What’s the point of blogging?

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For a long time, the accepted answer has been that “bloggers do things [and document what they do] so that you don’t have to“. In this worldview, bloggers are net-savvy individuals cursed by a craving for foolish adventure, but somehow redeemed (partially, at least) by their sense of openness.

But as a blogger, I get to see a lot of blogs: and I have to say that many (if not most) of the blogs I have seen emerging over the last 2-3 years are cut from a quite different cloth. Almost entirely gone is the sense of adventure (whether physical or cerebral): that entire urge seems to have lurched sideways into the “bucket list” fake world of Facebook. Also gone is the sense of vicarious and arbitrary participation, a kind of living-by-doing (and then documenting) ethic: this too seems to have been reduced in the Internet’s metaphorical sauté pan down to the rather mindless level of sharing pictures of restaurant lunches on Instagram.

The things that seem to have replaced both of these are instead shallower and rather less intense: barely-informed opinions, defensive snarkishness, an absence of any obvious critical thought, and jaw-juttingly defiant I-am-right-ness. You might disagree, but it seems to me that blogging has in general become a platform for the angrily unengaged: an opinionated echo chamber of prodigiously tiny dimensions, with no sign of any humility or experimentality.

In short, the blogger world circa mid-2017 seems to have lost its collective mojo: the pinnacle of the art has instead become a focus on Google Ads and paid-for reviews. Yeah, yeah, I know, you might think that I think that “it was all green fields here when I started blogging a decade ago“, but that’s honestly not the point I’m trying to make. Rather, it seems to me that in recent years society’s implicit contract with bloggers has changed: the more ambitious have moved on to propagandic vlogging (e.g. Stampy, Dan TDM, Zoella, PewDiePie, etc) or satirical tweeting (e.g. the ever-amusing Wor Cheryl), and it’s only the Adamsian B Ark left, sorry.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I too am thinking of moving on from blogging: I’m at heart a very positive, creative and generative person, and I’m not currently finding blogging as supportive a platform for the positive, creative and generative things I want to do as I would like. As some will remember, I tried to step sideways into crowdfunded television a little while back: though that didn’t prove successful on that occasion, it’s perhaps still broadly the kind of direction that would perhaps make more sense in the current context than what I’m currently doing.

Incidentally, what I intensely dislike about the television historical documentary genre is its brutal formality, its almost koan-like edited rhythm of talking heads and nicely-shot places of faded beauty. Me, I want to make the road to history visible, not just a soft-focus glamorized version of the destination: personally, I’m fascinated not at all by the sofa-like comfort of that-which-has-been-found-and-understood-and-softened-into-a-societal-lullaby, but instead by the struggle of making history.

For anyone who wants to see the kind of documentary I’d like to make, I’d strongly recommend Icarus on Netflix. This is a completely awesome piece of film, like a forensic surgeon’s keyhole endoscope peering inside the rotting carcass of Sport – dead from the neck down, though its head seems blissfully unaware.

Domenico De’ Domenichi (1416-1478) and Vat. Gr. 1291…

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Vat. Gr. 1291 is a manuscript that has had a fair amount of Voynich-related attention over the years. A beautifully illustrated copy of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables, its fol.9r contains a circular astrological / zodiacal diagram with some oddly-familiar carefully-posed naked nymphs:

Though this splendid Greek manuscript was made in the ninth century, it had one well-known bibliophile owner in the 16th century, Fulvio Orsini (1512-1600):

However, what I find intriguing is that the manuscript reappeared (or, to be a little more Renaissance-y, perhaps I should say “was reborn”) in Brescia in the middle of the fifteenth century. Which is (roughly) where we start…

Pietro del Monte (c.1400-1457), Bishop of Brescia

Though the bibliography listed by the BAV for Vat. Gr. 1291 contains over seventy entries, an accessible starting point for us is probably “A Renaissance bishop and his books: a preliminary survey of the manuscript collection of Pietro del Monte (c. 1400–57)” by David Rundle (British School at Rome, The Papers – Vol 69 (2001)). [It’s in JSTOR, if you have access to that.] Msgr Jose Ruysschaert (who we know from other Voynich studies) once planned to write a full study of Pietro del Monte, but never quite got round to it: Rundle took on the slightly more achievable task of reconstructing his library.

Rundle’s readable article paints a picture of (the perhaps quite flawed) papal apologist – who at his death was also Bishop of Brescia – as a resolute book collector much praised by (the admittedly often unreliable) book merchant and librarian Vespasiano da Bisticci. I’m sure book-sellers always liked to hear a “yes” from del Monte (*groan*). After the wannabe humanists’s death in Rome in 1457, the biggest beneficiary was Pietro Barbo (the future Pope Paul II), who seems to have inherited the bulk of del Monte’s huge library. Though some manuscripts (that Rundle speculates had been left behind in Brescia) also went to…

Bartolomeo Malapiero (d.1464), Bishop of Brescia

When Bartolomeo Malapiero was made Bishop of Brescia in 1457 on del Monte’s , he bought some of his books and manuscripts. Yes, Malapiero too was a book collector: Rundle directs us to M. L. Gatti Perer and M. Marubbi (eds), “Tesori miniati: codici e incunaboli dei fondi antichi di Bergamo e Brescia” (Cinisello Balsamo, 199), pp.151-167.

On Malapiero’s death in 1464, a good part of his library became the property of the next Bishop of Brescia…

Domenico de’ Domenichi (1416–1478), Bishop of Brescia

When Domenico de’ Domenichi, formerly Bishop of Torcello, was made Bishop of Brescia, he received (what is now known as) Vat. Gr. 1291 from Bartolomeo Malapiero, as we can see from this note added to it:

Hic liber e[st] mei dominici dedominicis ueneti epi[scopi] brixen[si] et fuit ex
libris. bonae memoriae dom[ini] bartolomej epi[scopi] predecesso[ris] mei et allatus est
mi[hi] ex brixia Roma[m] 1465 de mense septembris

We also know from this (now-lost but held on the Wayback Machine) web page I found back in 2002:

Before being acquired by Fulvio Orsini, the codex belonged to two bishops of Brescia, Bartalomeo Malipiero (1457-1464) and Domenic Dominici (1464-1478); the latter brought it to Rome in September 1465.

For the source of this information, the author (Luigi Michelini Tocci) cites “F. Boll. In « Sitzungsberichte der… Akad. Der Wissenshaften zu München », 1899, pp. 110-138; Lazarev, Pittura, cit., p. 110“.

However, there is no indication in the marginalia of where (or from whom) Bartolomeo Malapiero got it from. It could (possibly) have been Malapiero’s predecessor Pietro del Monte: but given that de’ Domenichi himself didn’t seem to know, perhaps we shall never know either.

De’ Domenichi was a very interesting character: as a well-known orator and theologian and yet also a humanist, he embodies many of the complexities of Renaissance thought. He was also a prolific book author and letter-writer, with an interest in astronomy and astrology: according to this online Italian biography of him:

He shared the general humanist interest in astronomy and astrology, and he himself wrote on these topics in some partly lost works. On 13th June 1456, upon the appearance of a comet, he wrote Iudicium comete visi in urbe romana, now conserved in two copies in the Herzog-August-Bibliothek of Wolfenbüttel (Germany): cod. Guelf. 42.3 Aug. fol. and cod. Guelf. 71.21 Aug. fol., in which he lays out his thoughts on these celestial phenomena. There is also a Quaestio de Sibyllis (Kristeller, Iter, I, p. 152). In his library could also be found manuscripts of astronomy, such as astronomical Tabulae and Ptolemy’s Almagest, Flores ex Almagesto and De astronomia of Geber Hispalensis, as well as the Tabulae [resolutae] of John of Gmunden.

Bibliography on Domenico de’ Domenichi (1416–1478)

De’ Domenichi was (I’m sure you’re seeing a pattern here) also a book collector: as a source on the bibliophilic side of his life, Rundle suggests C. Villa, “Brixiensia”, Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 20 (1977), pp. 243-275. (Which I haven’t yet seen.)

There are two other books I also haven’t yet seen, both of which are, inevitably, tremendously expensive:

* Hubert Jedin, Studien über Domenico de’Domenichi (1416–1478)
* Martin Ederer (2003) “Humanism, Scholasticism and the Theology and Preaching of Domenico De’ Domenichi in the Italian Renaissance” (Ederer tenaciously tracked down 105 of de’ Domenichi’s Latin sermons from archives scattered through Europe, and included two appendixes: “Domenico de’ Domenichi’s Treatises and Letters: Synopsis of Codices”, and “A Finding-List of Domenico de’ Domenichi’s Treatises and Letters”)

Where Next For de’ Domenichi?

What I’ve written above is as far as I reached on the subject: the next step would be to use Ederer’s Finding List to track down his letters, and to see if de’ Domenichi mentioned Vat. Gr. 1291 anywhere there. Given that Regiomontanus was in Rome at exactly the same time, I would have thought that a nice-looking copy of the Handy Tables would have been like astronomical catnip to him: so there might be plenty of interest there from a history of science and astronomy aspect that the more theological biographers might not have teased out to date.

But without a day at the British Library to go through Villa’s, Jedin’s, and Ederer’s works, that’s as far as this goes for now, sorry. 😐

Searching and researching…

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There are now many people who would happily classify themselves as ‘online researchers’. You don’t usually have to peer too far beyond the end of your mouse to see their forum comments, web pages, blog posts, YouTube videos, and occasionally even self-published meisterwerke.

Even though most of these people probably consider that they are engaged in serious research, is that actually the case? What is the difference between serious research and non-serious research? Is there even a difference at all? And (as I heard proposed recently) if there is a difference, surely it’s nothing more than a matter of intelligence, persistence, and luck?

Well… I have to say that that’s a position I can’t agree with at all.

Pay Per Click

Someone clicking on thousands of web pages or running a load of statistical tests can certainly be said to be searching, but this is really not the same thing as researching.

Think about this: how would your behaviour change if every click were to cost you five pounds? Yet in many ways, each click probably does: in terms of the computers you use, the mice you burn up, the broadband you rent, and (arguably the costliest of all) the portion of your life it consumes without returning anything to you. You don’t have to be a full-blown Marxist economist to see that the main thing being eaten away by this kind of activity is you.

The first main difference between searching and researching, then, is that a researcher needs to have an aim to guide his or her actions: every click needs to earn its keep. And the two basic planning tools that help researchers achieve this are research questions and research programmes.

Research Questions

Luckily there is no shortage of web pages that define and discuss research questions, because research questions often have to be included in requests for academic funding. But in many ways, though, given that researching may (being brutally realistic) come to absorb so much of your spare time / life, perhaps you should think of forming a research question as part of making a funding request to your (rational) self. No funding body would ever back someone whose research plan was just to read / try a load of stuff, so why should you back yourself to do the same?

As this web page puts it:

You may have found your topic, but within that topic you must find a question, which identifies what you hope to learn. Finding a question sounds serendipitous, but research questions need to be shaped and crafted.

As a rule, making your research question too general, too wide-ranging or too ‘loose’ is almost always unhelpful, because it means that you will struggle to ever reach an answer for it: too tight and it can come close to being tautologous. There’s a further balance to be had between the availability of evidence and the ‘speculativeness’ of the question: though it has to be said that once you’ve put together your first research question, forming others becomes a lot easier.

Even if your chosen topic is a very evidence-sparse and/or epistemologically uncertain field, you can still form practical research questions (though admittedly doing so can be a little bit less straightforward than in other, more mainstream fields). For example, in the field of Voynich Manuscript research, a partial list of the research questions I personally have pursued over the past 15+ years could contain:

* Using best-in-class Art History dating techniques, when was the Voynich Manuscript made?
* What was the original order of the Voynich Manuscript’s bifolios?
* What did the Voynich Manuscript look like in its ‘alpha’ (original) state?
* Were any parts of the original Voynich text laid down in separate codicological passes?
* Is there a direct mapping relationship between Currier A text structures and Currier B text structures?
* Is there a relationship between the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac section and the Volkskalender B family of manuscripts?
* What was the nature of fifteenth century cryptography?
* Might Antonio Averlino have been the author of the Voynich Manuscript?
* What happened between the vellum’s first being written on and the Voynich Manuscript’s reappearance in Prague?
* What did the f116v marginalia originally look like?
* Where did the f116v marginalia handwriting come from?
* Might there have been a relationship between the Voynich Manuscript and the Rosicrucian manifestos?

Note that none of the above is a ‘why’ question: all were specific enough – I hoped when I formed them – for an answer to be reached, though most have still proved to be slower to bring to a fully satisfactory conclusion than I would have chosen. 😐

Note also that a number of the above (though not all) are constructed around hypotheses: while some people are comfortable with hypotheses, others are less so. Regardless, I think it’s important to point out that a good research question need not explicitly include or rely on a hypothesis.

(I’ll leave it as an open question how many other Voynich Manuscript researchers have genuinely formed explicit research questions and research programmes: doubtless you will have your own view on this.)

Research Programmes

Following the logic through, it should be obvious that constructing a research question is only the first half of the planning stage. What you then need to do is to construct a research programme around that research question, to try to help you turn it into a focused series of practical actions you can work your way through in order to reach a worthwhile answer.

Here’s a useful list of questions to help you build this up:

* What literature should you review? (What kind of idiot would not build up a picture of the literature first?)
* What evidence can you rely on in your research?
* What similar research questions have been posed before?
* What answers did those researchers reach? (And what did approach did they follow to reach them?)
* Are there related or parallel fields where similarly-structured research questions have been posed?
* How much time and money do you want to invest in to answer this question?
* What process can you follow to move you closer to an answer?
* Are there others you can usefully collaborate with?
* Are there open source tools or data you can work with (or help develop) that would help?
* If your question is based on an hypothesis, what steps can you take to avoid presuming it is true along the way?
* How can you make sure the answer you reach will be based on causality and not merely on statistical correlation?

Trying to answer these questions (and others like it) should help you work out how you plan to reach a reliable, useful answer to your research question.

Note that “research projects” are the short term subsections you would typically decompose a medium term research programme into so as to make it achievable: project is to programme as chapter is to book.

Planning vs Action

At the end of this whole planning stage, you should have not only a research question that you’re trying to answer, but also a practical plan – i.e. some research means to help you try to reach an answer to your chosen research question.

And so it should be clear that the final difference between searching and researching is that researching requires both a pre-planning phase and some kind of systematic action.

Without conscious pre-planning and some kind of systematic research programme to guide you, you’re searching rather than researching, blindly casting your rod out into a vast evidential ocean. You might occasionally catch a fish, sure: but don’t be surprised if you go home hungry more often than not. :-/

A Cisiojanus July Voynich crib?

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Following the Volkskalender and Cisiojanus logical train of thought to its next station along, the question comes whether there might be any other information we have about the Voynich zodiac nymphs that could give us a second angle to drive down, to form a kind of pincer attack.

Alert Cipher Mysteries readers might swiftly point out here that there is indeed one particular zodiac nymph that might be of interest. This is the crowned nymph on the Leo page, which I first discussed here back in 2015.

voynich-crown-in-leo

(Note that the Voynich Manuscript has two other crowned zodiac nymphs, one in Cancer and the other in Libra: but in both of these cases, the crown seems to have been added as a separate codicological layer.)

If (as I’m currently wondering) the zodiac section is ultimately some kind of embellished Volkskalender month tables, then it might well prove to be that case that this crowned Leo nymph is flagging a saint’s day or a feast day that had particular significance to the Voynich Manuscript’s composer / author / compiler.

And given that the fifteenth century Volkskalender tradition normally placed the Leo zodiac roundel on the page for July, a reasonable starting point would surely be examining Saint’s days (memorials) or feast days in July during the fifteenth century.

Saint’s Days in July

So what feast days are there in July? Sadly, the scribe of the Volkskalender I was looking at before got bored of copying the Cisiojanus syllables by the time he got to July, so we’ll instead start with the version from the German Cisiojanus Wikipedia page:

júl proces údal oc wíl ¦ kili frá bene márgar apóst al
árnolfús prax mág ¦ ap chríst jacobíque sim ábdon

The (1430) Kalendarium in Ms. GkS 79 2° in Copenhagen’s Royal Library has a nice clear Cisiojanus July list, transcribed here by Erik Drigsdahl as:

1. Iul – (Jul(i))
2. **** pro – Processio Marie
3. ces
4. o – (Odalrici ep.cf.)
5. dal
6. oc – (Octava apostolorum)
7. et – @@@@
8. ki – (Kiliani m.)
9. li
10. fra – (Septem fratrum)
11. be – (Benedicti abb.)
12. ne
13. **** mar – Margarete v.
14. gar
15. **** ap – Divisio apostolorum
16. pos-
17. tol – @@@@
18. Ar – (Arnulphi ep.)
19. nol-
20. phus
21. prax – (Praxedis v.)
22. **** Mag – Maria Magdalene
23. ap – (Apollinaris ep.)
24. cris – (Cristine v.)
25. **** ia – Jacobi ap.
26. co-
27. bi
28. pan – (Pantaleonis m.) – @@@@
29. **** oll – (Ollego) – @@@@
30. ab – Abdon (et Sennen mr.)
31. don.

For the sake of clarity, lines with @@@@ are slightly different from the Wikipedia Cisiojanus, while lines starting **** and marked here in bold were originally marked in red (“rubricated”) in the 1430 Kalendarium to indicate that they were feast days:
* 2nd July – The Visitation of The Blessed Virgin Mary
* 13th July – St Margaret of Antioch (I believe “v.” is short here for ‘virginis et martyris’)
* 15th July – The Dispersion of the Apostles
* 22nd July – St Mary Magdalene
* 25th July – St James the Greater (the Apostle)
* 29th July – St Ollego (a saint local to the Hainaut region, according to this analysis of Ms. GkS 79 2°, but given that the Cisiojanus mnemonics were copied and adapted all across Europe, I’d point out that it’s difficult to know whether this was added here or copied as-is from a previous document’s Cisiojanus mnemonic)

The Candidates

2nd July: The Visitation of The Blessed Virgin Mary is always going to be a likely feast to link a crowned nymph to: but there are other Marian feasts throughout the year, and why don’t they too have a similar crown?

13th July: this is the Greek feast day of St Margaret of Antioch (known there as St Marina, but normally celebrated in the West on 20th July). St Margaret was one of the saints who spoke (posthumously) to Joan of Arc. “Her remains were […] divided between shrines in Montefiascone and Venice”: many cults grew up around her, Exeter also claiming to have her skull, for example.

According to this site:

She prayed at her death that women in childbirth would, upon calling on her, be safely delivered of their child as she had been delivered from the belly of the dragon. She is also known as the patron saint of women, nurses, and peasants. She also intercedes for those who call on her from their deathbed.

15th July: The Dispersion of the Apostles doesn’t strike me as a particularly crownable feast: but perhaps some may think otherwise. It is what it is.

22nd July: oddly, even though in the modern Catholic Church this is a feast day (St Mary Magdalene), this was only made so by Pope Francis: before 2013, it was only a memorial day. Yet from the above, it would seem that it was (locally) considered to be a feast day.

“Da Vinci Code” and “Holy Blood Holy Grail” (etc) aside, there would seem to be moderately good reason to consider that what we are looking at here might be specifically to do with Mary Magdalene. She was, according to this Catholic site:

Patron of contemplative life, converts, glove makers, hairdressers, penitent sinners, people ridiculed for their piety, perfumeries, pharmacists, sexual temptation, tanners, women.

25th July: St James the Greater. He was “the patron saint of veterinarians and pharmacists”. So it would seem as though late medieval pharmacists were spoilt for choice as to which Saint to place their trust in. But was he crownable? I’m not sure.

29th July: St Ollego (presumably Oleg, perhaps a Polish saint?) I don’t know anything about.

And So My Candidate Cribs Are…

Putting all the above together, the most likely crib for the crowned Leo nymph’s label would seem to be one of:
* “pro” (for “Processio Marie”), [though I suspect this may be the weakest of the three]
* “mar” (for St Margaret of Antioch), or
* “mag” (for St Mary Magdalene)

This may not sound like much at first, but when you combine these possibilities with the labels that appear for adjacent nymphs, it may well yield surprisingly fruitful results. Hopefully we shall see… 🙂

Volkskalender manuscripts and Cisiojanus feast-day mnemonics…

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I thought I’d post up a quick thought that came to me just now while looking at Fribourg Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Ms. L 309 (which is yet another volkskalender, naturally). There, the page for January (f2r) begins as follows (top left):

Here, underlined in green (by me), you can see the first two big feasts of the year – 1st January (“Circumcisio Domini”) and 6th January (“Epiphania Domini”). You can also see (beneath the green arrow) the famous “Cisiojanus” mnemonic, one syllable per day.

Cisiojanus

I first posted about “Cisiojanus” back in 2009, after Steve Herbelin had suggested that the circular diagram on Voynich Manuscript page f67r2 might possibly contain at least some of it in its text. What’s particularly interesting here is that while the usual version of the mnemonic begins…

  1. cí → circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision
  2. si → (continuation)
  3. o → (continuation)
  4. ján → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  5. us → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  6. ep → epiphanias, Epiphany
  7. í → (continuation)
  8. si → (null)
  9. bi → (null)

…what we see in Ms L 309 is subtly different…

  1. cí → circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision
  2. si → (continuation)
  3. o → (continuation)
  4. ján → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  5. us → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  6. ep → epiphanias, Epiphany
  7. í → (continuation)
  8. er → erhard, short for St. Erhard of Regensburg (whose feast day is 8th January)
  9. hard → (continuation)

What seems to me to have happened here is that the Cisiojanus mnemonic had, in a previous version of the same calendar, been adapted for a south-western German audience. That is, the otherwise meaningless “si-bi” syllable pair in the original version had been replaced by “er-hard” to include the local saint’s name, so that his 8th January feast day would be remembered and celebrated in the couplet. And yet the scribe copying this particular manuscript didn’t seem to know who St Erhard was (he was an Irish missionary to Bavaria, who later became “auxiliary bishop of Ratisbon and possibly the abbot of Ebersheimmunstet Abbey“), because he miscopied the feast name as “Erhandi”. *sigh*

As background, the Fribourg description for Ms L 309 says that it came from “Sud-ouest de l’Allemagne“, and that the calendar section (starting on f2r) was “Très probablement du diocèse de Constance ou de Bâle; une main cursive du XVe s. a introduit dans les mois d’octobre et novembre des célébrations typiquement lausannoises (par exemple la dédicace de Lausanne au 20 oct. et S. Himier au 12 nov.).” So if this is correct, it would seem that we can loosely map the transmission path from this document from south-east Germany (where Regensburg is, in Bavaria) to south / south-west Germany, purely on the basis of the Cisiojanus adaptation.

Hence what I’m starting to think is that, zodiac crossbowmen aside, there may well be a large number of internal local features – e.g. local adaptations to the Cisiojanus mnemonic, along with local feasts and many others – that we could sensibly use to determine the transmission paths and relationships between Volkskalender B documents. It’ll need a little more consideration, for sure, but this could very easily be moving in the right kind of direction.

And finally… Voynich labels, perhaps?

Doubtless this has been suggested before (though a brief check revealed nothing)… but could it be that the Voynich zodiac labels actually hold nothing more than the syllables of a Cisiojanus mnemonic? If so, then as long as you have the right month – and the right local adaptation of the mnemonic, of course – a modern codebreaker might possibly be able to use the zodiac labels on that page as a “block paradigm” match (though you’d also need some good guesses about the correct order and direction of the circular rings of labels to follow).

For example: even though the Voynich Pisces zodiac page has “marc / mars” written over it, I suspect that the month accompanying it is in fact more likely (based on those places where Volkskalender B zodiac roundels accompany months) to be February. In which case, one version (given on the German Cisiojanus Wikipedia page) of the February Cisiojanus rhyme is:

brí pur blásus ag dór ¦ febru áp scolástica válent
júli cónjungé ¦ tunc pétrum mátthiam índe

Don’t say I don’t spoil you with good stuff. 🙂

Brévart’s “Volkskalender B” family of manuscripts…

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A few days ago, when discussing the way that the Sagittarius crossbowman appears in similar fifteenth century manuscripts, I wrote that it was clear to me “that we are looking at a family of manuscripts with many similar features“, and that I suspected “the real historical heavy lifting – building a complete list of these fifteenth century manuscripts, and then deriving a cladistic tree linking them all together – must have been done already“.

With some initial help from Jürgen W. in Cambridge (thank you very much!), and then a little further assistance from (the now-retired) Professor Francis B. Brévart himself, I believe I now have the basic literature framework in place that forms the backdrop to what we seem to be looking at. It will take a lot more work to fill out the picture more satisfactorily, but what follows should bring anyone interested in what I’m writing about up to speed.

German Volkskalender

There are a large number of (largely fifteenth century) manuscripts and incunabula that cover broadly the same set of material: tables of Saints days, tables for calculating the position of the moon over its 19-year Metonic cycle, tables showing unlucky days (e.g. when not to undergo bloodletting, cupping, etc), lucky days (e.g. “guldin zal”), days to take baths, days to avoid hot baths, etc. Some also have extensive sections on the signs of the zodiac and the planets: many are bound along with similar documents. As a genre, this is almost exclusively German, though a handful of Old French versions have survived.

The first person to try to properly catalogue these documents was Ernst Zinner, in his (1925) “Verzeichnis der astronomischen Handschriften des deutschen Kulturgebietes” (though with three later addenda in 1952, 1962, 1964). Their contents were often copied one from the other (though with frequent differences), but as I understand it Zinner was more interested in collating the raw bibliographical data rather than trying to offer a cladistic synthesis of them all.

The specific name Zinner gave to these fifteenth century texts was “Volkskalender“, as a loose analogy to a separate series of much later (mainly 18th century) calendars. Despite the many substantial differences between the two series of documents (and the protests from other historians, who rightly point out that these calendars were necessarily expensive, and so probably had little to do with ordinary volks at all), the name has stuck.

All the same, the bibliographic references for individual documents may well refer to them as “Iatromathematisches Hausbuch”, or “Hausbuch”, or any number of different names. Brévart (1996) is fairly scathing about the definitional hole some historians have dug themselves into here: but all that needs to be said is that they’re all essentially talking about the same group.

Brévart’s two families

Professor Francis B. Brévart spent many years looking at these specific manuscripts. From our point of view, his two most significant publications were:

* “The German Volkskalender of the Fifteenth Century” [via JSTOR], in Speculum 63 (1988), pp.312-342.
* “Chronology and Cosmology. A German Volkskalender of the Fifteenth Century,” The Princeton Library Chronicle (1996), pp.225-265.

While Brévart 1988 discusses the contents of the manuscripts and introduces the two main families these fall into, Brévart 1996 includes a substantial list of the manuscripts in the two families. You really need to read both papers to get a clear picture of these manuscripts. Thankfully they combine erudition, attention to detail, and clarity of expression: very highly recommended.

The single document from which all the others ultimately derived was an extended Kalendarium compiled by Johannes Wissbier of Gmund between 1404 and 1405. Brévart refers to the more than thirty manuscripts directly descended from this as his “Volkskalender A” family. However, Brévart 1988 continues:

“During the third decade of the fifteenth century a totally different version of the Volkskalender came into being. In addition to the Kalendarium and the treatises on cosmology, the signs, and the planets found in Wissbier’s work, it included various other texts- for example, on the labors of the months, the four temperaments, phlebotomy, bathing, purging, and the unlucky days.”

This separate set, comprising more than twenty documents, is what Brévart calls the “Volkskalender B” family. This is the family we should be most interested in.

Brévart’s “Volkskalender B” family

Brévart 1996 lists (pp.250-254) twenty-six Volkskalender B documents (though also giving a useful mini-bibliography on each one, which I have not reproduced here):

* Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Ms. germ. 2° 1069 [link]
* Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Ms. germ. 4° 20 [link?]
* Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Hdschr. 319 [link]
* Edinburgh: The Library of the Royal Observatory, Ms. Crawford 4.6. (olim 9.14-5.14) [1478]
* Einsiedeln: Stiftsbibliothek Hs. 297 [1498] [link]
* Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek Cod. B 27 (olim Irm. 1365) [link]
* Frankfurt: Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Ms germ, qu. 17 [link]
* Heidelberg: Universitätsbibliothek Cpg 291
* Heidelberg: Universitätsbibliothek Cpg 298 (“and 831” [?])
* Heidelberg: Universitätsbibliothek Cpg 557
* Karlsruhe: Badische Landesbibliothek Cod. 494 (olim Donaüschingen, Fürstlich-Fürstenbergische Hofbibliothek) [1443]
* London: British Library Ms. Add. 17987 [Warburg lo-res photos] [1446] [link]
* London: University College Ms germ. 1 [1471] [link] [UCL description]
* Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 28 [c.1440] [link]
* Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 349 [c.1480] [link]
* Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 730 [c.1500] [link]
* Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 736 [c.1465] [link]
* Munich: Universitätsbibliothek 2° Cod. ms. 578 [1474] [link]
* Nuremberg: Staatsarchiv Hs. 426 [1430] [link]
* Prag: Narodni Muzeum Schlossbibliothek Krivoklat Cod. Ie7 (51.996)
* St. Gallen: Stiftsbibliothek Cod. 760
* Tübingen: Evangelisches Stift Msc. 17 [1462]
* Vienna: Oesterrichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 3085
* Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek Cod. 264.5 Extravagantes [1491] [link]
* Würzburg: Universitätsbibliothek Cod. M.p.med.f.5 [c.1450] [link]
* Zurich: Zentralbibliothek Ms. C 54 [c.1465] [link]

It’s possible that there are several more manuscripts in this family that escaped Brévart’s roving eye, e.g. this one as mentioned by René Zandbergen (though Brévart categorises it as a Volkskalender A family member):

* Planeten-Buch – BSB Cgm 7269, Konstanz, [BSB-Hss Cgm 7269] [1463]

The Sagittarius Crossbowman link

Why should anyone be interested in this family of documents? Simply because these contain almost all the roundel images of Sagittarius-the-zodiac-sign where what is normally depicted as an archer is instead depicted as a crossbowman.

Personally, I’m very much convinced by the previously-made suggestion that the crossbowman image in some of these documents was accidentally copied from a roundel of Sagittarius-the-constellation: and so it seems to be a very strong possibility that the Sagittarius crossbowman depicted in the Voynich Manuscript was copied from a member of the Volkskalender B family.

Moving forward, the idea would be to try to work out the relationships between these 26+ documents, and then see how the Voynich Manuscript’s section fits in to that tree. There are bound to be copies missing from the tree, for sure: but it seems to me that just about the surest way we will ever have to understand the Voynich Manuscript’s “zodiac” section is by carefully placing it in the context of Brévart’s “Volkskalender B” family, and seeing what we learn.

A solved pigeon cipher mystery (from 1952)…

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Because Trove holds newspaper articles all the way up to 1954, you occasionally stumble across interesting stories from around the world picked up by Australian newspapers. And because I’ve been raking over the various editions of the Truth, my virtual path has recently been littered with such things (though admittedly slightly racier and more gossipy than the dear old Adelaide ‘Tizer).

We surely all know about the Somerton Man: so here’s a link to the Truth’s take on the story, including this photo:

Another mysterious man was found near a beach on 2nd July 1949 (said the Truth elsewhere). However, this quickly turned out to be 23-year-old ex-soldier David John Wicks. He had been working as a yardsman at the Pineapple Hotel on Kangaroo Point: it seemed likely he had died as a result of having previously contracted malaria. Doubtless people will construct conspiracy stories around Kangaroo Point (which has appeared a fair few times here). *sigh*

Much more recently, yet another mysterious man found at Poona Dam at Nambour, 9th September 2008: “apart from the smiley face message, the only other thing in his wallet was an old Plains Video Kingaroy rental card.” A reconstructed picture of his face looked like this:

Again, a possible breakthrough was made earlier this year, when a man came forward to report that his brother Charles Rawlins was missing:

But what about the pigeon, Nick?

Ah, yes, sorry about that. The Truth related the tale of a pigeon-based cipher mystery so straightforwardly that it would be churlish not to quote it in full:

The Brisbane Truth 28th September 1952, p.34

ALL DUTCH TO EXPERTS

LONDON, Sat.— A carrier pigeon landed on the deck of an American cruiser during the recent ‘Exercise Mainbrace,’ the North Atlantic Treaty Powers’ manoeuvres. It bore a peculiar message.
No cyphers could be found to fit it. So the captain decided to rush it to headquarters. There, code experts got to work on it.
After seven hours it remained unbroken. It was a perfect code. Code breaking machines were put to work on it — no result!
Then it came into the hands of a Scottish sub-lieutenant: ‘It’s written in Gaelic,’ he pronounced.

The Secret History of Typex QQQQQ…

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A few years ago, while giving a talk at Westminster Under School on the WW2 pigeon cipher, I mentioned that (a) Typex messages were sent in groups of five letters; and (b) when some German codebreakers looked at intercepted Typex messages early on in the war, they noticed that the last letter of each cryptogram was almost never X.

I then asked the Westminster boys what the Germans inferred from this (which was actually an incredibly subtle and difficult question). I was thoroughly delighted when a quiet high voice at the back suggested that the Germans could have concluded that they were looking at an Enigma-class machine encryption, where the last letter group was padded out with Xs.

Indeed, our young future head of GCHQ was right: the space bar on the Typex keyboard was attached to the X key, and operators typically used spaces (i.e. Xs) to pad out the final message group to a multiple of five letters.

Separately, German codebreaker Otto Buggisch also noticed early on in the war that the first three letters of RAF Typex messages were almost never A, I, and R respectively: though Buggisch deemed his obervation to have “no practical significance”.

All the same, this is a good example of bad enciphering practice (because stereotyped contents such as HEILHITLER or KEINEBESONDERENEREIGNISSE leave all cipher systems exposed), and goes to show that Britain started the war with cipher practices that were essentially no better or worse than Germany’s.

Yet if we have a look at the secret history of the QQQQQ group as used in Typex messages, we find something that might help us to (eventually) reveal the contents of a well-known cipher mystery…

The British Navy and Typex

ADM 1-27186 tells us in good detail how Typex cipher practice changed in the British Navy through the war years.

The Navy started with the same set of five black rotors used by the Army: the machine setting keys specified which drums to use, and were initially constant for a week, but on 2nd September 1940 were changed every day. A further two red rotors were added on 1st June 1941, giving a choice of seven rotors.

At first, the per-message drum settings were chosen at random by the operator and “the actual initial setting of the drums was transmitted as the first and last groups of the message or message section”. “Message sections were limited, for security reasons, to 60-70 groups, after which a new message section was chosen. Sections were separated by groups of five Q’s.”

Hence the first appearance of QQQQQ in Naval Typex messages was as a plaintext separator between message sections. That is, a typical long message would look as follows, where ABCDE was the (raw) indicator of the first message section and LMNOP was the (raw) indicator of the second message section:

ABCDE ….. [60+ groups] ….. ABCDE QQQQQ LMNOP ….. [more groups] ….. LMNOP

Buggisch also recalled that some Typex-related documents found at Dunkirk (along with a rotor-less Typex machine, and perhaps a reflector) mentioned “an English cipher security officer point[ing] out that he has noticed frequent breaches of the strict regulation that wheels should be turned on at random after a message has been enciphered”.

On 1st November 1941, however, Navy operators’ freedom to choose their own settings was curtailed, and books of disguised message settings were introduced in the Navy: at the same time, the practice of using QQQQQ as a section separator ceased.

After 1st March 1942, the optional use of Typex plugboards was indicated by FIELD at the start of messages.

1st February 1943 saw the introduction of two sets of seven new rotors wired specifically for the Navy, called “Code X” (for normal secure traffic) and “Cypher X” (for more secure traffic with plugboards), and where the original seven drums were still used for Inter-service traffic. Then:

On the 29th December, 1943, following a further review of Typex security, which amongst other things showed this system was particularly vulnerable to cryptographic attack from stereotyped beginnings, a revised procedure for concealing the start of the text was brought into force. From this date, the first ten to fifteen words of the subject matter were buried in the text, in addition to the address.

A new (and somewhat cumbersome) doubly-enciphered message setting procedure was introduced on 1st February 1944: but this was broadly balanced out by extra latitude when dealing with multiple message sections. Now “message sections were once again distinguished by the self-evidence group of five Q’s with the added proviso, however, that after each such group the right hand drum must be rotated one place before encyphering was continued.”

Finally:

In April 1944, the cyclic procedure was introduced as a security measure in the cyphering of short messages which, by reason of their brevity, were unsuited to the “buried address” procedure.

I don’t know what “the cyclic procedure” was, all suggestions gratefully received. 🙂

The British Army and Typex

Christos has a good page on the Typex, with scans of HW 40/89: ‘Typex questionnaire’:

From this, we know that at the very start of the war, each Typex rotor contained 14 “large” letters (of 26), where operator-set random settings could only use these large letters: but this restriction disappeared in mid-1940.

Codress burying (i.e. concealed coded addresses) was introduced on 1st January 1941, while disguised message settings were introduced on 19th May 1941, some six months before the Navy did the same.

A letter-shift procedure was introduced on 1st Feb 1944, and a figure/letter shift procedure on 1st September 1944: these were introduced in the Navy on the same dates.

The Royal Air Force and Typex

It was the RAF who invented Typex: but the amount of RAF-related Typex information I have found is quite small.

However, Stuart Rutter once posted some scans (now only in the Wayback Machine) from the February 1943 user manual for the (mostly) portable Typex Mk VI (which is what I suspect was used in the field for the Pigeon Cipher):

Preparation of message for transmission – Withdraw and detach the tape from the message printer and insert in manuscript, as the first group, the disguised message setting used at the commencement of the message. If the message is complete in one section write this disguised message setting and groups of five Q’s must be inserted appropriately in the spaces left for that purpose. Each section must begin and end with the disguised message setting, in manuscript, appropriate to it. The tape should then be gummed to a message form so that there are ten groups in each line. This is done in order to facilitate the counting of the total number of groups.

It’s not as clear as in the other cases how the QQQQQ section should be used, but it’s there nonetheless.

Can Love Conquer All?

Dufty recounts (chapter 43) a charming “cryptological love story” about two lovelorn Typex operators separated by General McArthur’s push North, who would occasionally hide messages to each other at the start of Typex messages.

The way they had been trained to use Typex was to write some filler nonsense text at the start (presumably the “ten to fifteen words” mentioned in the Navy account), followed by an (enciphered) QQQQQ separator, followed by the address and finally the actual message contents. Because the filler text was stripped out of the message at the far end before being passed onwards, the operators had just enough latitude to insert their own messages.

Incidentally, it’s not clear to me whether this QQQQQ was always added at a five-letter boundary or whether it could appear at any position: I strongly suspect the former, so it could prove valuable to find out from any still-living Typex operators if this is correct. (Perhaps I’ll ask David Dufty if he would be so kind as to ask one of the Australian Typex operators he interviewed.)

The reason this might be interesting to us is that if (as has seemed reasonably likely to me for some time) the Pigeon Cipher was sent on D-Day (6th June 1944), their Australian love messages in the margins were being sent at about the same time.

And so it may well be that the Pigeon Cipher’s internal structure includes a short filler section and a (plaintext) QQQQQ block, followed by a single extra step on the rightmost rotor: and only then the actual message.

Cryptanalyzing QQQQQ?

The introduction of a filler header plus a QQQQQ separator to Typex messages certainly had the effect of hiding stereotyped beginnings, which was a positive lesson learned from attacking Enigma.

Yet had German cryptanalysts had a reflector and a set of Typex rotors to work with (which they very nearly did on a number of occasions, most notably in Dunkirk and in Tobruk, and there was even a “North African Story” that claimed that they did), could they have exploited (later in the war) the presence of plaintext QQQQQ to crack messages, perhaps with some Bombe-like machine assistance?

Kelly Chang’s (2012) dissertation on the cryptanalysis of Typex is silent on this: Chang treats Typex messages as if they were flat, uniform text messages (i.e. ‘pure’ Typex), which – as we can see from all the above – they were often not.

So, if a Typex message contains plaintext QQQQQ, where would it be? A first trick is to note that because we also know that Q cannot encipher to itself on both Enigma and Typex machines, we need not search for QQQQQ anywhere in a Typex message where Q appears: that is, we can sometimes see where QQQQQ isn’t. And if it turns out that the practice was to only place QQQQQ on five-letter boundaries in the plaintext, we need not check any ciphertext block containing a Q.

Furthermore, given a day’s collection of intercepted Typex messages (which would all have the same rotors selected), a German codebreaker could select the message with the most (random) instances of Q in the top part of the message, so as to sharply reduce the number of places to brute-force search for QQQQQ (because each Q instance in the ciphertext would ‘knock out’ itself and four preceding positions to check).

Curiously, in the case of the Pigeon Cipher, if we colour blue the five-letter indicator groups at the start and end, and colour red all the instances of the letter Q…

…you immediately notice that the third line (“PABUZ WYYNP …..”) contains no letter Q instances at all. This may just be a coincidence, of course: but I personally would be unsurprised if that line turned out to contain QQQQQ in the plaintext somewhere.

If this is right, do we now have enough to break the Pigeon Cipher? I’m not yet sure: but I suspect we’re starting to move closer to a position where we can reduce the search space by millions (if not billions) of times. And at some point, perhaps we’ll have reduced it enough to be able to sensibly set a search in motion… we shall see, fingers crossed!

Review of “The Secret Code-Breakers of Central Bureau”…

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Australian writer David Dufty’s just-released (2017) “The Secret Code-Breakers of Central Bureau” attempts to be two things at once: a hard-nosed revisionist cryptologic history of the Second World War in the Pacific, and a disarmingly charming series of Australian vignettes glimpsing behind the Ultra curtain.

Central Bureau

Central Bureau was the (deliberately anonymous-sounding) name given to a large part of Australia’s WW2 code-breaking apparatus: yet as the war dragged on, the politicking and turf wars caused an enormous amount of fragmentation.

Dufty tries to treat this deftly, but the networks of internal intrigue and alliances read too much like subtly broken org charts to make sense as mere words on a page. (Some diagrams would be a helpful addition for the paperback release, in my opinion.)

Japanese Navy codes, Army codes, Water Transport codes, ground-to-air codes, sea-to-air codes: all of these were tackled and defeated. Yet even though the theoretical structure and nature of some were worked out early on (e.g. JN-25 by John Tiltman), the codes themselves and the additive tables used to scramble them were subject to change. So the practical cryptologic work never ended, right up to the end of the War.

What is clear throughout Dufty’s book is that historians (OK, mostly American historians) have to date failed to present a balanced picture including Australian cryptological contributions to the war in the Pacific. Sadly, this imbalance was further hindered by the hostile attitude of many Australians (particularly politicians) to non-operational veterans in the post-war period.

I’m pleased to say that Dufty’s historical research and grasp of the realpolitik going on (particularly between the USA and Australia) rings much truer than other accounts I have read: the tricky balance between being aware of Ultra information and acting upon that same information is a leitmotif that runs through his narrative.

Star Rating

As an historical account of practical code-breaking under fire, then, the book gets a 4-star Cipher Mysteries rating: had it not got caught in the shifting sands of the multiple code-breaking organizations and agendas in the first half of the book, it might even have got to 4.5 stars.

But if your interests aren’t as, well, “code-breakery” as mine, and you’re happy to skim the chapters where the narrative gets a little bogged down in the details, there’s a lot of human interest – and yes, even cryptological love-stories in the margins of TypeX messages – to be had.

In short, it’s also a pretty good summer read (in Kindle format, because the hardback is too pricey for most budgets, and there is no softback edition as yet), though perhaps only for those who already know their substitution from their transposition. :-/

Cod. Sang. 760 and the “Iatromathematisches Hausbuch” Voynich hypothesis…

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An interesting-sounding document referred to by Alfred Martin in 1906 (pp.174-175, thanks to Stefan Mathys!) is Cod. Sang. 760, the contents of which the St Gallen archivists describe as follows:

This manuscript, illustrated with numerous colored pen drawings, originated in a secular environment in Southern Germany or in Switzerland around the middle of the 15th century. It describes the signs of the zodiac, the planets, the four temperaments, and the four seasons regarding their influence on human health. This is followed by dietary guidelines primarily regarding bloodletting, but also regarding eating, drinking, sleeping, waking, resting and moving, as well as, in concrete terms, regarding bathing (illustration p. 101) or defecating (illustration p. 120)

As to the manuscript’s origins, the archivists suggest:

Most likely an amateur doctor with an interest in astronomy, from the Southern region of Germany, wrote the original text around 1400 and assembled it into a compendium. Later the text was repeatedly supplemented and modified.

There are numerous reasons why I’m intrigued by Cod. Sang. 760: not only its zodiac roundels, but also the sun-moon roundels on adjacent pages, and the textual focus on all the things I’ve recently been wondering whether the Voynich zodiac pages encode – blood-letting, baths, clysters (enemas), etc.

“Iatromathematisches Hausbuch” manuscripts

Yet Cod. Sang. 760 (which was only digitized in 2014) is but one of a series of “Iatromathematisches Hausbuch” manuscripts, some of which were discussed on Stephen Bax’s site https://stephenbax.net/?p=1211 back in 2015, e.g.:

* Cod. Pal. Germ. 291

* Cod. Pal. Germ. 557

…and so forth. The 30-element list of Saint’s Days that appear on twelve pages at the start of these also appear in other manuscripts, perhaps most notably this one from Konstanz in 1463 (as mentioned by Rene):

* Planeten-Buch – BSB Cgm 7269, Konstanz, Anfang 15. Jh. bis 17. Jh. [BSB-Hss Cgm 7269]

What is interesting in CGM 7269 is that not only does the Sagittarius crossbowman appear, but also the image of two people in a bath (previously used to illustrate bathing) has been appropriated for the Gemini zodiac sign.

(There’s also Tübingen Md 2, MS Cod Sang 827, and Strasbourg Ms.2.120 to consider, etc.)

I could go on, but I hope the basic point – that we are looking at a family of manuscripts with many similar features – is clear.

The copied crossbowman hypothesis

I’m acutely aware that what follows is less of an outright answer than a provocation towards approaching an answer.

The first step is hypothesizing the origins of the Sagittarius crossbowman: I now feel quite sure that it was a copying error within the basic Iatromathematisches Hausbuch manuscript family, where a crossbowman roundel originally drawn to accompany the constellation Sagittarius was miscopied into the zodiac roundel accompanying the zodiac sign Sagittarius.

This is hardly a huge departure from what has been noted before, specifically when Rafal Prinke and Rene Zandbergen asked Prof. Ewa Sniezynska-Stolot of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and Prof. Dieter Blume (respectively) about this.

However, by positing the crossbowman drawing as a copying error, we can start to view the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac section not just as something visually influenced by a set of manuscripts, but as a member of the cladistic tree of a specific family of manuscripts.

The iatromathematical table/label hypothesis

Structurally, these iatromathematical housebooks have quite stylized layouts and contents. For example, they typically start with a nineteen-column computus table (which was no secret at all), followed by a set of twelve tables of Saint’s Days (I believe), with 30 elements in each list.

In the Planeten-Buch, these lists have further become associated with zodiac signs, in much the same way that we see in the Voynich Manuscript (albeit in a non-obvious way).

It would therefore seem reasonable to secondly hypothesize that the contents of these tables might have (in some way) ended up as the Voynich zodiac labels (e.g. using some combination of abbreviation and acrostic), i.e. from tables to labels.

Incidentally, this would be the kind of “block paradigm” match I’ve talked about for some time here. The reason I think it is of particular cryptographic interest is that there is good cryptanalytical reason to suspect that the Voynich’s “labelese” (i.e. the version of the text used to write labels) is only a subset of the ‘language(s)’ used to write the main text. As such, labelese may well be weaker and hence easier to break.

Where next?

So far, I have only looked at a handful of manuscripts, and from these have elicited only the outline of a research angle.

But the real historical heavy lifting – building a complete list of these fifteenth century manuscripts, and then deriving a cladistic tree linking them all together – must have been done already, surely?

Can I therefore again ask my German-speaking readers for their help, this time to dig up any literature looking at this family of manuscripts as a whole?

I’m sure it’s out there, but I haven’t yet found it. All pointers, tips and suggestions gratefully received! 🙂