A Voynich Manuscript pincer attack on Cancer…

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Every couple of years, I wake up in the middle of the night with an all-new version of The Big Idea – you know, the one that’s finally going to unlock the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets. These unstoppable small-hours plans are normally formed from the soup of things slooshing around in my head, but arranged in a pincer movement attacking the problem on two fronts (i.e. with the idea of trapping it in the middle).

As an aside, it would be a bit of a shock to me if the Voynich Manuscript’s contents turn out to be something wildly unexpected, like a 200-page Swahili ant-summoning ritual, or a book about various weird vegetables that magically cure diabetes (as if anyone would randomly send emails about that, ho hum). :-/ Similarly, I would find it a big surprise if the writing / enciphering system were to turn out to be something we hadn’t collectively considered at length and in detail already, though in some cunning combination that we hadn’t quite grasped.

More generally, I would summarize my overall position as being that, without much doubt, there is a high probability that we are much closer than we think to the Voynichian chequered flag. Even though there are many nuttier-than-a-fruitcake researchers out there (no, I’m not referring to you, dear reader, that would be quite absurd), a huge amount of excellent research has been done, a very large part of which will almost certainly be correct.

And so, swimming against the pessimistic epistemological tide that seems to prevail these days, my overall judgement is that we shouldn’t – very probably – need to know much more than we already do in order to crack through the Voynich’s walls: just a little more may well do the trick. In fact, it may even be that a single solid fact might be enough to open the floodgates. 🙂

This Week’s Big Idea

And so it was that I woke up at 2am a few nights ago with (inevitably) a new Big Idea for cracking the Voynich. And given that my last post was about the diffusion of vernacular Cisiojanus mnemonics, I guess few readers here will be surprised that the main part of the idea was that the 30-odd labels per zodiac sign might well be the syllables of a vernacular Cisiojanus.

Why vernacular? Well, even though Latin Cisiojani had been known since the 12th century or so, vernacular Cisiojani were novel and unknown even in the mid-fifteenth century, and so one might well be a good candidate for something someone compiling a book of secrets might well want to conceal / hide / obfuscate / encrypt (delete as appropriate).

At the same time, I don’t believe that Voynichese can be enciphered or obfuscated Latin, because the way Voynichese seems abbreviated / truncated seems incompatible with Latin (where endings contain so much of the meaning). But if we are instead looking at a linguistically diffused Cisiojanus (such as Italian or French), it’s perhaps a different kettle of (cray)fish.

In parallel, the Voynich zodiac section offers us numerous more interesting clues to work with: for instance, the three crowned nymphs, of which the red-crowned nymph on the Leo page is arguably the earliest.

I’ve previously proposed that one or more of these crowns might be flagging a feast day with personal significance to the author. (For example, for a Florentine such as Antonio Averlino, the most important day in the calendar was the Festa di San Giovanni, the Feast of St John the Baptist.) As such, we might also look at the Voynich zodiac page for Cancer, which also has a crowned nymph, but where the crown looks to have been added later:

I previously mused whether this Cancer crown might have been a fake, designed to draw attention away from the real crown in Leo, but in retrospect this was a bit too harsh and reductive, even if the codicology is sound. Rather, these two crowns (and indeed the crowned nymph in Libra) may well have had different types of significance, added in separate codicological layers for separate reasons. Even if the idea of Antonio Averlino’s connection to Firenze is too strong for some of you, the connection between Italian Cisiojani and St John the Baptist may still be worth pursuing, as we’ll see next.

Nicola De Nisco’s Cisiojanus

In the same way that Jesus’ birthday is celebrated near the Winter Solstice (the shortest day of the year), St John the Baptist’s birthday is celebrated near the Summer Solstice (the longest day). And so it has been widely suggested that both attributed birthdays offered Christian hooks to hang pagan festivals from (and there seems to be no obvious reason in the Bible why John’s birthday should be celebrated then). Hence in many places in Europe (not just Firenze), the Feast of St John the Baptist was a three- or four-day long affair, arguably more akin to a pagan summer festival.

Hence if we suspect that the labelese text in the Voynich’s zodiac section is some kind of vernacular Cisiojanus, there should be plenty of good reasons why we should look for the Feast of St John the Baptist.

For June (which German calendars typically link with Cancer), De Nisco transcribes one 15th century Italian Cisiojanus as follows:

Nic.mar.cel.qui.bo.ni.dat.me.pri.mi.bar.na.an.ton.
Vi.ti.que.mar.pro.ta.si.san.ctus.io.bap.io.do.le.pe.pau

If we add in De Nisco’s corrections in square brackets, plus additional saints’ names courtesy of that most indispensable of publications, The American Ecclsiastical Review (1901), Vol. 24, plus an 1886 French book which gave me St Dorothy of Prussia), we get:

1. Nic — Nicomedes [original document has “Vic”]
2/3. mar.cel — Marcellus / Marcellinus
4. qui — St Quirino, Bishop of Sisak
5/6. bo.ni — Bonifacius
7. dat — ???
8. me — Medardus
9/10. pri.mi — Primus
11/12. bar.na — Barnabas
13/14. an.ton — Sant’Antonio da Padova
15/16. Vi.ti — Vitus
17. que —
18. mar — Marcus et Marcellianus [original document has “Nar”]
19/20/21. pro.ta.si — Protasius (et Gervasius)
22/23/24/25. san.ctus.io.bap — St John the Baptist
26. io — Johannes (et Paulus)
27. do — (if this isn’t St Dorothy of Montau (Prussia), patron saint of the Teutonic Knights (from 1390) whose actual feast day should be 25th June, who was it? Thanks Helmut Winkler for pointing this out.)
28. le — Leo
29. pe — Petrus et Paulus
30. pau — Commemoratio Pauli

The presence of the much-contested St Dorothy of Prussia (a chronically-self-harming widow from near Gdansk, who was adopted in the 20th century by Catholics for Hitler, if you really want to know) gives us a hint not only to the German origins of this particular Cisiojanus, but also an earliest date (1390). Yet the presence of St Quirino perhaps hints at an itinerary via Hungary (the St Quirino with a 4th June feast died in Szombathely, whereas the St Quirino of Rome had an entirely different feast day): while, as De Nisco points out, the presence of the Feast of Sant’Antonio da Padova points very strongly to a Paduan Ciosiojanus adapter.

More importantly, you can see “san.ctus.io.bap” taking up four consecutive syllables in the Cisiojanus, a fragment of (almost-)plain text peeking through the jumble of syllable fragments that make up the rest. Moreover, the next syllable along is also “io” (for the feast of St John and St Paul), which might also be there for the finding.

All of which could offer an excellent crib for the plaintext lurking somewhere beneath Voynich’s labelese: so might we be able to find some echo of this in the Cancer labelese? Even more remarkably, might we be able to line up this phrase’s syllables with the labelese close to the crowned nymph in Cancer?

(As an aside, I hope you can see that this is the kind of connection that not only wakes Voynich researchers up in the night but also stops them from getting back to sleep.)

The “san.ctus.io.bap” Crib

Firstly, I offer up my own EVA transcription of the Voynich Cancer labels:

Outer ring (from 10:00 clockwise, just around from a gap at the left)

ykalairol
olkylaiin
olalsy
or.aiin.am
os.as.sheeen
otosaiin
opoiinoin.al.ain
ypaiin.aloly
oteey.daiin
oeeodaiin
ofsholdy
opoeey.okaiin

Central ring (from 10:00 clockwise)

olfsheoral
or.alkam
ytairal
oeeesaiin
ory
ochey.fydy
ofais.oeeesaly
ykairaiin.airal
okalar
orary
olaiin.olackhy

Inner ring (from 09:00 clockwise)

oletal
opalal
yfary
osaiisal
ytoar.shar
actho
aral

And then I offer up my thoughts: much as this whole idea got between me and my comfortable bed, I just can’t construct a sensible mapping (even with verbose cipher) between these labels and any of the Cisiojani I’ve seen, whether Latin, Italian, French or whatever.

But then again, I can’t sensibly map these labels to just about anything, language-wise: there’s no structure, or grammar, or variational consistency that offers a way of systematically parsing these labels into a system, let alone reading them. Even the characteristically labelese-like “oletal” / “opalal” / “okalar” / “olalsy” words (I’d perhaps also include “osaiisal”, “otosaiin”, “oeeesaiin” and “ytairal” in this group, and maybe even “ykalairol” and “olkylaiin” too) are only a minority of the thirty labels.

All of which isn’t to imply (as Richard SantaColoma is wont to say) that ‘this can only be a hoax’ (*sigh*), but rather that I think we’re missing something really big here, a rational connecting principle that would give these kind of labels a mutual structure and explanatory context that our theoretical crossbow bolts are flying a mile both over and past. For example, what is the way that we see “es” (411) much more than “er” (28), or “ir” (724) much more than “is” (62) really telling us? Why is almost every single instance of “ssh” not only at the start of a word, but also either at the start of a line or immediately to the right of an illustration in the text?

The linguistic diffusion of Cisiojanus mnemonics…

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Even though (academic opinion has it that) the idea of a Cisiojanus feast-name mnemonic first appeared in Germany in the 12th Century and largely diffused there, there is no such thing as a single universal Cisiojanus. That is, most examples of Cisiojanus have local tweaks – local saints, local memorials, local feasts.

Bear in mind that Christianity in the Middle Ages was a much less centralized affair than it became in the sixteenth Century and beyond: medieval Rome was a dump (the Vatican’s fabulous Renaissance buildings had yet to be erected), and papal behaviour was often more political than pontifical.

And so it was that Christian practice was more of a patchwork, where feasts (major ones excepted) were determined locally by bishops, towns, councils, and even guilds. The various examples I posted here before meshed syllables from local saints’ names into the Cisiojanus meta-framework: there is a lot more work for historians to do in terms of mapping the “adaptation trees”.

Interestingly, though, the basic Cisiojanus template was sufficiently flexible that it was able to be adapted not just to different German-speaking regions, but also to completely different languages.

Given that I haven’t found any review article on this “linguistic diffusion” of Cisiojanus, all I can do us offer up a brief set of research notes on all the different language Cisiojanus variants I’ve run across, in the hope that these might offer a starting point in that direction.

German Cisiojanus literature

Just as an aside, the root of the modern Cisiojanus literature is, without doubt:

“Cisiojanus : Studien zur mnemonischen Literatur anhand des spätmittelalterlichen Kalendergedichts” (1974) by Rolf Max Kully, which appeared in “Zeitschrift: Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde”, Band (Jahr): 70 (1974), Heft 3-4.

Before Kully, one of the most influential papers was by P. Diels (1937), Der älteste polnische Cisiojanus.

This year, there was a paper “All Days Are Equal, but Some Days Are More Equal than Others: Late Medieval German Cisiojani and Their Structure of Time” by Silvan Wagner at IMC 2018, as part of the “Memorising Time: The Cisiojanus as a Complex Storage of Pre-Modern Memory” session.

English Cisiojanus literature

“A Unique English Cisioianus” (2005), by William H. Smith, in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 18:2, pp.10-16. This covers Chapel Hill MS 522.

Scottish Cisiojanus literature

A Scoto-Irish Cisiojanus (1980), by Alexander Boyle, in Analecta Bollandiana, Volume 98, Issue 1-2, pp. 39-47. Boyle is discussing MS Laing III 21, folios 1-9: and refers back to a 1959 paper “Cisiojani Latini” by Oloph Edenius, which divides Cisiojanus manuscripts into two types – syllable-based (usually Latin) and word-based (usually vernacular).

Boyle has another article (with David McRoberts) called “A Hebridean Cisiojanus“, The Innes Review, Volume 21 Issue 2, Page 108-123.

Irish Cisiojanus literature

An Irish cisiojanus by William O’Sullivan, in Collectanea Hibernica No. 29 (1988), pp.7-13. I haven’t seen this fully, but fragments on Google make it seem as though O’Sullivan thinks Boyle and McRoberts got their Hebridean Cisiojanus wrong.

Italian Cisiojanus literature

Nicola De Nisco, a PhD student at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, uploaded Un inedito esemplare italiano di Cisioianus to academia.edu. This paper describes an Italian Cisiojanus that appears on the final page of “manoscritto ambrosiano + 93 sup.”, from the second half of the fifteenth century: it has a good bibliography.

De Nisco transcribes January as:

Sci.si.da.ia.nus.e.pi.si.bi.uen.pau.lim.fe.li.mar.an
Pri.sca.fab.ag.vim.cen.ti.pau.lus.cri.so.sto.mi.que.

For July (which has long been an interest of mine), the transcription runs:

Oc.pro.ces.no.dor.oc.ui.chi.li.fra.be.er.ma.co.di.post.al.
Ar.ga.mar.prax.mag.ab.crist.ia.an.na.pan.ta.le.on

Interestingly, De Nisco gave a presentation on “The Memory of Saints and His Stratifications: A Philological Approach to the Study of Italian Cisiojani” in IMC 2018, in the same session described above.

Hungarian Cisiojanus literature

There’s a Hungarian Cisiojanus described here, which goes far beyond the paltry limits of my tourist Hungarian.

Westjiddischer Cisiojanus literature

A fairly slim literature here, it has to be said, but Simon Neuberg (1999) “Aschkenasisches Latein. Ein westjiddischer Cisiojanus“, in Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm, pp. 111–132.

French Cisiojanus literature

Here’s a webpage discussing a French Cisiojanus from circa 1500, courtesy of prolific Cisiojanus commentator Erik Drigsdahl. January looks like this:

En ian vier que les Roys ve nus sont
Glau me dit fre min mor font
An thoin boit le iour vin cent fois
Pol us en sont tous ses dois

A version of the same French rhyme was found in a 1514 pastedown (courtesy of a crowdsearch project!), according to this 2014 page.

Dutch Cisiojanus literature

There’s a mention (I believe) of a Dutch Cisiojanus in KB Brussel 15.659-61 by Theo Meder’s “Sprookspreker in Holland“.

Icelandic Cisiojanus literature

A 16th century Icelandic Cisiojanus is mentioned on footnote 18 of page 35 of the Saga book here: it says that the syllable ‘bla’ for St Blaise got inserted into the Cisiojanus in Guðbrandur Þorláksson’s (1576) “Bænabok med morgum godvm og nytsamligum bænum”. As a side note, I’ve been to plenty of presentations that would seem to celebrate St Blaise three times over. 😉

Diebold Lauber’s workshop and the knotty problem of necklines…

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The recent surge of Voynich research interest in Diebold Lauber’s workshop has come about thanks to Koen Gheuen’s research. Koen’s focus was on the series of drawings in the centre of Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundels: and he began by tracing the unusual hand-clasping going on in the Voynich Gemini roundel (which I discussed here previously):

The similarity Koen highlighted between the Voynich Gemini roundel figures and the two frontmost figures in the following drawing from Diebold Lauber’s workshop is striking:

The parallels between the Voynich zodiac roundels and elements in Diebold Lauber’s workshop’s output are both qualitatively and quantitatively striking, not least of which is the crayfish (also highlighted by Koen) which – to the best of our collective knowledge – only appears misdrawn in a particular way (with the crayfish’s legs incorrectly attached to its tail rather than to its body) (a) in a Lauber-illustrated Buch der Natur, and (b) in the Voynich Manuscript’s Cancer zodiac roundel.

Knotty Problems

But there are problems of historical logic to untangle here. The first problem concerns the arms: the two hand-clasping Voynich Gemini figures have their arms crossed over (which is a correct depiction of the medieval ceremony), whereas the figures in Lauber’s drawing (dated 1448-1450) do not have their arms crossed over (which is incorrect). Koen dug up an image from the Werkstatt von 1418 (a different manuscript workshop, but from the same general area) that he suggests might well have been a predecessor to one or both of the other two:

Here, we can see the arms crossed over (which is correct) and a simple neckline (which is the same as we see in the Voynich Gemini roundel). Yet the arms are uncrossed, which is what we see in the Lauber drawing.

Koen proposes that this would make it difficult for the Voynich Gemini figures to have been derived from the Werkstatt von 1418 image, because the arms there were uncrossed, and it would be a little bit odd for the arms to have been recrossed.

Yet at the same time, given that the image depicts a man and a monk, this too is problematic for anyone trying to trace out a line of direct transmission.

It seems likely to me that the plain necklines depicted in all the Voynich roundel drawings that include a clothed human neck are systematic copies of a series of zodiac roundels from a single predecessor German manuscript (which was most likely a calendar). So we can tentatively date the predecessor document as being, say, closer to 1420-1430 (the date of the Werkstatt von 1418 drawing) than to 1448-1450 (the date of the Diebold Lauber drawing).

This gives us, I suspect, a sequence tree something broadly like this:

However, is this lineage compatible with the strangely misdrawn crayfish, which seems to suggest that Lauber’s workshop was somehow involved?

All I can say is that it is possible that the unknown document on the right (that I suspect was the predecessor for both the Voynich Gemini and the 1448-1450 Diebold Lauber drawing) was also from the Diebold Lauber workshop. The earliest known Lauber document is dated 1427 (Köln, Hist. Archiv der Stadt, Best. 7010 (W) 251, signed “Diebold de Dachstein”), and a number of Lauber’s early illustrations may have been by Hans Ott (whose work, the Heidelberg site says, can be found in Strasbourg documents between 1427 and 1449).

I (eventually) managed to track down some drawings from this 1427 Lauber document:

And yes, there are certainly a fair few simple necklines there. So the proposed sequence is still entirely possible, I think. Unless you know better? 🙂

Usage patterns in the Beale Ciphers…

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Even though Beale Ciphers B1, B2, and B3 each consist of similar-looking strings of numbers, it’s far from obvious that they have been generated in the same way (i.e. that they all result from using the same cipher system).

Usage Patterns

We can quickly map the usage of the first 1000 index values (I remain a bit suspicious of higher numbers), with the following bitwise key:
* ‘.’ => unused
* ‘1’ => used in B1
* ‘2’ => used in B2
* ‘3’ => used in B1 + B2
* ‘4’ => used in B3
* ‘5’ => used in B1 + B3
* ‘6’ => used in B2 + B3
* ‘7’ => used in B1 + B2 + B3

77773777777757777776775777777376777777777777676777
7766576377737777755577754577317777755555.75777575.
77516774525774757757774525554135276747531.6.143147
42.3..4227.5.4..4..1454.4564.45.4124..1.7.171624.7
515.65574175554565525..51454.7111745.42421.44752.2
52...4...414154...46..247....1..132522.34..1.46.4.
73457..3.444474644475.11.5.5........4..11.46.1.4..
4.2..1...31..55.1..32..44....444.....2.....2..4..2
1.1.22.12.144..541.2..1..1....1..4.1..43......1...
.........55.11.2....1..1..........33........4....1
1...2.....2..................1.......1.3..1....3..
...2..2..........1......2.....33.................2
1131..3...41.1..54.2..11......4...........24..2...
...1.........1.21.......41...1.1.4................
...............14..........1.......1..............
.......1.....................1....................
......2...21.14.41554.11....1..........1....4.....
.....4.1..11.4.......1..1..............5....141...
...........1....411.14.4......1..4.5..............
44.......111..1.........5.........1..............1

From this, we can see that even though the numbers that are used in all three ciphers are biased towards low numbers (e.g. look at all the ‘7’ values at the top), B1 numbers (and to a slightly lesser extent B3 numbers) appear throughout the number range. Furthermore, apart from the numbers near the top, there seems to be no systematic relationship between the usage map of any two pair of ciphers (not even B1 and B3).

And yet we have quite strong evidence that the same enciphering tables derived from the DoI were used for both B2 (which has been solved) and B1 (which remains unsolved). I think this alone is strong evidence that for all their underlying “causal similarities” (for want of a better phrase), B1 and B2 were not generated by the same ciphering system.

Note also that the map shows runs of adjacent indices that appear in only one of the three ciphertexts (e.g. “4444” in B3) or that appear in both B1 and B3 but not in B2 (e.g. “55555”). However, these look broadly within the range of normal randomness, so I doubt these are highlighting anything unusual.

Jarlve’s Incremental Series

In a comment here a few days ago, Jarlve observed that all three Beale ciphers have stretches of numbers that were numerically ordered to a degree that was somewhat unusual. And furthermore:

Testing the significance of these incremental series versus randomizations, then B1 = 4.61 sigma, B2 = 2.72 sigma and B3 = 9.86 sigma.

If we map B1’s “incrementality” (i.e. where ‘.’ => decrement, and ‘*’ => increment), we can indeed see a six-long increment sequence about 60% of the way through, plus a couple of five-long increment sequences. What is just as striking is that the long decrement sequence in B1 is four-long (twice), which points to some kind of subtle asymmetry.

B1:

*.*...**.*.*.*..**.**.***.**.*.**.**.*.**..***..**
.*..**.*.***...*.**..**..**.*..*.*.*.***.*..*..***
..*.*.*.***...***.*.**.***.*..*..**.****.*.**.*.**
..*.*..*..*.**.*.***....***.**..***.**.*.*..*.**.*
*.**.**..**.*.*.*..***..***.*.*.*****.**.*.**.*...
***.*..****.*.**.***..*..****..****.*.*.***..***..
*.******.*..**.***.*..*..**...**.*..**.*.*.*.*.**.
*..*.*..*.**.****..*.*..**..*.*.*.*..****..*..**..
**.*..**..***.*.***..**.*..**.**.****.****.*..*.*.
.***....*.***..*..*****.*..*.**..*.*.**...***.*.*.
**.***...*.****..**

Compare this with B2, which has a six-long decrement sequence (about 30% of the way through), and a pair of five-long increment sequences.

B2:

..*.*..***..**..*.*.*.**.**..*..*..***....*.*.**..
*.*..**.**.*.*.**..***.**.*..***.**.*.*.*.**.*.*.*
*.*.**...*...**..**.**.***.*.**..**..***.*..*.**.*
.***.*.*.*.*..*..**..*.***.*.***..**..***.*..**..*
.*.**......*.**.*....*..*.*.***.***..**.*..***..**
.*.*.*..**..*.*.*...*.***.*.**.*.*.**.*.*.**.*.*.*
.***.***.*..**..*.****...*..*.*.**..***.**.*.**.**
.*.*.**.*.*.*..*.*....***.*..*..*..**..**...**.*..
*.*.**.****..**.*..*.**.***...*.*...**.*..*..*.*.*
*.***.**..**.**.*.**.*...*.**..*.*.****.*****..**.
***..*.*..**.*.**.*.*.**..***..**...***.*....*.*..
*.**...***.*.****..*.*.*.*.*..**..**.**..*.*.*.*..
**.**...*..*.*.*.*..***.*.****..*.**..*.*.*..*.*.*
*.**.*..***..*..**...**.*.*..**....*.**.*..*****.*
***.*.*..**.**.*.***.**.*..**.*...**..*..*.****.*.
***..***.***

But all of this in B1 and B2 is almost as nothing to B3’s extremely unbalanced set of increment series, firstly in a patch in the middle (two seven-long increments and two six-long increments) and then in a long patch at the end (where the positive increment sequences are 9, 9, 7, 6, 7, 9, and 6 long). By way of contrast, the longest decrement sequences in B3 are a single 6-long set, and a single 5-long set).

B3:

.*.*..*.**.*.**..***..*.*..*.***..*.*.*..*.*.**.*.
**.*.*.*.*..*..**.***..*.**.****.***.**.*.*.**.***
*.*.*.*...*...**.*.*.**.**..*.**..*.***.*.***..*..
*.***.**.**..*****...*.*.*..****..*....***..*.****
.*****..***...*.*.****.*******..**.*.*.*..**..**.*
***.**...**..*..**.*.*.***.**.**.****.****.******.
***..****.**...*.*.**..*.***.*******..*...**.*****
*.**..*.*.**.*.***.*.**..*.*.**..*****..***.**..*.
***.**.****.****.*.***.*...**...**.*......*.*..**.
**..*.*****.****.*****.*.*.*.*.**.*.*....*.*.*****
****.*********..**.**.*******..**.*..******.*.****
..*.**.****.*****.....*.**..*******.****..*.*.***.
.*********.******

Putting All This Together

I think Jarlve’s incrementing series perhaps offer a quite different dimension to what Jim Gillogly (perhaps better known for breaking parts of the Kryptos ciphers) mused in his “Dissenting Opinion” on the Beale Ciphers, where he opined:

I visualize the encryptor selecting numbers more or less at random, but occasionally growing bored and picking entries from the numbered Declaration of Independence in front of him, in several cases choosing numbers with an alphabetic sequence.

Whereas this loosely seems to fit B1 (where mysterious alphabet-like strings do indeed appear, but which require the cipher table used in B2 to have been used in a different manner), the immediate problem is that it doesn’t really capture what happens in B3 (where no mysterious alphabet-like strings appear if you apply B3’s index values to the DoI) at all. There, (thanks to Jarlve) we can say that the same encryptor seems to have instead chosen numbers with a strong bias towards incrementing numeric series.

But why would that be?

Is it time for the Secret History of the First World War to emerge?

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I recently went to a very enjoyable evening of history lectures at Kingston Grammar School’s swanky Performing Arts Centre / Theatre, a local celebration of this year’s (2018) centenary of the end (or, at least, one of the ends) of the First World War. Inevitably, the urge to write a blog post in response was almost impossible to contain…

WW1 War Poetry

The first talk, given by Dr Jane Potter (Reader in Arts at Oxford Brookes University) was on war poetry: though very interesting, it became quickly apparent to me that even though war poetry as a phenomenon emerged in the military heat of WW1, it was forged as an academic study target in the ideological heat of 1960s anti-war protest.

Many aspects of war poetry that strongly engage its academic audience – its inclusivity, its naivety, and its perceived ‘genuineness’ – reflect the kind of ‘bottom-up’ social history that was emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. From that point of view, it is (I think) hard not to see that these were precisely the things that 1960s anti-war academics seized upon as giving it ideological value to them. Hence it is a field that seems to me to have been selected more for its low-impact liberal resistance values than for intrinsic artistic, stylistic, or technical value.

But even so, the academic genre itself projects back a modern dialogue about what (capital W) War is about / for (and let’s not forget it took until 1970 for Edwin Starr’s answer to emerge, famously rhyming “heartbreaker” with “undertaker”), and about what relation War has with the ‘common man’ (or indeed ‘common woman’), a dialogue only marginally in place in 1914. I think it’s safe to say that there are plenty of academic contradictions in play here.

For me, WW1 war poetry ranges all the way from the most moving and affecting to muddy drivel: but neither the best nor the worst makes me want to value it as more than just an interesting cultural phenomenon. So unfortunately I have to say that, though Jane Potter’s talk was both engaging and well-presented within its limits, I still don’t buy into the whole academic study of war poetry as something which continued study of can keep on eliciting genuine value: circa 2018 it seems more like a long-running Humanities cult, a Kodakian “gift that keeps giving” but with ever-diminishing returns, sorry. 🙁

The Moral Endeavour Driving WW1

The second speaker of the evening was Dr Edward Madigan (a Lecturer in Public History at the University of London’s Royal Holloway), and his talk was on altogether more solid ground. His starting point was that even though people in the UK now generally grasp that the Second World War was a genuine moral fight against the fascistic inhumanities of Nazism, few genuinely seem to understand what the equivalent British moral angle was in the First World War – A.K.A. ‘errrrm, what was that whole WW1 thing about, again? Franz Ferdinand or something?‘

What clearly came out from his slides and description was how British moral indignation at the 1914 German atrocities in Belgium (in particular in Louvain / Leuven) grew and grew, a sense of outrage that increased courtesy of the sinking of the Lusitania (yes, I do know about the various histories there, *sigh*), the Zeppelin raids, the raider attacks on Scarborough, and the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell. These moral flames were religiously fanned by such peopls as Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of Westminster, whose 1915 anti-German diatribes were extraordinarily inflammatory, to the point of being somewhat hard for modern ears to take in. (Even Herbert Asquith called it “jingoism of the shallowest kind”.)

And so Madigan’s overall argument – though he never quite framed in this precise way – seemed to be that moral outrage against the Germans grew in Britain like a kind of out-of-control viral meme, taking over the thinking of all bar the most doggedly pacifistic. And this from a country that was, right up until the start of WW1, a close partner with Germany, both culturally, fraternally, commercially, and even historically. (It is no coincidence that the British Royal Family is basically German.)

But… was that the whole story? I think not, and the evening’s final speaker helped illuminate a different side of the same history.

WW1 Propaganda

Professor Jo Fox is the Director of the IHR: the topic of her talk was “Propaganda and the First World War”. We’re now familiar with the idea of agitprop (a portmanteau of “agitatsiia” and “propaganda”, as per the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda, set up in 1920): but Jo Fox showed a series of images of British First World War propaganda, courtesy of the various enlisting committees and even the graphic journals of the day – intentional propaganda and unintentional propaganda, broadly speaking (echoing Marc Bloch).

One curious thing she noted was that German historians (though she didn’t say who), looking back at the First World War, pointed to the power of British propaganda as being one of the key things that swayed not only national opinion but also international opinion against Germany: and that this was one of the key mechanisms that served to isolate Germany and, ultimately, to lose it the war. Was propaganda really that powerful? Fox clearly thinks so, and indeed argued her case persuasively.

Perhaps the interesting follow-on question here is whether the Soviets ultimately stole agitprop from the Brits’ culturally weaponised WW1 propaganda. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the case, though Fox didn’t suggest an answer: maybe she’s saving this for her next book. 😉

Towards A Secret History of WW1?

From my own historical viewpoint, the problem with all three accounts presented during the evening wasn’t what they included but what they excluded. By which I mean: the act of trying to capture the vast vista of war though such narrow lenses as poetry (or even social history), viral moral outrage, or even pro-war propaganda is doomed to failure, for these are all surface symptoms. Instead, the single (but never really mentioned) driving force behind War is neither military, social, nor even moral, but political. Even Edwin Starr got it wrong: the one thing that war is good for is politics, plain and simple.

In my opinion, the thing pervasively missing from the evening was a single secret history question: how did the British Government manage to bring the Church, the State, the Establishment, the Media, and indeed just about everyone else (including writers, artists and mainstream poets) on-message with its political programme, culminating in the deaths of approximately 37 million people? Just about everyone played their part in disseminating pro-war propaganda: if there is a categoric difference from the kind of Soviet agitprop that followed not long after, it’s not one that I can easily detect.

So why, even a century on, are historians still apparently unable to peer behind the political curtain of WW1, to bring the machinations that made the propaganda possible into the light? What made the British Government’s (proto-)agitprop so effective, so far-reaching, so total? It seems to me that – unless, dear reader, you know better – the definitive secret political history of WW1 has not yet been written: or, rather, the awareness of the political framing of the war seems to be missing in action. Our historians seem to lack access to the definitive accounts of the scheming, manipulation, and political stage management that would give their own accounts context and genuine meaning: and so we seem to have fragmented histories that, for all their depth of research and technical professionalism, remain politically shallow.

Or is it the case that, even now, nobody wants to talk about how countries manipulate their peoples into going to war? Might it be that, in an age where politically unjustifiable wars continue to happen on a regular basis, this is all still too close for comfort? Might a hundred years be too soon for the real history of something so politically sensitive to emerge?

“Mario translates the Voynich Manuscript”

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“Among other revelations, he discovers it was a treatise on Spacesynth“, says the author of the following video, Hagar Hogan. I’m not sure if that actually helps explain it, but it may possibly be some kind of starting point. For some people.

This has taught me a lot about the relationship between Mario and Luigi and the Voynich Manuscript. But probably more about where the volume dial is on my speakers.

Of course, readers might consider that the above is a waste of time, and that I should instead use my blog as a platform for discussing serious-minded Voynich videos by earnest researchers.

Here, it has to be said that I’m specifically thinking of “Mystical Voynich Manuscript Interpretation – Part 1” on the ‘High Elven Wisdom And Love’ YouTube channel. Its author is “an empath […] an elvenkin […] a soul that expresses themself as an elf in this lifetime”, and who wants to post 45-minute videos on the powerful energy behind the Voynich Manuscript.

Me, I’ll stick with Mario, if that’s ok with you. 😉

Refining Beale Cipher B1’s cipher table…

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By now, everyone and his/her crypto-dog must surely know that the second Beale Cipher (“B2”) was enciphered using a lookup table created from the first letters of the words of the Declaration of Independence: that is, a number N in the B2 ciphertext corresponds to the first letter of the Nth word in the DoI.

Even working out that this was the case was far from trivial, because the version of the DoI used was non-standard, and there were also annoying numerical shifts (which strongly suggest that the encipherer’s word numbering messed up along the way). There were also a few places where the numbers in the B2 ciphertext appear to have been miscopied or misprinted.

Yet I don’t share the view put forward by some researchers that this would have made it nigh-on-impossible for anyone to figure out that the DoI had been used, simply because most of the number instances are low numbers, i.e. they are concentrated near the front end of the DoI where there are fewer differences with normal DoI’s, and before the numbering slips started to creep in. This means that even if you used nearly the right DoI, a very large part of the ciphertext would become readable: and from there a persistent investigator should be able to reconstruct what happened with the (not-so-straightforward) high-numbered indices to eventually fill in the rest of the gaps. Which is basically where Beale research had reached by the time Ward’s pamphlet was printed.

So far, so “National Treasure”. But this isn’t quite the whole story, because…

B1 Used The Same Table!

Even if we have so far failed to work out precisely how B1 was enciphered, we do also know something rather surprising, courtesy of Carl Hammer and Jim Gillogly: that the process used to construct B1 used almost exactly the same DoI used to encipher B2. Jim Gillogly, in his famous article “The Beale Cipher: A Dissenting Opinion” [April 1980, Cryptologia, Volume 4, Number 2, pp.116-119, a copy of which can be found in the Wayback Machine here] concluded that the ‘plaintext’ patterns that emerged from this were artificial nonsense, and so B1 (and by implication B3) were empty hoax texts, i.e. designed to infuriate rather than to communicate.

From the same evidence, Carl Hammer concluded (quite differently) that B1 and B2 were encrypted in the same way using the same tables, though he didn’t have a good explanation for the mysterious patterns. For what it’s worth, my own conclusion is that B1 and B2 were encrypted slightly differently but using the same tables, which is kind of a halfway house between Gillogly’s coglie and Hammer’s clamour. 😉

All three agree on this: that if you plug the DoI’s first letters into the B1 ciphertext, mysterious patterns do appear (more on those shortly). But for many years, my view has been that Gillogly’s end conclusion, though clear-headed and sincere, was both premature (because I don’t believe he had eliminated all possible explanations) and unhelpful (because it had the possibly unintentional effect of stifling nearly all subsequent cryptological research into the Beale ciphers).

Regardless, it seems highly likely that almost exactly the same DoI was used to construct B1 as was used to encipher B2. This is because the statistically improbable mysterious patterns only emerge in the B1 plaintext if you use the DoI.

Furthermore, what I think is quite striking is, as I pointed out some years ago, that if you use the corrected cipher table (i.e. the cipher table generated from the same DoI and using the same numerical mistakes as were used in the cipher table used to construct the B2 cipher text), the mysterious patterns not only remain, but become even more statistically improbable than before.

What this implies, I believe, is that not only was the same non-standard DoI used in both, but also the same enciphering tables derived from it, numerical errors and all.

Here’s what B1 looks like when combined with the raw DoI (numbers above 1000 map to ‘?’)

s c s ? e t f a ? g c d o t t u c w o t w t a a i w d b i i d t t ? w t t a a b b p l a a a b w c t
l t f i f l k i l p e a a b p w c h o t o a p p p m o r a l a n h a a b b c c a c d d e a o s d s f
h n t f t a t p o c a c b c d d l b e r i f e b t h i f o e h u u b t t t t t i h p a o a a s a t a
a t t o m t a p o a a a r o m p j d r a ? ? t s b c o b d a a a c p n r b a b f d e f g h i i j k l
m m n o h p p a w t a c m o b l s o e s s o a v i s p f t a o t b t f t h f o a o g h w t e n a l c
a a s a a t t a r d s l t a w g f e s a u w a o l t t a h h t t a s o t t e a f a a s c s t a i f r
c a b t o t l h h d t n h w t s t e a i e o a a s t w t t s o i t s s t a a o p i w c p c w s o t t
i o i e s i t t d a t t p i u f s f r f a b p t c c o a i t n a t t o s t s t f ? ? a t d a t w t a
t t o c w t o m p a t s o t e c a t t o t b s o g c w c d r o l i t i b h p w a a e ? b t s t a f a
e w c a ? c b o w l t p o a c t e w t a f o a i t h t t t t o s h r i s t e o o e c u s c ? r a i h
r l w s t r a s n i t p c b f a e f t t

Of the many artificial-looking sequences here, the one that caught Hammer’s and Gillogly’s eyes was:

a b f d e f g h i i j k l m m n o h p p

If we instead plug the same set of B1 numbers into the corrected DoI cipher table, this is what you get:

s b s ? e t f a ? g c d o t t u c w o t w t a a i s d b t i d t t ? w t f b a a b a d a a a b b c d
e f f i f l k i g p e a m n p w c h o c o a l l p m o t a m a n h a b b b c c c c d d e a o s d s t
b n t f t a t p o c a c b c d d e p e t p f a b t h i f f e h u u b t j t t t i h p a o a o s a t a
b t t ? m n m p a a a a r b o p j d t f ? ? t s b c o h d a f a c p n r b a b c d e f g h i i j k l
m m n o h p p a w t a o m b b l s o e s a t o f i s p c t a o l b t f l h d o a h g b w t e n c l c
a s s a a s t a t d t g t a w g f e a a o c a a a t t w h t t t a a o e t s a f a a s b s t c i h r
c a b t o t s c t d c n h w t s t e h i o o a t s t w t t s o f a a s t a a m s i w c p c w s o t l
i n i e e i t t d a t t p i u f a e r f a b p t c t a o i d n a t t o a t s t a ? ? a t m a t w n w
t t o c w t o t p a t s o t e b a t r c h b t o g a w c d r o l i t i a h l w a a s ? b c s t a f a
e w c m ? f t o w l t s o c c t e w t a f o a o w t t t t t o t h r i s u e o h a c u a f ? p o i h
r m s s t r a s n i t p c t u o w f t t

This yields even more mysteriously ordered patterns than before:
* a a b a d a a a b b c d e f f i f
* a b b b c c c c d d e
* a b c d e f g h i i j k l m m n o h p p

Sorry, Jim, but something is going on there to cause feeding B1’s numbers into the refined DoI to produce these patterns: and even if I agree that the rest of the Beale pamphlet is a steaming heap of make-believe Boy’s Own backfill, I still don’t think the B1 ciphertext is a hoax. There’s just too much order.

Filling In The Gaps

Now, if it is true that exactly the same cipher table was used to construct both B1 and B2 (and though I believe this is highly likely, I have to point out that this remains speculative), these mysterious patterns may offer us the ability to advance our understanding of the cipher table yet further. This is because we can look at those places where the mysterious patterns break down in mid-sequence, and use those places to suggest corrections either to the table or to the B1 ciphertext itself. That is, even if we can neither decrypt nor understand B1, we can still use its mysterious plaintext patterns to refine our reconstruction of the enciphering table used to construct it and/or our understanding of the B1 ciphertext itself.

150=a 251=a 284=a 308=b 231=b 124=c 211=d 486=e 225=f 401=f 370=i 11=f

370=importance BUT 360=forbidden, so I suspect that 370 may have been a copying slip for 360.

24=a 283=c 134=b 92=c 63=d 246=d 486=e

283=colonies BUT 284=and, so I suspect that 283 may have been a copying slip for 284.

890=a 346=a 36=a 150=a 59=r 568=b

59=requires, but I’m not sure what happened here.

147=a 436=b 195=c 320=d 37=e 122=f 113=g 6=h 140=i 8=i 120=j 305=k 42=l 58=m 461=m 44=n 106=o 301=h 13=p 408=p

301=history BUT 302=of, so I suspect that 301 may have been a copying slip for 302.

OK, I’d agree this isn’t a huge step forward: but given that the printed version of (the solved!) B2 has seven similar copying slips…

* B2 index #223 is ’84’, but should be ’85’
* B2 index #531 is ’53’, but should be ’54’
* B2 index #571 is ‘108’, but should be ‘10,8’
* B2 index #590 [#591] is ‘188’, but should be ‘138’
* B2 index #666 [#667] is ‘440’, but should be ’40’
* B2 index #701 [#702] is ’84’, but should be ’85’
* B2 index #722 [#723] is ’96’, but should be ’95’

…I’d expect that we’re likely to have between 10 and 20 copying slips in B1’s series of numbers. That, combined with the larger ratio of homophones (i.e. as compared with the size of the ciphertext), keeps pushing B1 out of the range of automated homophonic ciphertext solvers. So all we can do to try to correct for those may well be a help!

“Folklore: Prince Edward Island” by Sterling Ramsay…

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My bibliographic search for more information about the Hollow River Cipher led to Sterling Ramsay’s (1973) “Folklore: Prince Edward Island”.

It’s a nice little book, that tries to enjoy local folkloric tales of ghosts, spirits and buried treasure from Prince Edward Island without the intrusion of too much critical thinking, a tradition that has (apparently) continued to the present day with the PEI Ghosthunter’s Society.

As to the author, there’s a picture (presumably) of Sterling Ramsay circa 1973 on the back cover, though inverted and coloured orange. A few minutes with GIMP produced the following reconstruction:

Does Ramsay have anything more to say about the Hollow River story that the Prince Edward Island Magazine didn’t back in 1900?

The answer is… not a lot, but that’s perhaps to be expected. What we do learn is that (p.61):

Many years went by until the original parchment note fell into the hands of a Mr. Donald MacDougall who came originally from the Brackley area of the island. To say that he became intrigued with the note would be quite an understatement, for, according to various accounts, he became almost obsessed with the desire to decipher the note’s hidden message. He spent every free moment arranging in various forms the jumbled letters with the hope of finding some clue to their meaning, but all in vain. This in itself was not enough to discourage him however. He showed it to every person whom he considered as likely of obtaining an idea of its contents. But all without success, none could understand any part of it but that which he could plainly see for himself, that is, what appeared to be a date, the 10th day of a month, A.D., 1738. At length he began to suspect that he was merely being made the butt of some seaman’s cruel joke, so his interest soon waned and for the moment, at least, all thoughts of the mysterious message fled from his mind. This was not to be very long lived, however, as he was soon to discover.

Who Was Donald MacDougall?

A quick Internet search revealed several mid-19th century Donald MacDougalls on Prince Edward Island, all descendants of a (presumably too early?) Donald MacDougall:

1. born on 24th December 1847 in Grand River, Prince, Prince Edward Island, son of James MacDougall (b. 1789) and Margaret Plaisted. Donald MacDougall married a Mary Gillis on 27 Nov 1866.
2. born on 24th January 1842 to Roderick MacDougall (b. 1812) and Mary MacKinnon.
3. born on 5th November 1844 to Jonathan MacDougall (b. 1813) and Anne MacNeil.
4. born on 20th August 1850 in Grand River, Prince, Prince Edward Island to Michael MacDougall (b. 1818 in Grand River, Prince, Prince Edward Island) and Anne Gillis (died 22nd May 1902). He died on 4th May 1929 in Grand River, Prince, Prince Edward Island.

The “various accounts” mentioned by Sterling Ramsay are probably different family retellings of the same basic story, handed down a couple of generations. (There’s nothing like a bit of elusive pirate treasure talk around a family hearth, right?)

Sterling Ramsay

Is Sterling Ramsay still alive? There’s a picture of a Sterling Ramsay of Charlottetown shovelling snow in 2015 in a local PEI newspaper:

And, in a timely coincidence, it seems likely to me that this is probably the same Sterling Ramsay who elaborately decorates his house on Euston Street every Halloween to scare local children: though sadly the local Guardian’s online archive seems to have lost the pictures of him with the Grim Reaper and shaking hands with the Devil. But I’m sure you get the basic idea. 🙂

From collecting folkloric ghost stories to improvised Halloween house-theatre, it seems like there could easily be a consistent thread of interest weaving through his life, wouldn’t you say, hmmm? 😉

Gustina Scaglia, the Machine Complex Authors, and weak vs strong research questions…

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For more than forty years, the late historian Gustina Scaglia researched 15th and 16th manuscripts containing drawings of machines. This led to her writing (some with Frank D. Prager) a number of highly regarded books, a good number of which I can afford (and have copies of) and a fair few my budget cannot easily stretch to. :-/ The list of her machine-related papers stretches back at least to her 1960 NYU thesis Studies in the “Zibaldone” of Buonaccorso Ghiberti (Advisor: Richard Krautheimer).

Overall, I think what emerged can be fairly described as a decades-long research programme to work out how these technical books and drawings fitted together into an larger inventive tradition – i.e. to determine where machine ideas really came from, and how they flowed from manuscript to manuscript, being adapted and adjusted as they went.

In many ways, Scaglia achieved just about everything she aimed to do: her accounts of Brunelleschi, Mariano Taccola, and Francesco di Giorgio’s books (and all their copybooks and derivative works, sprawling through the 16th century and beyond) in many ways exemplify the best of historical scholarship – despite covering such a large area, they are well researched, well thought through, and lucidly presented. And yet…

The Hole At The Centre: The Machine Complex Authors

It’s hard not to notice that there is a hole at the centre of Scaglia’s account, one which never seems to have been resolved (at least, not in those papers and books of hers that I’ve read). Although a very large number of machine drawings in Francesco di Giorgio’s books were derived directly from Mariano Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio also had a second major source for his machine drawings, a source which Scaglia was able to track only indirectly: she called these sources “the Machine Complex Authors“.

(Note that her 15th century Machine Complex Author(s) are different from the quite separate 16th century person she calls The “Machine Complex Artist”, who she concludes was active in Siena, and whose works Oreste Vannucci Biringucci copied into his books of drawings. I thought I’d mention this as it’s easy to get confused by these two similar names.)

Scaglia talks a little about the Machine Complex authors in her “Francesco di Giorgio: Checklist and History of Manuscripts and Drawings in Autographs and Copies from ca. 1470 to 1687 and Renewed Copies (1764-1839)”, in an early section devoted to Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de Architectura (British Museum 197.b.21, formerly MS Harley 3281):

Francesco’s other engine designs in the Opusculum, which may be briefly designated as the Machine Complexes, and fort plans had all been composed by anonymous artisans in 1450-1470 or earlier, none of which appear in Taccola’s sets […] These Machine Complex designs, largely formed in the artisans’ imaginations, are often inoperable, greatly constricted by the box frame in which the components are fitted […] [p.43]

Essentially, by the time sixteenth century engineers began to look with a more experienced eye at these 15th century drawings, it was clear that they were almost all impractical (and indeed occasionally fantastical): that if they were to be built, they would inevitably “move slowly”, as the architect Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane put it.

To the best of my knowledge, if Scaglia ever had an inkling of who might have been the “anonymous artisans” who conjured up those additional Machine Complex drawings that Francesco di Giorgio used, she never wrote it down. This was the hole in her history she never managed to fill: Scaglia’s unfinished business, as it were.

Was Filarete a Machine Complex Author?

In “The Curse of the Voynich” (2006), I explored the idea that the Voynich Manuscript might have been (in some way) a version of the little books of secrets mentioned many times by architect Antonio Averlino, scattered through his libro architettonico. According to Averlino, they contained secrets related to agriculture, water, machines, bees and so forth (though he never actually included a formal list).

Opinions are sharply divided about these little books, allegedly composed during Averlino’s time as ducal architect in Milan (1450-1465): some historians think they never existed at all (i.e. that they were just a literary conceit in Averlino’s part-factual / part-fictional libro architettonico), while others think that they did exist and that trying to make money out of them was one of the reasons Averlino wrote his libro at all. Either way, there is currently no known evidence outside the four walls of the libro architettonico that supports or refutes either account: so all we really have to go on is what Averlino tells us.

However, since 2006, I have further speculated that Averlino might have been the author of some of the Machine Complex drawings. This is historically compatible based on what we know of both: the period when Averlino claimed to have written / invented / compiled his book of machine secrets was within exactly the same period Scaglia concluded the Machine Complex Authors were active in Italy, after Taccola’s works (-1449) and before Francesco di Giorgio’s early works (1470-1475). And Averlino’s death (probably in Rome sometime between 1465 and 1469) would be about the right time for some or all of his books of secrets to make their way out into the world.

Did Scaglia consider the possibility that Averlino may have been one of the mid-Quattrocento Machine Complex Authors? Scaglia did, in 1974, write a glowing review in Isis of Finoli and Grassi’s scholarly edition of Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico (a review I’ve only read the first page of, sadly), so would have been well aware that Filarete had claimed authorshop of a book of machines, something that fell squarely within her long-term research programme. But perhaps the lack of corroborating external evidence for this meant that positing a link to the Machine Complex Authors would perhaps have been more openly speculative than she was comfortable with: perhaps someone more familiar with her work than me will be able to say.

Machines Hidden In Plain Sight?

If, for the sake of argument, we temporarily accept the premise that Averlino’s book of machine secrets did end up concealed in the Voynich Manuscript, the obvious question is: where are they? When I was researching Curse, it was very easy to see how a book on “agriculture” could be behind the Voynich Manuscript’s herbal pages, and also to see how a book on “water” could be behind the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘balneological’ quire (with its drawings of baths, and even possibly a rainbow at the end): so the absence of machine drawings was an issue that vexed me a great deal.

Though still just as hypothetical as it was more than a decade ago, the prediction this led me to remains controversial, simply because it is both simple and outrageous: that if Averlino’s book on machines (and it would inevitably be, like Taccola’s drawings that went before it, very visually oriented) is somehow hidden in the Voynich Manuscript’s pages, I concluded that the only place it could be hidden in plain sight was in the Voynich Manuscript’s “Herbal B” pages.

The text on (what Prescott Currier famously called) Herbal A pages was written by a larger, more open hand than the scratchy, smaller hand that wrote Herbal B pages: and despite superficial similarities, the two sets of pages have significantly different statistical profiles. Even though Herbal A bifolios have ended up (partially) mixed in with Herbal B bifolios, there seems little doubt that the two were originally composed in separate writing phases, and perhaps even written by different scribes.

Hence: even though both groups of pages are made up of plant drawings (normally one per page) accompanied by blocks of text (sometimes interleaved through the drawings), there seems very strong grounds for concluding that the two groups could well be quite different at heart. One of the things that distinguished Curse was that it proposed that these two groups of pages might well contain two different books – a book on agriculture, and a book of machines.

“Sunflowers” or Gears?

Since writing Curse, I’ve read a lot more of the 15th century machine drawing literature than I was able to before. And even now (in 2018), the systematic set of visual parallels I draw in 2006 seem no less strong: I still don’t see Brumbaugh’s supposed “sunflowers”, but wind-powered mills (and even wind-powered cars, something that had already been invented – though not built – by the early 15th century)

I also don’t see implausible plants, but rather obfuscated details that I suspect represent the racks and pinions that appear in 15th century machine drawings:

Additionally, I see what appear to be concealed versions of the horse-powered (or ox-powered) hoists that were such a mainstay of the 15th century machine drawing tradition (i.e. in Buonaccorso Ghiberti, Taccola, and elsewhere):

Finally: given Filarete’s love of fountains, it’s also easy (once you get to this point in the whole train of thought) to wonder whether some Herbal B Pages depict fountains:

As always, your mileage may vary: make of it all what you will.

Weak vs Strong Research Questions

The research brick wall I ran into with Curse was that Averlino’s books of secrets are – as far as anyone can say – entirely internal to his libro architettonico, making them virtual, unproven, implicit, or even absent: no-one can tell. And as for whether Gustina Scaglia ever considered (or even pursued) the idea of Averlino as a possible Machine Complex Author, she passed away 15 years ago, so that’s not really an avenue that can be followed.

However: what struck me in the last few days is that even though individually both are weak (i.e. untestable) research questions, if you put the two together you get a strong research question – by which I mean a question that can be tested against actual evidence, and perhaps falsified or proved. The point is that whatever trying to answer the question reveals, it should be possible to use the result to learn something new.

That is, even though the following claims have proven almost impossible to individually test (i.e. they are weak research questions)…

* that Averlino wrote the Voynich Manuscript
* that Averlino wrote books of secrets including a book of machines
* that the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal B pages contain encrypted or obfuscated versions of his machine drawings
* that Averlino was one of Scaglia’s Machine Complex Authors whose drawings were copied by Francesco di Giorgio in 1470-1475

…if you put all of them together into a single composite claim…

* that Averlino’s drawings appear both in the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal B pages and in Francesco di Giorgio’s machine drawings

…you get a strong research question, i.e. something that can actually be tested. So my next step is obviously going to be working out precisely which of Francesco di Giorgio’s drawings came not from Mariano Taccola but from the Machine Complex authors, and then comparing those with the Voynich’s Herbal B page drawings to see if anything connects the two.

However, apart from some references by the British Museum’s curators to figures in an unnamed book by someone called “Mancini” (presumably Girolamo Mancini?), I don’t know if there is a facsimile reproduction of the Opusculum de Architectura – if anyone happens to know a facsimile of the Opusculum or what the name of Mancini’s book is, please let me know, thanks!

More generally, what I find interesting here is that for many years I have spent a lot of time trying to break down big research questions into smaller questions that can be researched and tested atomically. Yet here I’m having to work in quite the opposite direction, simply because the individual smaller research questions are each too weak to be answered. And that makes me wonder whether we as historical researchers are sometimes hamstrung for lack of larger vision: that we can spend too much time on tiny questions that we can only partially answer, when we should (at least some of the time) also try to construct larger, more daring problematiques (as the Annales historians liked to put it), which would be testable in quite different (and perhaps far more revealing) ways. Just something to think about, anyway.