Cipher Mysteries

(I'll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don't have star ratings & I'm not one to hide what I'm thinking, so this connection shouldn't ...

For the most part, constructing plausible explanations for the drawings in the Voynich Manuscript is a fairly straightforward exercise. Even its apparently-weird botany could well be subtly rational (for example, if plants on opposite pages swapped their roots over in the original binding, in a kind of visual anagram), as could the astronomy, the astrology, and the water / balneology quires (if all ...

Honestly,I do try to look at things that are entirely unconnected with cipher mysteries. But somehow (I really don't know how) they keep creeping in regardless. For example, last night I settled down to watch "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" on DVD with my son on loan from the library (the DVD that is, however hooked on books Alex may be). ...

Rene Zandbergen recently stumbled upon a circular drawing in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France's MS Coislin 338, and wondered whether it might be "a possible precedent for a Voynich astronomical illustration, where the original MS is Greek", just as for two other Greek manuscripts (Codex Taurinensis C VII 15 and MS Vat Gr. 1291) ...

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 ...

Why, lookie here. An eBay trader is selling a $999 crystal ball allegedly from a boarded-up Voodoo family estate. It says here that the ball was manufactured according to the "alchemic recipe" given in "Apocalypsis spiritus secreti" (by the Venetian Giovanni Battista Agnelli, a book best known from its 1623 printed edition, but John Dee owned a copy too). And ...

Much as I enjoyed watching Micky Bet covering the Voynich Manuscript, I couldn't help but wonder how much better it would be had it had a slightly funkier script. So (courtesy of the kind people at Overstream) I added my own captions. Enjoy! :-) (If you can't see this in your browser or email client, here's a ...

In "The Lost Symbol", Dan Brown takes his "symbologist" non-hero Robert Langdon on a high-speed twelve-hour tour around Washington. Broadly speaking, it's like riding pillion on a jetbike driven by a demented architectural historian screaming conspiratorial travelogue descriptions into your ears via a radio-mike. But you probably guessed that already. :-) In fact, because you all thought your other questions exactly ...

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 ...