Cipher Mysteries

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 ...

I think you can split history books into three basic types:- Books that retell us what we already know - i.e. a missed opportunity Books that tell us about things we didn't know - i.e. a pleasant surprise Books that change our minds about things we thought we knew - i.e. gold dust It should therefore already be no surprise to you that I place Jim Amelang's excellent ...

I've just received (directly from the author, thanks!) a copy of Vladimír Karpenko's admirably thorough 1990 AMBIX paper on the "cesta spravedlivá" pair of manuscripts. From his analysis, it seems very much as though these are both genuinely 15th century and (just as Rafal predicted) entirely unconnected with the VMs. Oh well! :-( Even so, the secret history of the mysterious "Antonio of Florence" ...

Today's Cipher Mysteries post comes from long-time Voynich researcher Jan Hurych, who very kindly agreed to go through Otakar Zachar's (1899) monograph on the "Cesta spravedliva v alchymii" ("The True Path of Alchemy") manuscript by Antonio of Florence dated 1457. Here's what Jan found... * * * * * * * While Otakar Zachar's name is now generally unknown, he appears ...

A big tip of the hat to Rafal Prinke: thanks to a swift reply from him last night, I can now say definitively that "The True Path of Alchemy" is not the VMs (confirming Rene's suspicion), because both still exist independently. And the romanticized 1904 mention of the former by Henry Carrington Bolton that quickened my historical pulse yesterday with its uncanny ...