Lynn Thorndike’s papers…

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Somehow, I think it was inevitable that a determinedly analytical mind like Lynn Thorndike‘s would have left a well-organized archival record: and so it was that he and his successors left his extensive collection of papers to the University of Columbia, the last place he worked as a History Professor. The archival finding aid went online here only in 2004, so it seems likely that few historians have thought of using it.

All the same, it still comes as a bit of a surprise to find out that there are 60 linear feet of records in this archive (“ca. 30,000 items in 124 boxes and 1 Flatbox; some in Mapcase“). As well as containing the obvious stuff such as correspondence and numerous card files, this also includes “76 volumes of personal diaries, 1902-1963“.

Thorndike’s epic quest to examine, read and understand medieval scientific texts was on a scale few have attempted before or since: his multi-volume “History of Magic & Experimental Science” provides a richly textured background that I think anyone seriously looking at early modern proto-scientific mysteries (such as the Voynich Manuscript, naturally) should have gone through. And even so, how much more might there be languishing in his papers – unseen, unread, unknown to us all?

The Voynich Manuscript for real people…

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It’s a typical writer’s puzzle: when something you read (or write) really sucks, but an even half-satisfactory alternative is nowhere to be found. That’s basically how I feel about almost everything that’s been written about the VMs: even though it’s an amazing mystery, that also somehow highlights all the dangerous sides of knowledge, accounts always amble off in the same kind of leadenly pedestrian way. For example, I spent ages tweaking and polishing the first sentence of “The Curse”:

“In 1912, when the ancient Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome was running short of funds, its managers decided to sell off some of its rare books.“

Just like the (abysmal) VMs Wikipedia entry, the sterile factuality and precision here can’t be faulted: but it’s aiming for the head, not the heart. But mysteries have a certain kind of tactile, claustrophobic presence to them: they surround you, taunt you, tighten your chest as you sense an approaching breakthrough. You think you’re hunting the target, when in fact all the clues are hunting you – the reader is the target.

In short, even though everything surrounding the Voynich Manuscript is a mystery, why do people persist in writing about it as if they are writing a description for a car auction – its size, shape, page-count, first historical mention, list of owners, number of pictures, valves, bhp, lalala? Capturing the raw factuality of a mystery in this way achieves little or nothing.

When I went to the Beinecke, I tried to read the texture of its pages with my fingers (to tell the hair side from the grain side): I smelt its cover and pages (just in case I could pick up any hint or note of the animal from which the vellum was made): I looked at its surface under a magnifying glass: I looked at special features through narrow-band optical filters, which I tilted to try to adjust the wavelength. I tried to stretch my range of perceptions of it to the point where something unusual might just pop out.

But most of all, I tried to imagine myself into the position of someone physically writing it: how the act of writing and state of mind mixed together, what was going on, what they were thinking of, how it all worked. And that was yet harder still.

At supper this evening, I told my son that the biggest mystery in the world is what other people are thinking: and really, that is perhaps at the heart of why the Voynich Manuscript is the biggest mystery ever – because we still cannot reconstruct what its author was thinking. It is this absence of rapport that opens up the possibility for mad, bad, and bizarre theories: because we can project onto the manuscript whatever feelings and thoughts we like.

Yet when authors write fiction, this empathy is typically where they start: working out how to create characters with whom the readers will be able to sustain some kind of reading relationship over the course of 200+ pages. Take that basic connection away, and you can end up with a writer’s folly, an artificial construction to which the narrative or flow is awkwardly pegged.

So how would I start the book, if I were writing it right now? Perhaps with Averlino at his point of death – the moment when his strange book was finally set free.

“What master of Destiny was he, when the Fates had carried him back to this holy place he despised so: and what kind of master of Nature, when he could see his death fast approaching and yet could do nothing?“

You may not like it: but is that just because you’ve become too used to reading Wikipedia?

John Matthews Manly’s papers…

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One of the major figures in the early 20th century history of the Voynich Manuscript was John Matthews Manly, the man who definitively debunked Newbold’s strange micrographic cipher claims. During the First World War, Manly worked in the US Military Intelligence Division, and left in 1919 having attained the rank of Major. After that, he put most of his time at the University of Chicago into researching Chaucer, before dying in 1940.

Interestingly, Manly’s papers are held by the University of Chicago: there’s even an online guide to them, which lists a whole set of Voynich & non-Army cryptographic folders to look at, particularly in Boxes 4 and 5. One day, if I happen to get the opportunity to spend a day in Chicago, I’d love to go through these: Manly was a smart guy, so it would be fascinating to find out what was going through his mind (however indirectly).

Box: 4
Folder: 19 – Table of Latin Syllables
Folder: 20-21 – Photographs of Voynich Ms
Folder: 22 – “Key to the Library” (JMM’s?)

Box: 5
Folder: 1 – Worksheets
Folder: 2 – Photographs of Mss (Including Français 24306, incomplete) and of one printed label
Folder: 3 – Three working notebooks, labelled “Bacon Cipher”
Folder: 4 – Notes on code for article; other notes on Sloane 830 [“Written in the years 1575-6, by a person whose initials appear to be M.A.B.”, according to levity.com] and 414 [two collections of “chymical receipts”]
Folder: 5 – Worksheets on related ciphers: “Galen’s Anatomy” [?] and “Kazwini” [presumably the 13th century Persian astronomical writer Al Kazwini]
Folder: 6 – Articles on the Voynich Roger Bacon Ms
Folder: 7-8 – Notes: ciphers in other Mss; other notes on printed sources
Folder: 9 – Notes on alchemical Mss, etc.
Folder: 10 – Notes for Bacon Cipher; “Key to Aggas”
Folder: 11 – Notes on texts in cryptography
Folder: 12 – Miscellaneous notes and worksheets
Folder: 13 – Bibliographies
Folder: 14 – Photostats of Mss: John Dee (Sloane 3188, 3189, 2599): unidentified
Folder: 15 – Notes on Vatican Latin Ms 3102 [Here’s the Jordanus page on this ms, Manly reproduced f27r in his article, while Newbold’s book reproduced f27r and f27v opposite p.148 and p.150]
Folder: 16 – “Notes on an Inquiry into the Validity of the Baconian Bi-Literal Cypher for the Interpretation of Certain Writings Claimed for Francis Bacon”
Folder: 17 – Comments on “Sixty Drops of Laudanum,” by E.A. Poe
Folder: 18-19 – “The Bi-formed Alphabet Classifier” of the Riverbank Laboratories
Folder: 20 – Notes on Shakespeare/Bacon cipher

Box: 11
Folder: 9 “Roger Bacon and the Voynich Ms” by JMM, reprint [first page is here on JSTOR]

Pietro Andrea Mattioli…

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Google only finds about ten pages where Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) is linked with the Voynich Manuscript. Here’s a short research note to fill that gap…

If you look at Mattioli’s CV, you’ll see plenty of echoes with other people linked to the VMs. Though a renowned herbal compiler & writer in his spare time, he was also a physician to the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand II and to Emperor Maximilian II (who was, of course, Rudolph II’s father), which is broadly similar to both Hajek and Sinapius.

Brumbaugh once compared Mattioli’s famous 1544 herbal (the one that Hajek and Handsch translated in 1562/1563) with the VMs’ herbal drawings, and concluded that the two had (I think) at most one half of one plant in common. And so it seems relatively certain there is no connection: neither one is derived from the other, nor do both emanate from a common source.

Yet even though Rene Zandbergen avers demurs in this, I am quite certain (from closely examining it at the Beinecke) that the first word of the faded marginalia at the top of f17r has been emended from “melhor” to read “mattioli“. That is, a later owner (who was probably unable to read Occitan and French) misinterpreted the word as a garbled reference to Mattioli, and decided to correct it on the page.

Marcelo Dos Santos’ page on f17r (in Spanish) mentions much of this. He also mentions Sean Palmer’s assertion that the waterstain on f17r must have happened after the f17r marginalia were added, but before the f116v ‘michitonese’ marginalia: but no, sorry, I don’t accept that idea at all. If you look at the following pages, you can see where the waterstain fades away: it’s a localised piece of damage.

Marcelo also pulls down my suggested link with fennel for the picture on f17r (the one with a pair of “eyes” in the roots): yet he seems not to grasp that there the herbal literature of the late Middle Ages / Renaissance repeatedly connects fennel with eyes – finnochio / occhio in Italian, but similarly in Occitan and other languages. Oh well.

Review of "The Book Nobody Read"…

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In his 1959 book “The Sleepwalkers”, Arthur Koestler painted a rather damning picture of Renaissance European astronomers and scientists, where the only person not sleepwalking was Kepler. As part of the process of tarring everyone else with the same soporific brush, Koestler derided Copernicus’ famous “De Revolutionibus” as “The Book Nobody Read“.

It’s true that only a small proportion of “De Revolutionibus” is particularly interesting, with the remainder filled with bone-dry technical astronomical gubbins. But people manifestly did read it, often adding their comments (thoughts, possible errors in the text, etc) in the margins. And what might you learn about that community of readers by examining the marginalia in every extant copy?

More than 30 years ago, Owen Gingerich, one of the leading historians of astronomy, took up this challenge, and in so doing compiled an international census of all the first and second edition copies of Copernicus’ book. “The Book Nobody Read” is Gingerich’s personal memoir of his extraordinary (if obsessive) historiographical / bibliomanic quest to rebut Koestler’s dismissive epithet. Oh: and of course, it turns out that lots of people did read De Revolutionibus.

Throughout the memoir, Gingerich’s perpetually boyish enthusiasm for this prolonged pursuit shines through: yet even an ardent astro-aficionado with a codicological bent (such as, errrrm, me) must silently shudder at the extreme degree to which this sheer marginality was doggedly followed.

Probably the best sections of the book are the legal bits, where FBI personnel step into the frame, invariably on the trail (thanks to Gingerich’s book measurements and lists of missing or altered pages) of various purloined copies of De Revolutionibus, along with the corresponding courtroom sequences. There are also some choice footnotes which connoisseurs of that genre will enjoy, particularly the one on p.187 about Kepler’s apparent seven-and-a-half month gestation (he was sure he was conceived on his parents’ wedding night!)

As a personal account, it’s only superficially autobiographical: while the reader does build up an idea of the development of Copernican scholarship over the three decades covered, and a few hints at an ongoing academic spat with fellow historian Ed Rosen, Gingerich himself is largely backgrounded by the tidal wave of historiographical facts he feels compelled to share.

Yet at its heart, the book has an internal paradox: that while its structure is not unlike a polite, slightly clunky, pre-Cold War 1950s time-capsule, the thinking inside it has an tight, inclusive, late 1990s academic sensibility. Ultimately, I wanted to know whether this was a portrait of the Census, or a portrait of Gingerich himself: but it is never really clear which.

I really enjoyed “The Book Nobody Read” (and if you’re a regular Voynich News reader, you’d probably enjoy its ‘book detective’ sleuthing just as much as I did): it reads well and is engaging throughout, so all credit to its author. Yet it takes a certain type of personality to bare not just your activities in a book, but your soul as well: and the former dominates the latter here. Ultimately, it’s a biography of the Census, not of Gingerich: as a result, I think some readers may well come away from this bookish feast slightly hungry, which is a shame.

"Voynich Manuscript": two words, two lies?

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While writing my MBA dissertation a few years ago, I spun off a short paper called “Justified True Belief: Three Words, Three Lies?“, where the abstract explained its title:-

Cornelius Castoriadis once famously described the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as “four words, four lies”: here, I examine each of the three words of “justified true belief” in turn to see if that too might be based on a fatally flawed discourse. In fact, “three lies” turns out to be a little strong – but the evidence strongly points to “two-and-a-half lies”. We deserve better than this!

My guess is that Castoriadis, for all his pithiness, was ripping off Voltaire, who in 1756 wrote:

This agglomeration which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

So now, by applying the same pattern to the Voynich Manuscript, I’m extending the chain of ripping yet further. Just so you know!

What’s in a name? Wilfrid Voynich never called it “The Voynich Manuscript”: right from the start, he called it “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”. Which was a bit of a shame, given that it originally almost certainly had nothing to do with Roger Bacon.

However, because Voynich desperately wanted it to contain Bacon’s encrypted secrets, he was convinced it had to be medieval. It was in this context that he referred to it as a “manuscript”, because manuscripts are technically defined as being handwritten documents that predate the start of printing, which means 1450 or so. And so you can see that the word “Manuscript” in “Voynich Manuscript” presupposes a medieval document, or else it would have to be called “an early modern handwritten document” (which, for all its precision, is not quite so punchy). And worse, the range of dates it could sensibly have been made goes over this 1450 mark, so we have no real certainty to work from here.

As for “Voynich”: in one sense it should be “Wojnicz”, the book dealer’s surname before he ended up in London. But we sophisticated moderns should perhaps more sensibly name it after the Jesuit Villa Mondragone (where Wilfrid Voynich found it), or Johannes Marcus Marci (who inherited it and whose letter to Kircher travelled with it all the way to New Haven), or George Baresch (arguably the first obsessive Voynich researcher to be documented), or Sinapius / Jacobus de Tepenecz (whose erased signature still faintly remains on the first page), or even Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (who was said to have paid well for it).

All of this still rather panders to an implied need for naming, as if by giving it a name it somehow helps us understand its origins (it doesn’t, can’t, and won’t). It’s an itch we don’t actually need to scratch: we need to learn to be more comfortable about remaining in a state of uncertainty.

My dissertation was all about knowledge and uncertainty: the work I’ve done since then points to my own three-word definition for knowledge – “hopefully useful lies“. Calling this enigmatic object the “Voynich Manuscript” is indeed “two words, two lies” – but as long as we never forget that they are both lies, its name is a most useful tool.

More on Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku…

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I recently posted about Rudolf’s physician before Jacobus de Tepenecz [Sinapius], Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku: and wondered aloud whether he might have bought / owned / sold / annotated the Voynich Manuscript. It’s a good question: the f17r marginalia seems to have been emended to read “mattioli…” (I believe it originally began “melhor”), and Hájek famously translated Mattioli’s Herbal.

The first step would be to find some of Hájek’s handwriting: with the help of Jan Hurych, I soon found the Manuscriptorium, which is a kind of uber-catalogue of Czech manuscripts. Searching for Hájku yielded 14 unique references, most of which are “Minucý a Pranostika” (i.e. tables and weather predictions) from different years, and which seem likely to be small printed pamphlets (and so probably of no practical use to us here).

However, there are four other documents which might have his handwriting (listed below, each with repository and shelfmark, if anyone happens to be in Prague or Zwickau and wants a challenge, as well as Jan’s brief translation of the start of the title). I’ve asked the manuscript librarians whether Hájek himself is thought to have written any/all of these, and hopefully will get an answer relatively soon…

  • Královská kanonie premonstrátů na Strahově, Praha – Kodex Dobřenského, opus 344.
    1574 “Tabule dlauhosti Dne…” – The table of day’s and night’s lengths
  • Národní knihovna České republiky – 54 S 91 neúpl.
    1560 “Wayklad Proroctwij …” – Explanation of Turkish prophecy…
  • Knihovna národního muzea v Praze – 28 E 1O
    1556 “Wypsanij s Wyznamenánijm gedné y druhé Kométy” – The description and explanation of both comets…
  • Zwickau Ratschulbibliothek – 4, 10, 39, přív.
    1580 “O některých předesslých znamenjch Nebeských” – About some heavenly signs in the past . . .

As a nice coincidence, I’m in the middle of reading Owen Gingerich’s delightful bibliophilic road-trip book “The Book Nobody Read” and who should pop up on p.172 and p.178 but “Thaddeus Hagecius” (i.e. “Tadeáš Hájek” in Latin). According to a marginal note by Johannes Praetorius in the back of the Beinecke Library’s copy of Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus” (the historiographic subject of Gingerich’s book), Paul Wittich had passed a “terse list of three errors” in the book on to Hájek. The same list of errors appears in a copy in Debrecen, and in a copy in Edinburgh.

And so Gingerich throws the idea that this particular Edinburgh copy may perhaps have been owned by Hájek up in the air. But all the same, it’s only a speculation. Still, I’ll ask him if he ever went looking for marginal handwriting by Hájek, you never know…

…but now I’ve thought of searching Google for “Thaddeus Hagecius” (*d’oh!*), I find that there is a pile of correspondence between Tycho Brahe and Hájek (and a good-sized 2002 article on it here).

And according to this Czech page, the Prague-based Society for the History of Sciences (“DVT” = dějiny věd a techniky) published in 2000 “the first volume of the Czech monographic series Works on History of Technique and Natural Sciences dedicated to significant Renaissance scholar Thaddeus Hagecius (Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku)” (it was the 500th anniversary of his death that year). It seems to be called “Práce z dějin technika a přírodních věd 1“, Praha 2000, 180 str: it’s not immediately obvious how you’d buy a copy, though… (I’ll ask Jan Hurych).

And there’s also a 2004 article about his astronomy in this German book.

That’s often the way with research: find just the right key, and zero research leads suddenly turns into ten…

Review of "The Dumas Club"…

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If (like me) you enjoyed Roman Polanski’s film “The Ninth Gate” (I happened to see it in a hotel room in New Haven, giving it a particular resonance for me) which I mentioned recently, you might think about reading the novel from which it sprang, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “The Dumas Club”.

Its main protagonist, Lucas Corso, gets described early on as a “book detective”: but he is closer to the romantic archetype of a charmingly ruthless European antiquarian book-hunter for which Wilfrid Voynich and Hans Kraus both felt nostalgic. Whenever short-sighted, boyish-looking Corso takes off his glasses and puts on his “innocent rabbit” face, everyone seems to give him what he wants: perhaps Wilfrid Voynich used much the same kind of trick, who knows?

But it’s not simply a cherchez-la-livre romance: there are two stories intertwined, one concerning various Spanish book-dealers’ passions for Alexander Dumas’ pulpy (but vastly popular) bestsellers such as “The Three Musketeers”; and the other about the three remaining copies of a mysterious 17th century printed book for summoning the Devil, written in heavily abbreviated/coded Latin and with nine Tarot-like drawings, and whose printer (Aristide Torchia) was supposedly burned at the stake for creating it.

Structurally, this reminds me a lot of the TV show “CSI” (the proper Las Vegas one), which typically fills its hour-long slot by telling two forensic detective stories (each roughly half-hour long), and leaving it as a point of suspense whether the two strands are connected or not. Lucas Corso struggles gamely to see the link, but ultimately none materialises in the way that he expects. Despite the reader’s (and Corso’s) sense of a buzzing conspiratorial coherency in the early few chapters, the book actually ends up more like two intertwined extended short stories (one horror, one literary) than a single majestic novel, which is a shame.

For the film adaptation, Polanski simply ditched the whole Dumas connection, and instead concentrated on the “Book of Nine Gates” half of the book – essentially, whereas he optioned “The Dumas Club”, he actually filmed “The Non-Dumas Club”.

Yet the first hundred pages are simply brilliant, inspiring, edgy, like peering anxiously through Montecristo cigar fug to make out the looming shape of an unknown menace. But then Perez-Reverte (quite literally) loses the plot: the writing disintegrates into a mess of intertextuality and clunky self-referentiality, with the novelist having Corso continually feel as if he is a character in a serial novel – essentially, in a remake of a Dumas novel. Whether that’s true or not, having it rammed down my, errrm, eyes so many times completely broke the spell.

One glaringly missed opportunity throughout is the aspect of whether the unidentified young girl (who takes the name “Irene Adler” from a Sherlock Holmes novel) actually exists, or is merely some kind of strange hallucinatory being, conjured up by Corso himself: a kind of “Dumas Club” meets “Fight Club”, if you like. Kudos to Polanski for picking up this angle more strongly in his film. Perhaps she had to physically exist in the book as a result of Perez-Reverte’s (I think wrong) decision to have to have one of the characters (Boris Balkan) as the storyteller. And so in the book, Irene’s ambiguity centres not on whether or not she exists outside Corso’ mind, but on whether for him she acts as a force for good or evil – an angel, succubus or demon.

All in all, I have to say that I really wish Perez-Reverte had found sufficient writing courage to take the horror through to its logical conclusion, rather than pull up short at the final hurdle. Though Polanski’s literary take on the novel was (perhaps necessarily) quite superficial, his filmic instinct to raise the stakes yet higher than the book worked fabulously well.

For the full literary effect, I’d recommend reading “The Three Musketeers” first, then “Twenty Years After”, then “The Dumas Club”, and then watching “The Ninth Gate” late at night, with the curtains drawn, and a bottle of Bols gin by your side. Enjoy!

Incidentally, looking at the book with my Voynich research hat on, it was nice to see Perez-Reverte pick up on things like “The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient… Gervase of Tilbury and Gerson both mentioned it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries” (p.202), and to have Torchia trawling around Prague for the cabalistic secrets of an unknown brotherhood (p.203). The uber-convoluted magic circle in the final chapter (p.312) is quite fun, too.

Of the three magic circles in the Voynich Manuscript, it is interesting that both sun and moon ones depict people holding bottles: here’s the left man from the “hidden moon” magic circle – the “S” in his face probably denotes “Septentrio” (i.e. North). I’ll write more about these another day: here’s a link to an earlier post I made on William Kiesel’s lecture at Treadwell’s. Suffice it to say that this picture might simply refer to water and hyssop, both used to purify magic circles for millennia… unless you know better?

Voynich Documentary (for 2010)…

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Well, you can’t say I’m not looking ahead. News reaches my ears of a lavish Voynich documentary being made by the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) “Universum” Natural History Unit and Pro Omnia Film & Video Promotion GmbH, in association with “ARTE, ZDF and the Smithsonian Network“.

Now we’ve got past the broadcasting acronym jungle, what is its angle? It’s still early days, but its producers Klaus Steindl and Andreas Sulzer seem already to have focused on the VMs’ Bohemian history as being worthy of study: we’ll just have to wait and see what their research harvests…

Well-known Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen is helping out in some way (hopefully they’ll remember to listen to him, particularly as Voynich research is more about avoiding problems than solving them), and they promise:

“Now analysing the illustrations will give a new angle to decoding the manuscript. Wrapped around the text on almost every page there are drawings of plants, star constellations of the zodiac, bathing female figrues and structures remniscent of piping systems and microscopic views. Do these patterns hold the key? For this documentary a team of scientists takes a new interdisciplinary approach to crack the Voynich code – including the first forensic examination of the book itself.“

Somehow, I get the feeling that they haven’t yet read my book – oh, well. 🙁 But let them continue…

“A recently discovered signature is a new lead: It identifies the early 17th century scholar Jakub de Tepenec – an alchemist in attendance on Habsburg emperor Rudolph II. How was he connected to the unknown author? Did he possess some kind of secret knowledge about alchemy, magic plants and the fabled fountain of youth he tried to hide from the inquisition?“

OK, OK, even though these are supposed to be rhetorical questions, you’d have to say that “only through ownership” and “no” are both pretty good answers. And “recently” isn’t usually used to mean “85 years ago”, but I guess they’re looking at the big picture here. Regardless, there is an incredible wealth of information from this fascinating period in the numerous Czech archives, so I wish them all the best in their search for whatever it is they’re looking for.

Yet as Charles Hope cautions, archival research is best approached more as an exercise in hopeful serendipity than in one of historical problem-solving: as my friend Sergio Toresella said, “In my life I went twice in an Archivio and I haven’t got a spider in a hole (as we say in Italian).” You get the idea.

Me, I think I’ll stick to the Quattrocento. 😉

Become A Voynich Manuscript Expert In Just 5 Minutes…

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Would having “Expert on the Voynich Manuscript” on your CV significantly raise your perceived intellectuality (i.e. an extra ten grand per year on your salary)? It would? Then read on, and I’ll reveal the secret two-stage process that They don’t want you to find out…

Stage One. You start out by pretending to be a Voynich expert. All you have to know is:

(a) That the two jargon terms for the Voynich Manuscript are “VMs” (because “Ms” or “MS” is short for “manuscript”) and “Beinecke MS 408” (because it’s 408th in the Beinecke Library’s collection of manuscripts);
(b) That the VMs lives at Yale University in New Haven (because that’s what the Beinecke Library is part of); and
(c) That the VMs is a mysterious old handwritten book that nobody can read. Not even me!

If you really want, you can also read the Wikipedia VMs page: but apart from the fact that the Voynich Manuscript was [re]discovered in Italy in 1912 by dodgy book dealer Wilfrid Voynich (hence its name), feel free to basically skip the rest.

Incidentally, if you’re ever asked about anyone who has written about the VMs (Newbold, Brumbaugh, Terence McKenna, anyone really), any real Voynich expert would nod sympathetically and say “Poor old X – if only they had known what we know now“. Of course, this is a big fat lie, because we still know basically sod all about the VMs.

Stage Two. You continue by actually becoming a Voynich expert. This is also easy, as long as you can get a working grasp of the following basic statements:-

  • The VMs was probably made by a right-handed European between 1250 and 1640.
    If post-1622, explain how Jacobus de Tepenecz’s signature got on the front
    If post-1500, explain how 15th century quire numbers got on it
    If pre-1450, explain how Leonardo-style hatching ended up in some of the drawings
  • If the VMs is a language, note that its words don’t function like those in real languages
    If the VMs is a cipher, note that it doesn’t work like any known cipher
    If the VMs is nonsense, note that its letters appears to follow unknown rules
    If the VMs’ plants are botanical, note that most don’t resemble real plants

Now all you have to do is to devise your very own really, really lame signature theory. As long as it amuses you and doesn’t trample on the above dull bullet-points too badly, congratulations – you’re right up there with the big hitters! But how should you construct this new theory?

Actually, it’s quite helpful here to project how you feel about your own work onto how you think the original author(s) felt about the VMs. For example, if you think that your own work is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written solely to convince your employers to pay your wages, then you might try devising your own variant of the basic hoax theory template (which argues that the VMs is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written by [insert name here] solely to convince Emperor Rudolf II to pay a rumoured 600 gold ducats).

But be bold in your theorising! Be creative! Perhaps think of some vaguely Renaissance figure you admire (though Leonardo’s already taken, and he was left-handed anyway, d’oh!) or just happen to remember, preferably someone whose name you can consistently spell correctly. Wafer-thin historical connections to herbal medicine, astrology, astronomy, ciphers and mystery are probably bonuses here. So, Nostradamus would be a good ‘un: Queen Elizabeth I not so good.

But remember, you’re not trying to prove your theory is correct here (for what kind of an idiot would attempt that with such scanty evidence, 500-ish years after the event?) Rather, you’re just staking your claim to the possibility that

no images were found

might have been the author. And the level of proof required to achieve that is, frankly, negligible.

And hey, even if you choose the name with a pin and a biographical dictionary, if it eventually turns out that you are right, think how unbearably smug you’ll be. Possibly for decades!

Finally: however bad projecting your own life onto the VMs’ blank canvas may be as an historical approach (and believe me, it lies somewhere between ‘rubbish‘ and ‘pants‘), it is guaranteed to give you plenty of interestingly ironic things to say about the VMs when you’re asked about it at those hip higher-earner parties you’ll be attending. Oh, and at your book-launch too, naturally. 🙂