For a while, I’ve had an itch (a Voyn-itch, if you prefer) I couldn’t work out how to scratch.

You see… about six years ago, I found an old history book digitized on archive.org (if I remember correctly): it related how Francesco Sforza assembled an ongoing ad hoc council of representatives of various city-states surrounding Milan, told them all the inside news of what was going on, and even asked their opinions on what Milan should do – Big Tent politics, Quattrocento-style. These representatives then wrote copious letters back to their rulers, passing on as many of Milan’s secrets as they could remember. Fascinating stuff, so I made a mental note to look the reference up again, because it would be a great place to see if I could find a critical edition of whichever of those despatches still existed, to use them to read around critical dates in my reconstructed Averlino/Voynich narrative, to see if any detail either strengthened or refuted my hypothesis.

But do you think I could ever find that book again? That’s right – not a hope.

So anyway, I’d practically given up on finding those despatches when, while (inevitably) looking for something completely different  this evening, I stumbled upon one stonkingly huge set of them. The sixteen volume series is entitled Carteggio degli oratori mantovani alla Corte Sforzesca (1450-1500), with each slab containing 500 to 700 pages of letters sent from Milan back to the Gonzaga court in Mantua. The ones that seem to have been published so far are:-

1. 1450-1459 / 2. 1460 / 3. 1461 / 4. 1462 / edited by Isabella Lazzarini
5. 1463 / edited by Marco Folin
6. 1464-1465 / 7. 1466-1467 / 8. 1468-1471 / edited by Maria Nadia Covini
10. 1475-1477 / edited by Gianluca Battioni
11. 1478-1479 / edited by Marcello Simonetta
12. 1480-1482 / edited by Gianluca Battioni
15. 1495-1498 / edited by Antonella Grati, Arturo Pacini 

For me, the two most interesting things to look at would be the reception in Milan of the De Re Militari incident which happened sometime in 1461 [Vol.3]; and also August / September  1465 [Vol.6], which is when Domenic Dominici the Bishop of Brescia rode into Milan with his copy of what is now known as ‘Vat. Gr. 1291’ (René Zandbergen’s favourite circular Byzantine nymph-fest, which Fulvio Orsini would then buy), before then leaving  for Rome with (I strongly suspect) Antonio Averlino in tow.

Of course, any other fleeting mention of Antonio Averlino / Filarete in the 1450-1465 volumes of these despatches could well turn out to be extraordinarily useful, never mind any rumours or talk of a mysterious unreadable herbal as well! 🙂 One day I’ll get a chance to go through these myself (because the British Library has a copy of all of the above), and who as yet knows what’s there to be found?

In the meantime, please leave a comment here to tell me if there are any other sets of despatches published or currently being edited that were sent out from Francesco Sforza’s ‘Big Tent’ in Milan circa 1450-1465, thanks very much!

While searching for things to do with the humanist minuscule hand, I stumbled across a reference in a short 2002 paper by Jessica Wilbur to an oversized 1981 hardback by Jacqueline Herald called “Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500“. Now, I thought, that sounds like a book I’d really like to buy: only to find out from Bookfinder.com that copies now go for between £403 and £836. Ohhhh well…

However, according to the M25 Consortium and WorldCat there are at least 20 copies of it in libraries not too far from me (including the British Library, the Warburg Institute, Kingston University, Cambridge, Oxford, etc), so it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of this by some [hopefully legal] means.

Is this something any Cipher Mysteries reader has already seen? It seems almost the perfect book to have in one hand while examining the various Voynich nymphs’ costumes: and it seems strange that such a strong visual resource didn’t feature in the recent Austrian documentary. Maybe its very rarity has made it lost to a whole generation of researchers, who knows?

Update: having posted this, I settled down to continue reading the copy of Mark Phillips’ (1987) “The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence” that I bought yesterday in the very pleasant  Oxford Street Books in Whitstable. And in footnote 22 on p.40 there just happens to be… yes, a direct reference to Jacqueline Herald’s book. What are the chances of that, eh?

A fascinating email just arrived at Cipher Mansions from Tony Gaffney, our virtual cryptologer-in-residence at the British Library. While looking at BL Add. MS 39660 recently, he noticed a set of dates for ten popes written in an unusual mixture of Roman numbers and Arabic numerals (“an9 pm9” = “annus primus“, and “ufq3” = “usque“):-

That is:-

  1. cclxxxij
  2. m cclxxxiiij
  3. m cc lxxxx
  4. m cx ij
  5. 1 40 viij
  6. 1 4 10 an9 pm9
  7. 14 12
  8. 14 17 ufq3 1430  an9 pm9
  9. 1 431 ufq3 1446
  10. 14 46 ufq3 1455

According to the BL’s bibliographic description, this was written on paper in Italy, with the later popes added not before 1455: while Tony adds that the “v” in the fifth date “is written in the old style of a backward sloping b“, hence a 15th century hand. All of which gives us a basic prediction for where and when we might expect to find this unusual kind of mixed Roman / Arabic numbers: Italy in the second half of the 15th century. Examining BL Add. MS 39660 even more closely may to help us be more specific: but that’s a job for another day.

The presence of “pm9” here is particularly heartening, as this is precisely what is used for the quire number in Q1 of the Voynich Manuscript. Intriguingly, Tony notes that the “cc” pairs in the first three dates are ligatured at the top, just like the EVA “ch” glyph, though he has previously seen this in the 14th century Royal MS 12BXXV f.283 (which is a “table converting Arabic & Latin numbers“). And furthermore, he adds that “in the fifth [date], we have not only a combination of Arabic and Latin numbers but the 4o is the Voynich EVA qo linked!!“. Of course, that might just be a coincidence, but even so…

Every few years, I get around to posting a list of Voynich challenges – things about the Voynich Manuscript that we would like to know or to find out.

Looking back at my 2001 list of Voynich Challenges, I seem to have been flailing around at every codicological nuance going: yes, there are hundreds of interesting angles to consider – but how many stand any chance of yielding something substantial? With the benefit of just a little hindsight, I’d say… realistically, almost none of them (unfortunately).

Stepping onwards to my 2004 list of Voynich research tasks, which was instead mainly focused on a particularly narrow research question – whether Wilfrid Voynich lost any pages of the VMs. (Having myself consulted the UPenn archives in 2006, I’m certain the answer is a resounding ‘no’.)

Also in 2004, the release of the (generally excellent) MrSID scans by the Beinecke Library (even though it carried out test scans in 2002) was also an important landmark for study of the VMs, because it allowed anybody to look closely at the primary evidence on their own PC without having to trek to New Haven. Many old questions (particularly about colour) that had bounced around on the original VMs mailing list for years were suddenly able to be answered reasonably definitively.

Hurling our nuclear-powered DeLorean fast-forward to June 2009, what things do we now want to know? And moreover, even if we do find them out, does any of them stand any chance of helping us?

For all the determined work over the years that has been put into trawling the post-1600 archives (particularly Kircher’s correspondence), I can’t help but think that there can be precious little left to find of significant value. It has been a nice, well-defined project – but can I suggest we put it behind us now? The presence of 15th century handwriting (on f116v) and 15th century quire numbers surely makes this avenue no more than a fascinating diversion, no more useful than a forensic dissection of (say) Petrus Beckx’s life. Ultimately, “what happened to the VMs after 1600?” is surely one of the many convenient (but wrong) questions to be asking.

But what, then, are the right questions to be asking? In my opinion, the seven most fruitful historical research challenges currently awaiting significant attack are the  following…

(1) Understanding the ownership marginalia on f1r, f17r, f66r and f116v, in particular what caused the text on them to end up so confused and apparently unreadable – even their original language(s) (Latin, French, German, Occitan or Voynichese?) is/are far from certain. Whatever details turn up from this research (dates, names, places, languages, etc) may well open the door onto a whole new set of archival resources not previously considered. Alas, delayering these marks is just beyond the reach of the Beinecke’s scans – so unless our Austrian TV documentary friends have already deftly covered this precise angle (and I’m sure they are aware of this issue), I think this would be a fantastic, relatively self-contained codicological / palaeographic research project for someone to take on. Do you know a Yale codicologist looking for a neat term project?

(2) Palaeographically matching the VMs’ quire numbering scheme – abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals (but with Arabic digits for the most part). Again, this should be a self-contained palaeographic research project, one that a determined solo investigator could carry out (say) just using the British Library’s resources. Again, if this suggests links to documents with reasonably well-defined provenances or authorship, it may well open up an entirely new archival research angle to pursue.

(3) Examining the “aiiv” groups for steganography, both in Currier A and in Currier B. I’ve made a very specific prediction, based on carefully observing the VMs at first hand – that in the Herbal-A pages, the “scribal flourish” was added specifically to hide an earlier (less subtle) attempt at steganography, based on dots. A multi-spectral scan of some of these “aiiv” groups might well make reveal the details of this construction, and (with luck) cast some light on the writing phases the author went through. Definitively demonstrating the presence of steganography should also powerfully refute a large number of the theories that have floated around the VMs for years.

(4) Reconstructing the original bifolio nesting of the VMs. Glen Claston and I have attempted to do this from tiny codicological clues, but this is in danger of stalling for want of applicable data. But what kind of data that could be collected non-destructively be useful? Ideally, it would be good if we could perform some kind of DNA matching (to work out which bifolios came from the same animal skin), as this would give a very strong likelihood of connecting groups of pages together – and with that in place, many more subtle symmetries and handwriting matches might become useful. Would different animal skins autofluoresce subtly differently? I think there’s a fascinating research project waiting in there for someone who comes at this from just the right angle.

(5) Documenting and analyzing the VMs’ binding stations. If the VMs happens to go in for restoration at any point (which the Beinecke curators have mentioned at various points as being quite likely), I think it would be extremely revealing if the binding stations and various sewing holes on each bifolio were carefully documented. These might well help us to work out how the various early bindings worked, which in turn should help us reconstruct what early owners did to the manuscript, and (with luck) what the original ‘alpha’ state of the manuscript was.

(6) Carefully differentiating between Currier-A and Currier-B, building up specific Markov-like models for the two “languages”, and working out (from their specific differences) how A was transformed into B. This may not sound like much, but an awful lot of cryptological machinery would need to rest on top of this to make any kind of break into the system.

(7) Making explicit Glen Claston’s notion of script & language evolution over the various writing phases. This would involve a combination both of palaeography and statistical analysis, to understand how Voynichese developed, both as a writing system and a cryptographics system. There’s a great idea in there, but it has yet to be expressed in a really detailed, substantial way.

In retrospect, a lot of the art historical things that preoccupied many Voynich researchers (myself included) back in 2002-2005 such as comparisons with existing drawings, the albarelli, etc now seem somewhat secondary to me. This is because we have a solid date range to work with: the Voynich Mauscript (a) was made after 1450 (because of the presence of parallel hatching in the nine-rosette page), and (b) was made before 1500 (because of the presence of two 15th century hands, in the quire numbers and on f116v).

Some people (particularly those whose pet theories don’t mesh with this 1450-1500 time frame) try to undermine this starting point, but (frankly) the evidence is there for everyone to see – and I think it’s time we moved on past this, so as to take Voynich research as a whole up to the next level. Though researchers have put in a terrific amount of diffuse secondary research over the years, collectively our most productive task now is to forensically dissect the primary evidence, so as to wring out every last iota of historical inference – only then should we go back to the archives.

Will these seven basic challenges still all be open in 2012, a hundred years after Wilfrid Voynich claimed discovery of his eponymous manuscript in a Jesuit trunk? I sincerely hope not – but who is going to step forward to tackle them?

For ages, I’ve been planning to devote a day at the British Library solely to the task of looking for matches for the Voynich Manuscript’s unusual quire numbers. There’s a long description of these quire numbers elsewhere on this website, but the short version is that they are “abbreviated longhand Latin ordinals in a fifteenth century hand”, and are one of the key things that point directly to a 15th century date:-

If we could find any other manuscripts with this same numbering scheme (or possibly even the same handwriting!), it would be an extraordinarily specific way of pinning down the likely provenance of our elusive manuscript, more than a century before its next mention (circa 1610). It would also give an enormous hint as to the archive resources we should really be looking in to find textual references to it.

But let’s not get too carried away – how should we go about finding a match, bearing in mind we haven’t even got one so far?

To achieve this, my (fairly shallow, I have to say) research strategy is to trawl through the following early modern palaeography source books, as kindly suggested by UCL’s Marigold Norbye:-

  • F. Steffens, Lateinische Paläographie (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929)
  • New Palaeographical Society   Facsimiles of Manuscripts &c., ed. E.M. Thompson, G.F. Warner, F.G. Kenyon and J.P. Gilson, 1st er. (London, 1903-12);  2nd ser.  (London, 1913-30)
  • Palaeographical Society   Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions, ed. E.A. Bond, E.M. Thompson and G.F. Warner, 1st ser. (London, 1873-83);  2nd ser. (London, 1884-94)
  • S.H. Thomson, Latin Bookhands of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1969)
  • G.F. Hill, The Development of Arabic Numerals in Europe exhibited in sixty-four Tables  (Oxford, 1915)
  • Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, by Charles Samaran and Robert Marichal. etc.

To which I would add (seeing as it was written by Michelle Brown, who was for many years the Curator of Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, so it seems a little ungracious not to include it)…

  • Brown, Michelle. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts: From Antiquity to 1600. London : British Library, 1990.

…as well as the Italian equivalent of Samaran and Marichal’s work…

  • Catalogo dei manoscritti in scrittura latina datati o databili per indicazione di anno, di luogo o di copista. Torino, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1971 Bird-Special Collections Z6605.L3 C38 f

…and a more general bibliographical reference work…

  • Boyle, Leonard E. Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

Even though this might seem like a very large set of source books to get through in a day, no more than 5-10% of each is likely to be acutely relevant to the 15th century, so it should all be (just about) do-able. And I think that several of them may well be on open shelves in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Room at the BL, which should help speed things along.

Yet all the same, do I stand any significant chance of uncovering anything? Well… no, not really, I’d have to say. But that’s no reason not to try! And the bibliographic side of the trawl may well yield a more specific lead to follow in future, you never know.

All I need to do, then, is to free up an entire day from my diary… oh well, maybe next year, then. =:-o

A huge thanks to the indefatigable Tony Gaffney who very kindly took the time recently to double-check my transcriptions (some of them derived from Augusto Buonafalce’s transcriptions) of Bellaso’s various challenge ciphers against the copies held in the British Library.

Of the twelve corrections he suggested, roughly half were typos on my part, while the remainder were places where I had transcribed punctuation-like marks (but which were instead simply marks added incidentally as part of the printing).

I’m reasonably sure that the (corrected) Bellaso cipher page here now holds a pretty close, multiply-eyeballed set of transcriptions: so what are you waiting for, go and crack them! 🙂

While snooping around the (mostly empty) user subsites on Glen Claston’s Voynich Central, I came across a page by someone called Robin devoted solely to the Scorpio “Scorpion” page in the VMs. This has an unusual drawing of a scorpion (or salamander) at the centre, and which I agree demands closer attention…

Voynich Manuscript f73r, detail of scorpion/salamander at centre of Scorpio zodiac circle

My first observation is that, while the paint in the 8-pointed star is very probably original, the green paint on the animal below is very likely an example of what is known as a “heavy painter” layer, probably added later. But what lies beneath that?

Luckily, there exists a tool for (at least partially) removing colour from pictures, based on a “colour deconvolution” algorithm originally devised (I believe) by Voynich researcher Gabriel Landini, and implemented as a Photoshop plugin by Voynich researcher Jon Grove. And so the first thing I wanted to do was to run Jon’s plugin, which should be simple enough (you’d have thought, anyway).

However… having bought a new PC earlier in the year and lost my (admittedly ancient) Adobe Photoshop installation CD, Photoshop wasn’t an easy option. I also hadn’t yet re-installed Debabelizer Pro, another workhorse batch image processing programme from the beginning of time that I used to thrash to death when writing computer games. If not them, then what?

Well, like many people, I had the Gimp already installed, and so went looking for a <Photoshop .8bf plugin>-loading plugin for that: I found pspi and gimpuserfilter. However, the latter is only for Linux, while the former only handles a subset of .8bf files… apparently not including Jon Grove’s .8bf (I think he used the excellent FilterMeister to write it), because this didn’t work when I tried it.

For a pleasant change, Wikipedia now galloped to the rescue: it’s .8bf page suggested that Helicon Filter – a relatively little-known non-layered graphics app from the Ukraine – happily runs Photoshop plugins. I downloaded the free version, copied Jon Grove’s filter into the Plug-ins subdirectory, and it worked first time. Neat! Well… having said that, Helicon Filter is quite (ready: “very”) idiosyncratic, and does take a bit of getting used to: but once you get the gist, it does do the job well, and is pleasantly swift.

And so (finally!) back to that VMs scorpion. What does lie beneath?

Voynich manuscript f73r detail, but with the green paint removed

And no, I wasn’t particularly expecting to find a bright blue line and a row of six or seven dots along its body either. Let’s use Jon’s plugin to try to remove the blue as well (and why not?):-

Voynich Manuscript f73r central detail, green and blue removed

Well, although this is admittedly not a hugely exact process, it looks to me to be the case that the row of dots was in the original drawing. Several of the other zodiac pictures (Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Sagittarius) have what appears to be rather ‘raggedy’ blue paint, so it would be consistent if Scorpio had originally had a little bit of blue paint too, later overpainted by the heavy green paint.

And so my best guess is that the original picture was (like the others I listed above) fairly plain with just a light bit of raggedy blue paint added, and with a row of six or seven dots along its body. But what do the dots mean?

I strongly suspect that these dots represent a line of stars in the constellation of Scorpio. Pulling a handy copy of Peter Whitfield’s (1995) “The Mapping of the Heavens” down from my bookshelf, a couple of quick parallels present themselves. Firstly, in the image of Scorpio in Gallucci’s Theatrum Mundi (1588) on p.74 of Whitfield, there’s a nice clear row of six or seven stars. Also, p.44 has a picture of Bede’s “widely-used” De Signis Coeli (MS Laud 644, f.8v), in which Scorpio’s scorpion has 4 stars running in a line down its back: while p.45 has an image from a late Latin version of the Ptolemy’s Almagest (BL Arundel MS 66, circa 1490, f.41) which also has a line of stars running down the scorpion’s back. A Scorpio scorpion copied from a 14th century manuscript by astrologer Andalo di Negro (BL MS Add. 23770, circa 1500, f.17v) similarly has a line of stars running down its spine.

In short, in all the years that we’ve been looking at the iconographic matches for the drawings at the centre of these zodiac diagrams, should we have instead been looking for steganographic matches for constellations of dots hidden in them?

Incidentally, another interesting thing about the Scorpio/Sagittarius folio is that the scribe changed his/her quill halfway through: which lets us reconstruct the order in which the text in those two pages was written.

Firstly, the circular rings of text and the nymphs were drawn for both the Scorpio and Sagittarius pages. The scribe then returned to the Scorpio page, and started adding the nymph labels for the two inner rings, (probably) going clockwise around from the 12 o’clock mark, filling in the labels for both circular rows of nymphs as he/she went. (Mysteriously, the scribe also added breasts to the nymphs during this second run). Then, when the quill was changed at around the 3 o’clock mark, the scribe carried on going, as you can see from the following image:-

Voynich manuscript f73r, label details (just to the right of centre)

What does all this mean? I don’t know for sure: but it’s nice to have even a moderate idea of how these pages were actually constructed, right? For what it’s worth, my guess is that these pages had a scribe #1 writing down the rings and the circular text first, before handing over to a scribe #2 to add the nymphs and stars: then, once those were drawn in, the pages were handed back to scribe #1 to add the labels (and, bizarrely, the breasts and probably some of the hair-styles too).

It’s a bit hard to explain why the author (who I suspect was also scribe #1) should have chosen this arrangement: the only sensible explanation I can think of is that perhaps there was a change in plan once scribe #1 saw the nymphs that had been drawn by scribe #2, and so decided to make them a little more elaborate. You have a better theory about this? Please feel free to tell us all! 🙂

As a Brit, there’s a very particular class of American-made sequel that fills my film-watching soul with despair. On planes and slow Sundays, you’ve doubtless caught a few exemplars yourself: “Garfield 2”, “Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London”, “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” all spring readily to my mind, but these form but the tip of a particularly yellow-coloured iceberg.

The template is horrifically simple: having achieved moderate success with a first film by pandering to a peculiarly parochial home market, the US-based producers then look for somewhere vageuely ‘exotic’ (but still English-speaking) in which to set the follow-up. Almost inevitably, dear old Lahn-don Town gets the nod: and thus usually commences the exhausting directorial circus of finding American acting talent who can produce comedy UK regional accents as badly as American screenwriters can write them.

So far, so insular: but what gets my goat is not the fact that London has been chosen (actually, it’s a complex, interesting, intensely compromised place with a billion stories of its own), but rather that what gets realised in celluloid is a kind of bizarre fairytale version, complete with pea-souper fogs, whistling Cocker-ney cabbies (what, Polish and Cockney??), scheming upper-class twits (inevitably with huge estates in the country), and salt-of-the-earth plebs (without two brass farthings to rub together). Sorry to say it, guys, but these days London is actually more Dick Cheney than Dick Van Dyke.

All the same, I’d have to say that those much-maligned American film producers could just about pull off this whole stunt and, indeed, produce a masterpiece from this cloying amalgamation of unpromising clichés. But by this stage their budget has all-too-often already disappeared into the cavernous pockets of the oh-so-amusing comedy lead characters: and thus vanishes into painfully thin air any notion of hiring a writer of real genius, the kind you’d need to bring such a dead-before-it-was-ever-born project to life.

And so onto James K. Rollins’ new book “The Voynich Project” (2008).

Rollins builds his story around a polarity eerily familiar to Indiana Jones fans, teaming a lantern-jawed hero and a feisty female archaeologist against indestructible disfigured Nazis wielding futuristic weaponry. Into this (already somewhat eggy) mix he adds a group of Indigo children (each with their own superpower), just about every English-speaking secret military force in the world, ancient maps, Carl Jung’s Red Diary, and the Vatican, etc etc. Oh, and there’s an American Indian consciously modelled on Chewbacca. Sure, it’s not Shakespeare: but is it Dan Brown?

Look – I’m a sucker for the kind of pacy, evocative writing that you would need to turn such a morass of potboiler elements into a genuine piece of fun. However, from my own European point of view, that train never really arrives – instead, the book comes across as a stream of mystery-themed ideas machine-gunned in the reader’s direction, as if the countless holes in the story can be filled through a kind of macho puppydog exuberance. Sorry, JK: though notionally a “Euro-thriller”, its scope and writing are both just too narrowly American to win me over.

But there’s also the whole Voynich Manuscript side of the book.

Rollins has clearly taken the time to read up on the VMs and to engage with its strange pictures, for which I applaud him (I even get a brief mention in the notes at the end, which is nice, however unwarranted). Unfortunately, one thing manages to spoil the whole party.

Briefly, what happens is: hero goes to the British Museum/Library to meet man studying the alchemical side of the Voynich Manuscript; because the man has disappeared, the hero instead meets his sister (who also happens to work there); they go to a pub in the East End; hero learns about the woman’s mysterious Celtic tattoo on her back; Nazi thugs enter the pub; she produces a key from above the back door; they escape out to the rear into a messy gunfight… and when the woman is eventually captured by the Nazis, her tattoo turns out to contain an ancient map / key to the secrets hidden in the Voynich Manuscript.

The problem is that this central storyline exactly reprises probably the best-selling (and quite possibly the best-written) Voynich novel yet, Max McCoy’s (1995) “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” – you know, the one I recommend that all aspiring Voynich novelists should read first. If there had been just a handful of similarities, I could possibly have passed over them in silence – but this is all much too much for me to bear.

No reviewer ever wants to be in this position – but honestly, what else can I say?

I’ve just heard back from the British Library Manuscript department about BL MS Add. 10035, “The Subtelty of Witches”, which I mentioned here a few days ago: “unfortunately it does not begin in English. The whole of the manuscript is written in cipher.

So: was Eric Sams mistaken? Might the British Library actually have two unreadable books? Well… after a rather longer trawl through the various BL catalogues, I’ll say that “The Subtelty of Witches” is still the best candidate. There are plenty of enciphered letters there, but nothing else of any major size: all the same, I should probably consult Sheila Richards’ (1973) book “Secret writing in the public records, Henry VIII-George II” (actually 1519-1738), just in case there’s any fleeting reference to it there.

Incidentally, Eric Sams wrote a piece for Musical Times in 1970 (now online) on Edward Elgar’s ‘Dorabella’ Cipher, where he suggested the 87 encrypted symbols could be decrypted to read…

STARTS: LARKS! IT’S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, α, β
BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

Sorry, but somehow I just don’t think Sams quite nailed it on this particular occasion. Sams also wrote a 1987 note explaining his reasoning in more detail: but that just seems a bit too eager to tie things up. All the same, he wraps up the final note by pretty much coming round to my opinion:-

[…] But what if that cipher-table served another purpose?

Dr. Percy Young’s standard biography tells us that Elgar used a music cipher; the names of people he disliked were thus consigned to the Demon’s Chorus in The Dream of Gerontius. An Oxford professor of music, Sir Jack Westrup, has suggested that Elgar used cipher in the Enigma Variations.

Perhaps interested readers would like to consider on what lines (or spaces) ex 3 might make a music cipher?

However, a musicological Ventris has yet to take up this challenge: what haunting melody might be encrypted there? As Elgar said to Dora Penny, “I thought you of all people would guess it“… but what was her favourite song? 😉

Are you an historian with an enciphered document you want to read? If so, here’s a link to an article you really ought to have a look at: “Cryptanalysis and Historical Research” by Eric Sams, from Archivaria 21 (1985-1986) [it’s actually an extended version of two earlier articles he wrote for the TLS in 1977 and 1980].

There’s tons of good stuff in Sams’ article, such as a mention of the table of early shorthands in Isaac Pitman’s book “The History of Shorthand” (which I saw in Leeds University’s Brotherton Collection): this table really ought to be on the web somewhere (please let me know if you happen to find a copy). Incidentally, The Shorthand Place website has a fantastic list of shorthand collections in UK libraries.

But I know what you’re thinking at this point: “What does Sams think of the Voynich Manuscript?” And the answer is, well, not an awful lot:-

“Of course some archives are likely to remain dark and impenetrable. William Friedman, one of the world’s greatest cryptanalysts, spent many a fruitless hour on the Voynich manuscript, attributed to Roger Bacon, which is fluently written in a natural-looking yet wholly unintelligible language.”

AKA, “if it looks tricky, don’t even go there”. But wait: Sams isn’t finished yet…

“The British Library […] also owns an original volume of an equally obscure manuscript which begins by saying in plain English that no one will ever unravel the meaning of what follows.”

But… which manuscript would that be, Eric? Unfortunately, Sams – the teasing swine! – fails to say. (Please email me if you do know!) Flicking through the British Library’s manuscript catalogue, the best candidate appears to be “The Subtelty of Witches” by Ben Ezra Aseph (1657) [British Library MS. Add. 10035], written entirely in cipher… might that be it? Also: BL Ms Add 32305 contains 39 folios of “unidentified cipher keys”: which sounds like a lot of fun. 😉 But I digress! Sams finishes his discussion thus:-

So be it; many tracks lead into such caves. but none ever come out. The true treasure-chests are much more likely to be those which clearly once had real keys, later lost or mislaid. 

Well… speaking as a long-term denizen of the Voynich Manuscript cave, I have to admit that Sams might just have a point here. But no sense of romance, damnit! 🙂

PS: fans of Sams can find a list of his cryptological papers here.