Cipher Mysteries

The next European Skeptics Conference starts in Budapest in a few days' time (17th-19th September 2010), and features Klaus Schmeh giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript. Though Klaus has invested a lot of effort into building up a hardline skeptical position on VMs theories (basically, that more or less everything written on it is either pseudoscience or pseudohistory), I personally don't ...

OK, moving straight into confessional mode, I feel more than a touch ashamed that I haven't reviewed Chris Harris' Mappamundi loooong before now. But... even though I've read it twice, I still don't really know what to say about it. Let me explain... Sticking to the knitting, it's a fairly trite starting point to note that it's an historical adventure, with ...

When Wilfrid Voynich bought his (now eponymous) manuscript in 1912, it was accompanied by a 1665 letter from Johannes Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher. In that, Marci noted three things that Raphael Mnishovsky (King Ferdinand III's Czech language tutor) had told him about the strange artefact:- "that the said book belonged to Emperor Rudolf" "that [Rudolf II] presented 600 ducats to the messenger who brought ...

For decades, Voynich Manuscript research has languished in an all-too-familiar ocean of maybes, all of them swelling and fading with the tides of fashion. But now, thanks to the cooperation between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the documentary makers at Austrian pro omnia films gmbh, we have for the very first time a basic forensic framework for what ...

Podcaster "thevampiresamurai" has just posted up part 1 of "The Incrutable Dr Woo Manchu", his audio story linking Sherlock Holmes, the Voynich Manuscript, Roger Bacon, Khmer shorthand, and a murdered Chinese laundryman, all being investigated by dogged cigarette-smoking private eye Carson Albion....

I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough ...

"Get up, fool!", barked Guillaume Imbert, the French Grand Inquisitor. Yet the Grand Master Jacques de Molay continued to lay on the prison floor, passively resisting to the end. "OK... that was your last chance, Templar scum. Guards - crucify him, and wrap him in a shroud which his bodily fluids will seep into, leaving a ghostly imprint which will ...

A new day brings a new Google Adwords campaign from Edith Sherwood (Edith, please just email me instead, it'll get the word out far quicker), though this time not promoting another angle on her Leonardo-made-the-Voynich-Manuscript hypothesis... but rather a transposition cipher Voynichese hypothesis. Specifically, she proposes that the Voynich Manuscript may ...

Having just blogged on up-to-the-minute German Voynichiana, what of the rest of Europe? Here's a quick sampling to whet your appetite, should you ever wish to feast on such morcels... (2008) El castillo de las estrellas Enrique Joven [mentioned here] Having worked with Enrique recently (he generously translated my History Today telescope article so that it could appear in Astronomia magazine), I'm ...

Reading through the revised (2006) edition of David Hockney's "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters", I was a little surprised to come across (p. 235) a brief mention of the Voynich Manuscript. In his section on "Secrecy" textual sources, Hockney quotes the introductory passage from William Romaine Newbold's (1928) "The Cipher of Roger Bacon" where Newbold asserts that during the years ...