps points to the antithesis of Linus’ Law: that if enough people help to trample on every suggestion, nothing is simple. Or perhaps even simpler: given enough troll eyeballs, everything becomes worthless junk. Oh well. 🙁

Dead links, Google oddness, etc…

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I decided to do a bit of site admin over the last few days, by at least trying to tidy up any outstanding issues lurking in the Cipher Mysteries site, mostly from the changeover from Blogger to WordPress. While doing this, I noticed that the site had suddenly dropped about 300 places in Google’s rating for basic search terms, such as “Voynich” and “cipher” (though it has since recovered to about 180): at one stage, it wasn’t even #1 for “cipher mysteries” (Bah!) Even though I’m still getting lots of new visitors (mainly from mailing list recommendations, I think), not a lot of “love” (as SEO people like to describe PageRank, usually to sex up their dull presentations) is flowing my way from Google. Perhaps that will change soon…

Anyway, I found an excellent free tool that revealed a whole load of site problems I wasn’t previously aware of: http://www.dead-links.com/ Much as you’d expect, this is a free robot crawler that trundles happily through your website finding all your dead links, both internal and external. Links to commercial sites (such as Amazon / IMDB etc) often get reported as “405” (which basically means, “no robots allowed in here, so go away“): you’ll also get the occasional “403” (“Forbidden“, where you’ve accidentally linked to a page you had to log in to access), and perhaps a “500” (“Internal Server Error“), where Bad Stuff Is Going On But You Don’t Actually Know What It Is.

In the main, though, the bulk of the errors are likely to be “404” pages: this can encompass just about anything from miscopied or dead URLs, to “the-page-was-loading-too-slowly-so-the-robot-decided-to-give-up” (normally a false positive). Helpfully, dead-links.com lists all the errors a second time at the end of the output page, so you don’t need to cut and paste them from the huge list yourself (errrm… like I happened to do the first time).

And so, I’m going to try to sort out all my dead and malformed links over the next few days: if only 50% of the Voynich sites on the web would do the same…

Dorabella: one step forward, two steps back…

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According to a nice little 2004 New Scientist article by Kevin Jones (Professor of Music at Kingston University, my most recent alma mater), even though Elgar composed his cipher note to Dora Penny in 1897, he appears to have reused the same 24-token cipher alphabet in an exercise book 30 years later. (Kevin Jones doesn’t mention in which collection the exercise book is to be found: there’s a nice listing of Elgar’s notes and immense collection of letters here.)

As with the majority of self-conceived ciphers, it was born of a simple idea:-

[Elgar] listed the symbols used in the Dorabella cipher matched against the letters of the alphabet. The cipher follows a simple pattern, with single, double and triple E-like characters, each in eight possible orientations – upright, rotated 45 degrees clockwise, 90 degrees clockwise and so on. This gives a total of 24 potential characters, and as with many ciphers, I and J share a single character, as do U and V.

Elgar then tries it out on some samples, which when deciphered read:-

M-A-R-C-O E-L-G-A-R (Marco was his pet spaniel) and A V-E-R-Y O-L-D C-Y-P-H-E-R. But when applied to the Dorabella cipher this key does not generate anything that makes obvious sense.

It certainly was “a very old cypher” (probably 30+ years old at that stage). But there’s something a bit back-to-front about this whole thing. If he was reusing an old cipher, why would he be going through the palaver of trying it out again? He would surely have gone through his experimenting phase decades before? But according to Kevin Jones’ subsequent notes to the 2007 BBC Proms:-

Elgar scribbled an 18 character code using the same cipher symbols in the column of printed programme notes for a concert he attended at Crystal Palace in April 1886 – opposite a musical example from Liszt’s “Les Preludes”. (Copy at the Elgar Birthplace Museum.) Annotations on other pages are not ciphered – so it’s possible that this may have been added at a later date.

And so even though this was used as a cipher circa 1886 (probably), and post 1927 (probably), was it also one circa 1897? All these scraps muddy the water once again – which is perhaps what Elgar was hoping to achieve. I just wish we knew what Dora Penny’s favourite song was…

Interestingly, one of the comments to this page was by Peter Brooks, who said he was “increasingly confident that the message consists of two parts separated by an evident period on the last line”, with a first apart in Latin and the second in some kind of vertically arranged English. Personally, I’m not sure how that would be any less obscure than the solution proposed by Eric Sams discussed here recently: but I’m sure Peter Brooks has plenty of sensible reasons to back his notion up.

Following on from the Proms post, “The Elgar Apostle” (“the Elgar on-line newspaper”) held a Dorabella cipher competition, which “seven individuals were brave enough to submit entries”.

The final Dorabella bombshell of the day comes from Peter Brooks, who noted (in his comment) that “there is a moderated Yahoo group Elgar-Cipher“. If you want to find out more about the Dorabella Cipher, this is surely the first place you’d want to head towards.

Incidentally, the “enigma” of the 1899 “Enigma Variations” was Elgar’s claim that they all played in counterpoint to a well-known melody (which he never disclosed, and which has never been worked out) – might the Dorabella Cipher be enciphering this tune, too? (The timing would be basically right.)

PPS: the German WWII Enigma machine was (apparently) specifically named after the Enigma Variations: yet another non-obvious connection between music and cryptography…

The mystery of Bellaso’s ciphers…

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A little while back, I asked Augusto Buonafalce about Renaissance cryptographer Giovan Battista Bellaso’s challenge ciphers, completely unaware that he seems to have published more articles on them than anyone else on the planet. (Shame on me for not subscribing to Cryptologia, I really ought to.)

In fact, Bellaso published two sets of challenge ciphers in his cryptography manuals: a set of three long ones in 1553 (which I don’t have copies of), and a set of seven short ones in 1564 (which I do). For me, the mystery is why nobody has cracked any of these in 450 years… compared to the Voynich Manuscript’s multilayered (and horrendously tangled) cryptography, they can’t be that hard, surely?

Here’s a link to the short page I’ve just put up on Bellaso’s challenge ciphers. Don’t forget that the “=” signs at the line-ends are almost certainly hyphens, and not part of the cipher. Good luck! 😉

Two Renaissance cold cases, solved…?

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Italian scientists claim to have solved two mysterious deaths from the Quattrocento: those of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Agnolo Ambrogini, two big-brained Florentines at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court who suddenly passed away within only a few weeks of each other in 1494.

Though some historians had conjectured the pair might have died of syphilis, the contemporary rumours of poisoning have apparently now been supported by the high levels of arsenic, mercury and lead found (very, very post mortem) “in Pico’s tissues and nails”, the report goes on. All fascinating forensic stuff, I’m sure. (With slightly more in the Telegraph’s coverage).

But… permission to speak, please, Mr Italian Scientists? The 15th century in Italy was full of hazards, no less from your friends than from your enemies. For example, the culinary fashion was for really undercooked meat (and lots of it), which can (quite literally) be a recipe for disaster – and whenever anyone died suddenly, the jabbing finger of retribution usually pointed at anywhere but the kitchen.

For the rich (i.e. those who could afford apothecaries), another major source of death-by-(mis)fortune was the arsenic-, lead- and quicksilver- (i.e. mercury-)based medicines that were sometimes in favour. I would say that the best thing about the medieval cure “theriac” was that its large number (often 70+) of ingredients usually meant that none of them came in a strong enough dose to kill you.

Put bluntly, I would be thoroughly unsurprised if other bones from similar Medici courtiers happened to exhibit precisely the same tox profile: but without actually killing them. And there are many reports of poisoning plots that failed – different groups used different poisons (the Borgias favoured inorganic ones, as I recall), often ineffectively. Did the two men’s similar deaths mean they shared the same enemy, or just the same apothecary and cook?

Merely pointing to the arsenic etc isn’t enough to tell the whole story: and this is why I sometimes despair at the sight of scientists’ trying to do history. Different types of evidence (and inquiry) yield different and complementary types of story, and it is usually only by linking all these together that the whole narrative emerges. These days, history is multimedia, or it is nothing.

Here, “historical documents that have only recently come to light” (suggesting that Piero de’ Medici was angered by Pico’s connection with mad preacher Savonarola) ought to give the inevitable documentary a spin in the right direction. However, only in Hollywood’s cheesier fringes might someone think that writing “kiiiiiill hiiiim” in a letter would be a good idea. Will the archives really have enough to hold it all together?

All the same, if someone could point to some coded letters written in 1493-1494 by Pico della Mirandola’s enemies, well, then we might just be in business… 😉

Architectural ciphers…

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Readers of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” will doubtless remember (if you made it though to Chapter 12, *sigh*) the parallels I drew between physical architects (such as Antonio Averlino / Filarete, of course) and software/cipher architects: both achieve their design ends using a kind of “intellectual structuring” means. But might there be even closer links?

Concealment through architecture is an old story: one might think of priest holes, for example. Famously, Francesco Sforza constructed hidden passageways and staircases in the Corte part of the Castello di Porta Giovia in Milan to allow him to come and go as he pleased (see Evelyn Welch (1995) “Art and Authority in the Renaissance”, pp.205-207): countless other castles have secret tunnels and passageways along this same general theme.

Novels, too, like to reprise this idea: I’m just finishing “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell (2007), whose Bard-esque historical scavenger hunt makes liberal use of architecturally-concealed bits (though perhaps echoing Nic Cage’s “National Treasure” rather more than was strictly necessary for the plot, I’m sad to say).

But I was delighted to find out that real life still trumps most fiction: an obsessive architect called Eric Clough designed a truly remarkable $8.5m house on Fifth Avenue in New York, with layer upon layer of clues, tricks, mechanisms, puns, crosswords, ciphers (even a skytale!), panels and salamanders (!) for the owners to discover over a period of months and years. It’s a marvellous (if slightly mad) story, one I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Don’t forget to click on the 15-photo slideshow at the left: this has close-up pictures of many of the puzzles. Very cool!

PS: speaking of architectural ciphers, my sister once told me about an architect who had his house made backwards, so he could watch TV. But I might have misheard her. 🙂

BL cipher manuscript update…

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I’ve just heard back from the British Library Manuscript department about BL MS Add. 10035, “The Subtelty of Witches”, which I mentioned here a few days ago: “unfortunately it does not begin in English. The whole of the manuscript is written in cipher.”

So: was Eric Sams mistaken? Might the British Library actually have two unreadable books? Well… after a rather longer trawl through the various BL catalogues, I’ll say that “The Subtelty of Witches” is still the best candidate. There are plenty of enciphered letters there, but nothing else of any major size: all the same, I should probably consult Sheila Richards’ (1973) book “Secret writing in the public records, Henry VIII-George II” (actually 1519-1738), just in case there’s any fleeting reference to it there.

Incidentally, Eric Sams wrote a piece for Musical Times in 1970 (now online) on Edward Elgar’s ‘Dorabella’ Cipher, where he suggested the 87 encrypted symbols could be decrypted to read…

STARTS: LARKS! IT’S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, α, β
BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

Sorry, but somehow I just don’t think Sams quite nailed it on this particular occasion. Sams also wrote a 1987 note explaining his reasoning in more detail: but that just seems a bit too eager to tie things up. All the same, he wraps up the final note by pretty much coming round to my opinion:-

[…] But what if that cipher-table served another purpose?

Dr. Percy Young’s standard biography tells us that Elgar used a music cipher; the names of people he disliked were thus consigned to the Demon’s Chorus in The Dream of Gerontius. An Oxford professor of music, Sir Jack Westrup, has suggested that Elgar used cipher in the Enigma Variations.

Perhaps interested readers would like to consider on what lines (or spaces) ex 3 might make a music cipher?

However, a musicological Ventris has yet to take up this challenge: what haunting melody might be encrypted there? As Elgar said to Dora Penny, “I thought you of all people would guess it“… but what was her favourite song? 😉

A new VMs hypothesis…

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Halfway through Blunt and Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal”, a small lightbulb flickered briefly to life in my tired head. And it was to do with the VMs’ Occitan marginalia, something that has bugged me for years…

To my codicological eyes, the VMs appears to have had a busy time in the 15th century (with three or four inquisitive owners), a very quiet time for most of the 16th century, before an intense flurry of activity circa 1600 (when I think its folios were numbered and the “heavy paint” layer added), which is just about when its semi-documented life at the Rudolfine court begins.

But, like an alcoholic after a particularly mad binge, there’s a whole chunk of time missing in the middle – in fact, about a century’s worth. What happened then? Who owned it? How did the VMs apparently get from Occitania (probably Southern France) to Prague? And – most crucially of all – why did nobody think fit to mention such an intriguing object?

Now: even though in many ways I hate what I call “join-the-dots histories”, when evidence is completely lacking (as is the case here) you really don’t have much choice. Basically, pragmatic hypotheses (which historians need so as to be even remotely strategic about what they look to for evidence) have to come from somewhere: and so here is my (possibly new) suggestion for how the VMs travelled from Northern Italy to Southern France and onwards towards the Rudolfine Imperial court at Prague. It may be rubbish, but it is at least testable rubbish. 🙂

The dots I propose to conveniently join together in a line (along which the VMs might well have travelled) are:-

  • Guillaume Pellicier [or Pellissier, or Pelicier] (c. 1490–1568), Bishop of Montpellier, who was a French diplomat in Venice between 1539 and 1542, from where he brought back Greek, Hebrew and Syriac books. He was also interested in botany; was imprisoned for a while (it’s a long story…); and was a long-time patron and friend of….
  • Guillaume Rondelet [or Rondeletius] (1507-1566), who famously taught medicine and botany at the University of Montpellier, and wrote a definitive book on fish. Rondelet bequeathed his collection of manuscripts to his student…
  • Matthias [de] L’Obel (Lobelius), (1538-1616) a young (but soon to be famous) botanist; he travelled to the North, settling first in Holland, then England, then Holland, and then England again.

From there you can get the VMs to Prague in any number of ways, though many (of course) would like it to have been carried there by Dee & Kelley. While that last part is still in the realms of wishful thinking, I’m more interested here in working out if the Montpellier side of things might be true… but how?

Further reading-wise, here are the lowest hanging fruits of all: HTML text resources.

  • I’ve placed a copy of Rev. Charles Kingsley’s chapter 14 of “Health and Eduction” (1874) “Rondelet, The Huguenot Naturalist” on the Cipher Mysteries website here. By modern standards, the text is a bit cloying, let’s say: but an OK starting point nonetheless.
  • A relatively up-to-date summary of Guillaume Rondelet’s life (in French) is here.

For correspondence, all three men have stuff in various archives: Pellicier’s Venetian correspondence, Rondelet’s (mainly medical) letters were published in his “Opera Omnia Medica” (?), while L’Obel (from whose name we get “Lobelia”, incidentally) similarly has a few letters out there (his patron Baron Zouche, the 16th century apothecary Jean Mouton, etc).

As with most questions about French letters, Gallica has plenty of scans of creaky old books which may (or may not) be useful. Here are some quick links to start with, sorted by date (rather than by usefulness):-

  • 1554: Libri de piscibus marinis, in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt. Rondelet, Guillaume. Matthiam Bonhomme (Lugduni). Online here.
  • 1557: Histoire des plantes, en laquelle est contenue la description entière des herbes… non seulement de celles qui croissent en ce païs, mais aussi des autres estrangères qui viennent en usage de médecine. Dodoens, Rembert (1517-1585). Impr. de J. Loe (Anvers). Online here.
  • 1572: Illustrations de Commentaires de M. Pierre André Matthiole, médecin Senois, sur les six livres de Ped. Dioscoride anazarbeen de la matière médicinale. Mattioli, Pierandrea (1500-1577). Guillaume Rouillé (Lyon). Online here.
  • 1579: Nicolai Dortomanni Arnhemij Libri duo. De causis & effectibus thermarum belilucanarum. / Carmina G. Salmuth, C. Heintzelij, A. Widholtzii. Dortoman, Nicolas. Apud Carolum Pesnot (Lugduni). Online here.
  • 1581: Plantarum seu Stirpium icones. De Lobel, Matthias. C. Plantini (Antuerpiae). Online here.
  • 1841: Notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de Lyon, 1483-1546. T. 1.  Péricaud, Antoine (1782-1867). impr. de Mougin-Rusand (Lyon). Online here.
  • 1877: Étude historique sur l’École de droit de Montpellier, 1160-1793, d’après les documents originaux,…  Germain, Alexandre-Charles. Boehm et fils (Montpellier). Online here.
  • 1903: Les ambassadeurs français permanents au XVIe siècle. Vindry, Fleury. H. Champion (Paris). Online here. (Text starts on page 5)
  • 1911-1914 Bullaire de l’église de Maguelone. [Volume 1]. Rouquette, Julien (1871-1927). Online here.

Books to look at for Guillaume Pellicier (note the various spellings!) would seem to be:-

  1. 1886: Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pelicier évêque de Montpellier, ambassadeur de François Ier à Venise. Henri Auguste Omont. A. Picard, Paris. In the Internet Archive here.
  2. 1891: Inventaire de la bibliotheque de Guillaume Pelicier, eveque de Montpellier (1529-1568). Henri Omont, in Revue des Bibliotheques, I, pp. 161-172. “Inv. used. Montpellier. Clergy, booklist printed”, according to this page on French wills. Gallica has apparently not yet scanned the 1891 edition (while the earliest currently on Google Books is 1897), which is a huge shame as this is the first place I’d like to look… oh well. 🙁
  3. 1899: Correspondance politique de Guillaume Pellicier: ambassadeur de France à Venise 1540-1542. Tausserat-Radel, Alexandre (1858-1921). Paris, F. Alcan.
  4. 1969: La diplomatique francaise vers le milieu du XVIe siecle, d’apres la correspondance de Guillaume Pellicier, eveque de Montpellier, ambassadeur de Francois Ier a Venise 1539-1542. J. Zeller. Slatkine Reprints.
  5. 1986: Les copistes de Guillaume Pellicier, éveque de Montpellier <1490-1567>. Annaclara Cataldi Palau, in Scriptorium 40, pp. 225-237. According to this website, “The author’s research on the Greek manuscripts in the library of Guillaume Pélicier, the French ambassador to Venice between 1539-42, relied heavily upon analysis of the watermarks to supplement other palaeographical and documentary evidence“
  6. 1986: Les vicissitudes de la collection de manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pellicier. Annaclara Cataldi Palau, in Scriptorium 40 (1), pp.32-53
  7. ????: Manoscritti greci della collezione di Guillaume Pellicier, Vescovo di Montpellier (ca. 1490-1568) : “Disiecta membra”. (I don’t know where it’s from, but ULRLS has a copy).

(Incidentally, Annaclara Cataldi Palau is a Professor at King’s College London, whose research interests are “Greek palaeography and history of book production“: so I presume that the last article was placed in the University of London Library system directly by her, in case you can’t find it anywhere else.)

Books which tend to get cited on Guillaume Rondelet are:-

  1. 1582: Vita Gulielmi Rondeletti, L. Joubert [Rondelet’s first biographer], in Opera Latina, 2 (Lyon, 1582), pp. 186-93. [Nancy Siraisi briefly discusses Joubert’s account in her “History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning” (2007), pp.126-127]
  2. 1865: Rondelet et ses Disciples ou la botanique à Montpellier au XVIe siècle. Discours prononcé dans la séance solennelle de rentrée des Facultés et de l’École supérieure de pharmacie de Montpellier, le 15 novembre 1865 par J.-E. Planchon, directeur de l’École de pharmacie. If you’re interested, there’s a copy on AbeBooks for a paltry £363.04: or you can go to the Natural History Museum’s library instead (which is what I plan to do). 🙂
  3. 1899: La botanique en provence au XVIe siecle, II, Pierre Pena et Mathias de Lobel. L. Legré (Marseilles).
  4. 1926: Un manuscrit médical du XVIe siècle, contenant principalement des œuvres de Guillaume Rondelet: Notes bibliographique et biographiques, Suzanne Solente (with E. Jeanselme and Dr. M. Lanselle), in Bulletin de la Societe Francaise d’histoire de la Medecine, 20. pp. 3-36
  5. 1936: Guillaume Rondelet, J. M. Oppenheimer, in Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 4, pp. 817-34.
  6. 1965: Guillaume Rondelet, C. Dulieu, in Clio medica, 1, pp. 89-111.

I’ll return to Lobelius another day (I’m still reeling from all the above). As it is, I’ve already jeopardised my membership of the Bloggers Union by including too much useful information in a single post. :-O