Two up-to-the-minute papers on the Vinland Map (the Beinecke’s other “VM”) for your delectation and delight.
Firstly, a 2008 paper by Garman Harbottle called “The Vinland Map: a critical review of archaeometric research on its authenticity” in Archaeometry, 50, pp.177-89 – this tries to discredit / undermine the analytical & spectroscopic chemical analyses of the Vinland Map by McCrone (1974) and Clark (2004).
And secondly, a late-2008 paper by Kenneth Towe, Robin Clark and Kirsten Seaver that seeks to vigorously rebut Harbottle’s rebuttal (and, indeed, appears to succeed).
Much as I would like the tricky fragments of cipher on the Vinland Map (as best described by James Enterline) to be a genuine piece of late medieval cryptography (after all, this is a cipher history blog), and even though I suspect Towe, Clark and Seaver might have overreacted somewhat to Harbottle’s paper, the science currently does seem to be more on their side than on his. Hmmm… I really ought to review Kirsten Seaver’s (2004) book “Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vínland Map” (where she names her suspect as Joseph Fischer, though her argument has been criticized for lack of evidence) here soon… so much to read, so little time. Oh well! 🙁
For a recently updated (and generally very comprehensive) online discussion of the Vinland Map, I heartily recommend J. Huston McCulloch’s Vinland Map webpage.
Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is no strange to fakes and fraud. It appears that rare book dealers and snake oil salesmen are related.
If McCrone can be trusted the Vineland map is a fake and the original book was split and rebound. Yet the Beinecke has conducted other test and still believe it is real. What happened to Enzo Ferrajoli ? Why did the Beinecke stop the Voynich at one test ? Why not Raman microprobe spectroscopy ?
Did Wilfrid color the pages himself knowing collectors favored lluminated Manuscripts. Was it originaly the work of Joannes Annius of Viterbo ?
xplor: multispectral scans of various Voynich pages were carried out last year, but nothing has yet been published. I shall, of course, be at the front of the queue. 🙂
There’s also a lot to be said about the Vinland Map (I finally got round to reading Kirsten Seaver’s “Maps, Myths and Men” last year, but haven’t yet reviewed it here, because I need a better quality scan of the Vinland Map – and specifically of the Welsh coastline, as I recall – to illustrate the central issue upon which many of the questions of fakery turn).
I took off on Enzo Ferrajoli . What a colorful character.
Dante gave a clue about Joannes Annius of Viterbo.
‘In silence we had reached a place where flowed
a slender watercourse out of the wood—a stream
whose redness makes me shudder still.
As from the Bulicame pours a brook whose
waters are then shared by prostitutes, so did this
stream run down across the sand.”.
Which way is up ? Would the Vinland map be the first with north at the top ?
Yr Hen Ogledd wants to know.
Maps! We don’t need no stinking maps. The Vikings from Dublin and Limerick for 6 hundred of years were sought to help deliver the Cymry from their Saxon foes.