The Voynich silly season is upon us (which is a shame)…
Rather than spam your (no doubt already dangerously close-to-overfilled) inboxes with a stream of inane posts about edgy Japanese musicians producing conceptual albums inspired by the VMs’ illustrations (e.g. …
Limited edition Merzbow (Masami Akita) pressed on lime green vinyl, a work inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript, in a bootleg style cover.
…), Cipher Mysteries will be gently snoozing through most of this year’s silly season, and I cordially suggest you do the same!
You know, it really is about time the Next Big Thing happened in the VMs world (and I don’t mean the radiocarbon and ink papers finally being published in a proper journal). Why hasn’t some tenacious Yale art history student picked up on the codicological mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s marginalia and done a proper spectroscopic analysis of them? Why hasn’t anyone really gone looking for a mid-15th century abbot (for who else would have their own scriptorium, producing documents for him to sign?) not too far from Savoy and called something not too far from “Simon Sint…”? The closest I’ve found so far is Abbé Simon du Bosc (who died in 1418, but was an abbot in Northern France), but probably isn’t much of a match… oh well! =:-o
July 27th, 2010 at 3:17 am
When Umberto Eco wrote “The Name of the Rose”, he presumably had a real-world source for the fictional monastery in the novel. It might be interesting to see what he has to say about the VM, its possible surces/author(s) and related subjects.. Or has this already been done?
July 27th, 2010 at 11:18 am
Exactly! That is the first serious suggestion I have read in a long time to solve the VM mystery. Pim Gillissen, Amsterdam, Netherlands
July 27th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
It’s probably part of the ‘curse’.
It is next to impossible to get anybody else really excited about one’s own promising leads, let alone react on them with some spontaneous action…
July 27th, 2010 at 4:00 pm
It’s such fun not knowing that even when people claim to have ‘solved’ it, we all just keep pegging away anyway. I really suspect that we *don’t really want* the questions answered.
July 27th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
And I STILL want a DNA analysis of the parchment – or is cured parchment genetically dead?
July 29th, 2010 at 4:32 am
Eco may have done this in “The Search for the Perfect Language,” if memory serves.
August 5th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Silly season?!
Take your copy of the VM – turn it upside down – first word first page – split the ‘ch’ combination down the middle – now rotate the 2nd and 4th letters through 180 degrees – replace the ‘8’ with an ‘i’
Who was trying to dupe Kircher then – he ain’t fooling me
August 6th, 2010 at 3:10 am
“I STILL want a DNA analysis of the parchment – or is cured parchment genetically dead?”
See here:
http://archaeology.about.com/b/2006/12/28/dna-from-ancient-parchment.htm