Cipher Mysteries

I don't quite know how I manage it but I do keep on tripping over odd stuff, not unlike Christine Jins' sensitively made peppermill, something definitely not to be sneezed at. So here's this week's microdose of historical weirdness for you, the supernatural Victorian fiction of "engaged feminist" lesbian Vernon Lee (the pen-name of Violet Paget), such as "...

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 ...

Klaus Schmeh, a German encryption professional who over the last couple of years has become increasingly fascinated by the cipher mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, has just been interviewed by the sparky skeptics at Righteous Indignation for their Episode #76 - Klaus' VMs section runs from 25:50 to 45:45, and gives a fairly pragmatic introduction to the Voynich ...

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 ...

I recently blogged here about the difference between skepticism (which has at its heart both a guarded optimism and a realistic take on the practical difficulties involved in gaining knowledge) and cynicism (which by way of contrast is a denialist position, that says it is safer to believe nothing rather than get hurt by believing something that will turn out to ...

Somewhere during the last decade, historians picked up got the idea that history book publishers wanted to be pitched 'vertical' books about individual microsubjects, books that somehow try to recapitulate the last N-thousand years of human history as viewed through the narrow prism of, say, salt or swearing or codpieces. All of which somehow reminds me of the joke about the ...

Art historians have long debated whether or not dissatisfied architect Antonio Averlino made the trip from Italy to Constantinople in 1465: one of the key pieces of evidence supporting the notion is the letter of recommendation written in Greek by Averlino's old friend Filelfo (the humanist writer and Hellenophile) and addressed to George Amirutzes (Mehmed II's personal tutor). This is one of those things ...

In the last few days, several people have independently asked me to summarize my "The Curse of the Voynich" Voynich Manuscript theory (that it is an enciphered copy of Antonio Averlino [Filarete]'s lost books of secrets). Good theories generally improve when you retell them a few times: for example, back when I was first pitching my new type of ...

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 ...

Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things ...