British Library cipher manuscript…?

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Are you an historian with an enciphered document you want to read? If so, here’s a link to an article you really ought to have a look at: “Cryptanalysis and Historical Research” by Eric Sams, from Archivaria 21 (1985-1986) [it’s actually an extended version of two earlier articles he wrote for the TLS in 1977 and 1980].

There’s tons of good stuff in Sams’ article, such as a mention of the table of early shorthands in Isaac Pitman’s book “The History of Shorthand” (which I saw in Leeds University’s Brotherton Collection): this table really ought to be on the web somewhere (please let me know if you happen to find a copy). Incidentally, The Shorthand Place website has a fantastic list of shorthand collections in UK libraries.

But I know what you’re thinking at this point: “What does Sams think of the Voynich Manuscript?” And the answer is, well, not an awful lot:-

“Of course some archives are likely to remain dark and impenetrable. William Friedman, one of the world’s greatest cryptanalysts, spent many a fruitless hour on the Voynich manuscript, attributed to Roger Bacon, which is fluently written in a natural-looking yet wholly unintelligible language.”

AKA, “if it looks tricky, don’t even go there”. But wait: Sams isn’t finished yet…

“The British Library […] also owns an original volume of an equally obscure manuscript which begins by saying in plain English that no one will ever unravel the meaning of what follows.”

But… which manuscript would that be, Eric? Unfortunately, Sams – the teasing swine! – fails to say. (Please email me if you do know!) Flicking through the British Library’s manuscript catalogue, the best candidate appears to be “The Subtelty of Witches” by Ben Ezra Aseph (1657) [British Library MS. Add. 10035], written entirely in cipher… might that be it? Also: BL Ms Add 32305 contains 39 folios of “unidentified cipher keys”: which sounds like a lot of fun. 😉 But I digress! Sams finishes his discussion thus:-

So be it; many tracks lead into such caves. but none ever come out. The true treasure-chests are much more likely to be those which clearly once had real keys, later lost or mislaid. 

Well… speaking as a long-term denizen of the Voynich Manuscript cave, I have to admit that Sams might just have a point here. But no sense of romance, damnit! 🙂

PS: fans of Sams can find a list of his cryptological papers here.

Anaphoric clock in Kansas City…

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As I mentioned recently, I’m working my way through James E. Morrison’s book “The Astrolabe”: seeing so many astrolabes at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford was good fun, but I still want to get all the maths and celestial mechanics straight in my head – I’m never really happy until I get Art and Science in some kind of balance. Curiously, I worked for a camera company (/*you know who you are*/) not so long ago where stereographic projection (as used in astrolabes) is central to its business: isn’t it strange by how little maths has changed over the millennia?

But before the astrolabe, there was a set of objects known as anaphoric clocks (as mentioned by Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book IX, Chap. 8, 8-15): the Tower of the Winds in Athens is generally believed to have had one of these. These are deceptively simple objects, comprising a wire framework top layer (known as a “spider”) to represent the hours of the day, and a backlayer containing both a stereographic projection of the night sky and a circle of peg holes marking the sun’s position as it moves through the zodiacal year.  (All basically as per Morrison, “The Astrolabe”, pp. 33-34).

And now Kansas City is host to a brand new (and really quite funky) anaphoric clock, thanks to local artist Laura DeAngelis (with help from Peregrine Honig), as well as the advice and calculations of Jim “Mr Astrolabe” Morrison himself. If you happen to be in Kansas City unexpectedly (for example, if you click your heels, Dorothy), why not have a look for yourself? The anaphoric clock is in the Oppenstein Brothers Memorial Park, and I think it’s just fabulous (but I would, wouldn’t I?)

Review of “Bearing the Heavens”…

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I’ve just come back from 24 hours in Swansea, a town where, bizarrely, almost every road is one way (usually the opposite way to which you want to go). At the top of Mount Pleasant, students eke out their existence, one drunken stumble away from a 5-minute death-roll down Constitution Hill’s 45 degree gradient. Swansea is the kind of place where (ideally) you’d like a hang-glider to get to town, a satnav implant to get around, and a cable-car to get home again. But still, the beer’s good, so I can forgive all that… 😉

All of which springs to mind simply because I’ve just read a book on Tycho Brahe by Adam Mosley, history lecturer at the University of Swansea. From his office, most of the bright lights in the evening sky are doubtless not stars or planets, but roomlights in digs at the top of the hill, full of students massaging their aching quads and calves, & wondering why their 50cc scooter’s clutch burnt out in only two days.

In many ways, Mosley’s book – “Bearing The Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century” (2007), Cambridge University Press, ISBN13: 9780521838665, £55.00, US$105.00 – dovetails quite neatly with “On Tycho’s Island”, as reviewed here recently: whereas the latter looks inwards at Brahe’s insular life on Hven, the former instead looks outwards to Brahe’s links with the external world. To do this, Mosley focuses on three things – Brahe’s letters, his books, and his instruments.

The writing is brisk and accessible throughout (though I felt devoting the first chapter to a justification of why he chose the punning title “Bearing the Heavens” was somewhat superfluous), and the two big chapters on books and instruments cover the ground well. But I have to say that this is all a bit of a feint, a distraction from Mosley’s actual thesis – which is concerned solely with the importance to the history of science of Brahe’s letters in their context. This is the real deal, the stuff that you can tell he’s excited about here.

And, I think, rightly so – Mosley’s book essentially sends out a ‘call to adventure’ to historians of Renaissance science, that they have woefully undervalued the usefulness of letters. Book publishing is just the tip of the iceberg of ideas – even these days, printing your own books is no walk in the park (trust me, I’ve tried it), and the difficulties involved 400-500 years ago were far greater, even for driven people of significant means such as Brahe. Renaissance letters were often copied and circulated, or even collated for later publication: and so Mosely argues that it is the huge interconnected web of letters that form the underwater bulk – and it is to this largely unseen mountain we should be devoting our attention.

Regular readers of this blog will know that this is a zeitgeisty angle (though perhaps still falling just short of being trendy), exemplified by (for example) Josef Smolka’s ongoing study of Tadeas Hajek’s letters to/from Andreas Dudith. What separates Mosley’s exposition is that he simply does not accept that it is a marginal area for study – for him, correspondence is king, and should occupy centre stage for our understanding of science pre-1600.

For a while, I’ve been thinking along these lines: I even tried creating a database in Freebase to try to map out & visualize the connections between various 16th century letter-writers, to try to glimpse the “invisible colleges” as they formed, flourished and faded. Yet when I saw Mosley’s Figure 2.1 on page 36 (which tries to do this for Brahe’s immediate network), I suddenly realised the staggering enormity of the challenge and gave up on the spot.

Fig 2.1 from Adam Mosley\'s \

Ultimately, what historians of science would need is a gigantic collaborative correspondence database, that could be used as a cross-archive finding aid. Even though a few people’s letters have been studied in depth (such as Christopher Clavius, Tycho Brahe, Athanasius Kircher, etc), libraries and archives (particularly private archives) must still have an enormous collection of pearls of which historians are unaware.

Perhaps others have already advanced Mosley’s thesis just as eloquently and persuasively: but it is an idea whose time (I believe) has now come. Will others heed his call? I hope so…

Historical hoaxes…

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I recently stumbled across a forum discussion comparing the Voynich Manuscript to the “Maybrick Diary” (oh, and the Vinland Map, too) inasmuch as they are all high profile documents that have been dubbed fakes or hoaxes. James Maybrick was a Victorian cotton merchant from Liverpool high up the ludicrously long list of people variously accused of being Jack the Ripper, as well as the alleged author of a Ripperesque diary that surfaced in 1992.

It seems that just about everybody (apart from Robert Smith, the present owner) is reasonably sure that the Maybrick Diary (written in a Victorian diary with the first 20 pages ripped out) is a fake: Michael Barrett, who originally claimed to have bought it in a pub, later swore (twice) that he had dictated the diary to his wife, though these affadavits were (apparently) subsequently repudiated.

To me, the Maybrick Diary fits the general template of hoaxers falling out after the event, guiltily unable to keep up the pretence, not unlike the mad furore over the fake alien autopsy I described a while back. In pattern-speak, one might observe that a Beneficiary (Michael Barrett / Ray Santilli) benefits from the appearance of a MacGuffin (the Maybrick Diary / alien autopsy footage) claiming to unravel a notorious unexplained Mystery (Jack the Ripper / Roswell), but couldn’t quite keep up the pretense for a long time.

Compare that with the Vinland Map, and you can see why historians like Kirsten Seaver go looking for that person who benefitted from its appearance: for without a Beneficiary, you haven’t really got a hoax. Seaver proposed that the VM was forged by an Austrian called Josef Fischer (1858-1944) after about 1923, for a rather tortuous (dare I say “Jesuitical“?) reason involving teasing unknown Nazi scholars. However, introducing Nazis (particularly without any actual evidence) is normally a sign that you’ve lost the argument: so it’s easy to understand why Seaver’s otherwise intensely detailed research has failed to please. What everyone does now agree is that it is an astonishingly clever object, whichever century (or centuries) it was from.

And what of the Voynich Manuscript? While some unknown person did benefit (to the tune of 600 ducats) from its first half-documented appearance in Prague, you’d have to imagine really hard (to the point of hallucination) that they actually created it as well – the VMs has a complex, multi-layered codicology that speaks of a busy 15th century existence in the hands of multiple owners, a whole century before Rudolf II’s collecting heyday. Oh, and the other problem with seeing the VMs as a hoax is that it is doesn’t claim to unravel a Mystery – it is itself the Mystery. Unless you can imagine something even more mysterious?

“Mappamundi” novel, cover announced…

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Cover for Christopher Harris\' forthcoming Voynich-themed novel \I’ve had a nice email from Chris Harris, whose upcoming Voynich Manuscript-themed novel “Mappamundi” (which I mentioned here in June) is due for publication on 29th January 2009. Published by Dedalus, it’s a non-Byzantine sequel to his earlier Byzantine trilogy (if that makes sense): a teeny weeny version of the cover is on the right here.

Which reminds me… an article at the back of this month’s History Today (yes, that issue) made a rather striking claim: that historical fiction steps in to fill the gap left by historians, who have become unable to answer the basic question “What happened?” because they are so hogtied by postmodern notions of relative truth. Hmmm… as with all great lies, there’s a kernel of truth in there. My own take is that there are now so many types of history – archival, social, urban, intellectual, cultural, moral, religious, Marxist, propagandist, technological, political, codicological, forensic, etc – each with their own types of problematic, enquiry, methodology and even truth, that it can be hard to blend them together to tell a complete story. And while it is true that historical fiction offers the hope of a reconstructed holistic history, so too does the best historical scholarship.

Ultimately, I think that history is like a shattered cup, whose shards offer historians multiple ways of piecing them back together: and that once in a while, with just a little luck, we might by doing so glimpse a hitherto unseen Grail, tentatively reconstructed through our persistence and industry. Perhaps this is the romance of History (whichever subfield of it you happen to subscribe to), where novelists dramatize not just the texture of historical events, but the process of historical discovery too – is the romance in the history, or in the historian?

Voynich miscellany, once again…

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Do you fancy a little personal journal with a front cover loosely inspired by the VMs (the plant at the top of page f18r, to be precise)? If you do, someone called “Black Pepper” has put her design on CafePress… just in case you have $14 to burn. Alternatively, here’s a Voynich Manuscript-themed screensaver from Amaranth Publishing for a mere $2.

And here’s Thomas Maska’s Avallaen font, inspired by Voynichese lettering: he made it for his conlang [constructed language], also called Avallaen, supposedly “spoken by approximately 35 million people on the northern end of Escerna, a massive volcanic continent in the N’ra Teoi (Great North Sea).” I quite like the way the digits are formed from gallows with different numbers of bars. Oh, and don’t forget, ägloinniyüvoih pōvlen üevs erüs.

Onwards to the fine arts: and I’d have liked to show you an image of Danielle Rante’s mixed-media drawing called “Voynich Secret History” here (this won the 2008 Ohio Arts Council Professional Award), but she didn’t return my email. Oh well!

And there was a 2005 piece similarly called “Voynich Secret History” (though this was a 4-5 minute film by artist Katherine Parker). Her interests include:” the redemption of kitsch, archetypes, and Märchen (German fairytales)“. Yes, I’d say most of the stuff that’s written on the VMs does read like almost-unredeemably-kitsch German fairytales, so perhaps she’s touching on a deeper truth here. 🙂  Her description of the film is that “Dormant plants, winter snow, steam, and drawings based on the Voynich Manuscript are metaphors for latent, hidden and lost knowledge“. All of which sounds rather pleasant, & perhaps one day I’ll see that too…

Enjoy! 🙂

John Dee events in 2008…

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Word just in from my friend Peter Nockolds, concerning some John Dee Anniversary events…

Magus John Dee died 400 years ago, either this year or next, and to mark this there are a series of events in Mortlake Parish Church where he was buried (although the grave isn’t marked). These begin with a talk tomorrow evening, Tuesday 23rd, at 8 by Benjamin Woolley. Author of ‘The Queen’s Conjourer, the Art and Magic of Dr Dee’. The talk is entitled ‘Cosmos in a Cottage’, and is an attempt to reconstruct something [like] Dee’s house in Mortlake, drawing on a variety of sources.  […]

The Church, St Mary the Virgin, is in Mortlake High Street, about five minutes walk from Mortlake Station (Network South East) and is on the 209 bus route from Hammersmith. Admission is £7 with proceeds to the Mortlake Tower Appeal

And according to http://www.wherecanwego.com/Search/ViewEvent.aspx?e=215740 , there are three more Dee-themed lectures on the Tuesdays following:-

  • Sept 30th – Elizabeth Callingham Garton – The man who invented the British Empire
  • Oct 7th – Robin Cousins – In the Footsteps of John Dee
  • Oct 14th – Nicholas Dakin – The Confidential Life of Doctor Dee

“Tickets are £7 or £25 for 4 in advance – ring Anne Reeves 020 8876 6616”

Review of “The Source”…

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The view you take of the Voynich Manuscript’s text inevitably affects the view you take of its drawings: though you could construct scenarios where (for example) someone sane did all the writing and someone mad added all the pictures, they really wouldn’t be very likely. And so there are actually only three broad classes of Voynich theory that have attracted attention over the years:-

  1. It’s written in an unknown / synthetic language –> the pictures are representational
  2. It’s written in cipher or private shorthand –> the pictures are obscured / encrypted
  3. It’s meaningless / hoaxed nonsense –> the pictures are meaningless / nonsensical

\In “The Source”, bestselling novelist Michael Cordy takes option 1 as his starting point, and weaves a pacy yarn around the amazing South American secrets hidden in the text by a Jesuit missionary / priest called “Father Orlando Falcon”, holding a bizarre redemptive power which the Vatican itself feels threatened by, yet which might be able to save the lives of the atheist geologist hero’s decipherer wife and their unborn child, yada yada yada. But enough of the PR-speak.

By all rights, I should hate this book: right from the start, it pits the Superior General of the Society of Jesus (basically the uber-Jesuit) and his homicidal killer half-brother against a rationalist oil scientist and a not-very-convincing linguistics student, in a kind of 1940s cartoon propaganda take on Religion vs Science. And as regular blog readers will know, my heart normally sinks a mile whenever evil Jesuits’ crooked noses and gaunt faces pop up in a novel (it was a cliche 350 years ago, and even Dan Brown was smart enough to try to reinvent it as Opus Dei). And here we also have an added Big Oil vs Gaia wrestling bout awkwardly threaded through the narrative.

You can doubtless see where this is going: even though Michael Cordy’s craft has improved dramatically since his 1997 debut novel “The Messiah Code” (which I reviewed here), his Big Themes construction and Top Trumps who-will-win-as-if-you-don’t-already-know characterization really don’t work for me. And yet “The Source” still manages to comprise, despite its superabundance of traditionalist book-for-the-beach tropes, as good an introduction to the mystery of the VMs as anything out there. (The only bit of wishful thinking is the “Voynich Week” mini-conference at the Beinecke – as if!)

And finally: I think there is a lesson in there for Voynich theorists, too: if you take an Option 1 approach and try to read the drawings in the balneological (‘water’) section too literally, the nymphs will tie you in knots.

Review of “The Six Unsolved Ciphers”…

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…or, in all its prolixitous glory, “The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World’s Greatest Cryptographers“, by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as “Can You Crack the Enigma Code?” in 2006.

You’d have thought I’d be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, Elgar’s “Dorabella” cipher, the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture, the Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough, and the “Zodiac Killer” ciphers, all things that a Cipher Mysteries blogger ought to get excited about. But there was something oddly disconsonant about it all for me: and working out quite why proved quite difficult…

For a start, if I were compiling a top six list of uncracked historical ciphers, only the Voynich Manuscript and the Beale Papers would have made the cut from Belfield’s set – I don’t think anyone out there could (unless they happened to have cracked either of the two) sensibly nitpick about these being included.

Yet as far the other four go, it’s not nearly so clear. I’ve always thought that the Dorabella cipher was a minor jeu d’esprit on Elgar’s part in a note to a dear friend, and most likely to be something like an enciphered tune. The Kryptos sculpture was intended to bamboozle the CIA and NSA’s crypto squads: and though it relies on classical cryptographic techniques, there’s something a bit too self-consciously knowing about it (its appropriation by The Da Vinci Code cover doesn’t help in this regard). And while the Shugborough Shepherd’s Monument (Belfield’s best chapter by far) indeed has hidden writing, placing its ten brief letters into the category of cipher or code is perhaps a bit strong.

Finally: the Zodiac Killer ciphers, which I know have occupied my old friend Glen Claston in the past, forms just about the only borderline case: its place in the top six is arguable (and it has a good procedural police yarn accompanying it), so I’d kind of grudgingly accept that (at gunpoint, if you will). Regardless, I’d still want to place the Codex Seraphinianus above it, for example.

Belfield’s book reminds me a lot of Kennedy & Churchill’s book on the Voynich Manuscript: even though it is a good, solid, journalistic take on some intriguing cipher stories, I’m not convinced by the choice of the six, and in only one (the Shugborough Shepherd’s Monument) do I think Belfield really gets under the skin of the subject matter. While he musters a lot of interest in the whole subject, it rarely amounts to what you might call passion: and that is really what this kind of mystery-themed book needs to enliven its basically dry subject matter.

It’s hard to fault it as an introduction to six interesting unbroken historical codes and ciphers (it does indeed cover exactly what it says on the tin), and perhaps I’m unfair to judge it against the kind of quality bar I try to apply to my own writing: but try as I may, I can’t quite bring myself to recommend it over (for example) Simon Singh’s “The Code Book” (for all its faults!) as a readable introduction to historical cryptography.

PS: my personal “top six” unsolved historical codes/ciphers would be:-

  1. The Voynich Manuscript (the granddaddy of them all)
  2. The Beale Papers (might be a fake, but it’s a great story)
  3. The Rohonc Codex (too little known, but a fascinating object all the same)
  4. John Dee’s “Enochian” texts (in fact, everything written by John Dee)
  5. William Shakespeare’s work (there’s a massive literature on this, why ignore it?)
  6. Bellaso’s ciphers (but more on this in a later post…)

Feel free to agree or disagree! 😉

Review of “On Tycho’s Island”…

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People don’t generally know a lot about Tycho Brahe, which is a shame. In most accounts of the history of astronomy, his bright star tends to get eclipsed by the twin 17th century supernovae of Kepler and Galileo. But scratch the surface of the story, and it’s really not that simple…

Brahe was a Danish nobleman with a singleminded desire – to understand why the motions of the planets in the heavens failed to match what the best astronomical tables (based both on Ptolemaic and Copernican systems) predicted. Somehow, he engineered an arrangement by which King Frederick II granted him the island of Hven to pursue his astronomical studies for the glory of Denmark: yet what Brahe set up there was as much a social institution (like a postgraduate research community) as a technical observatory – to get the job done, he needed people just as much as equipment.

In fact, Tycho tried to get all the brightest young astronomers of the time to work on his island (for peanuts, it has to be said, but that’s research for you), and to correspond with everyone who was anyone in astronomy. Even so, things didn’t always work out as planned, most notably with Ursus (though I believe the question of whether Ursus was as big a scoundrel and weasel as Brahe tried to make out is far more open than most historians credit).

Methodologically, Brahe’s biographers and historians have tended to focus on the man and his writings: yet until recently none specifically focused on his ever-changing familia (family) of research assistants that passed through Hven. John Robert Christanson’s book “On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants 1570-1601” (Cambridge University Press, 2000) changed all that: what started out (quite literally) as Christianson’s shoe-box of notecards to pull together the numerous fragmentary mentions of Brahe’s coworkers slowly grew into a database, and then (25 years on) into the present book.

But there’s a problem: however interested you are in the subject, after a while the database-like origins of the book – in the infinitessimal ebbs and flows of the set of assistants – start to grate on the reader. And let’s face it, what Brahe was running was as much a kind of “observation factory” as anything else, turning (taking a Marxist-Leninist spin) a input stream of idealistic researchers into a output stream of data. After around 150 pages of on-island minutiae, you start to wonder: where is this all going? How much more can I take?

And then on page 171, Christianson’s book explodes in a direction you simply won’t (unless you’re extraordinarily well-read on Brahe’s life) have seen coming. Brahe tries to marry off his eldest morganatic daughter (“morganatic” means that when a nobleman marries a commoner, his children won’t inherit his nobility or money) to Gellius Sascerides, a clever (but church-mouse poor) member of his familia. And then everything – and I mean everything – starts to go wrong for Brahe (and at some speed), to the point that he ends up dismantling his beloved observatory and fleeing the country. Thanks to his Europe-wide network of contacts (particularly Tadeas Hajek), he finally ended up working for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague (though only briefly) – but even so, Brahe’s swings in fortune are really quite staggering.

It’s only once you reach the end of the book that you can appreciate what happened in terms of his two familiae. Given that neither his morganatic children nor his set of researchers and coworkers seemed likely to him to give him the continuing legacy he desired, what was Brahe to do? He tried to finesse a best-of-both-worlds scenario, but the attempted union of his morganatic family and his (almost adoptive) intellectual family was simply never going to work within his societal context. It is only really a proper appreciation for his constellation of assistants on Hven that gives his whole story poignancy.

Writing teachers often say that the beginning of a story is rarely the best place to start: and so many writers would start “Brahe: The Novel” with the attempted negotiations for the wedding (and bring in all the preceding history in flashbacks etc), because this is where the wedding train (sorry!) starts to come off the rails – and where oh-so-controlling Brahe begins to lose the plot. Yet what Christianson has produced is rather more valuable than a novel: a rich, dense, vividly-detailed historical stage upon which the reader can imagine and construct their own dramas.

Overall verdict: Highly Recommended (but don’t give up in the middle!)