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 ...

Following up the recent post here on Tycho Brahe's moustache, Jan Hurych emails in to point out that a team of Czech researchers has also been forensically analyzing Brahe's handkerchief. Disturbingly, their interim results indicate that he may have been addicted to Brasso. (OK, OK, so it's a joke: but as it made me laugh, onto the blog it ...

Enciphered diaries & a murdered famous astronomer? No, it's not Enrique Joven's book out unexpectedly early, but this gem of a story from Der Spiegel: it describes how enciphered / encoded sections of the 400-year-old diary of Tycho's distant cousin Erik Brahe seem to allude to Brahe's murder. Brahe's body is about to be exhumed to find out the ...

As regular Cipher Mysteries readers will know, I've recently become particularly interested in early modern correspondence as a way of peering into the dispersed scientific networks that began to develop and extend during the late sixteenth century (the so-called "invisible colleges"), very much along the lines described for Tycho Brahe's familia by Adam Mosley in his recent book Bearing the Heavens. However, one key problem is ...

Back in May this year, I suggested to my friend Philip Neal that a really useful Voynich research thing he could do would be to translate the passages relating to Jacobus Tepenecz (Sinapius) that Jorge Stolfi once copied from Schmidl's (1754) Historiæ Societatis Jesu Provinciæ Bohemiæ (though Stolfi omitted to the section III 75 concerning Melnik) from Latin. The ...

I've just come back from 24 hours in Swansea, a town where, bizarrely, almost every road is one way (usually the opposite way to which you want to go). At the top of Mount Pleasant, students eke out their existence, one drunken stumble away from a 5-minute death-roll down Constitution Hill's 45 degree gradient. Swansea is the kind of place where (ideally) you'd like a hang-glider to get ...

People don't generally know a lot about Tycho Brahe, which is a shame. In most accounts of the history of astronomy, his bright star tends to get eclipsed by the twin 17th century supernovae of Kepler and Galileo. But scratch the surface of the story, and it's really not that simple... Brahe was a Danish nobleman with a singleminded desire - to understand ...

Here's a little piece of Voynichiana pinging on the edges of the VMs research radar, concerning Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who I thought had not to date been speculatively linked with the VMs. It came from the text accompanying the "Earth and Sky: Astronomy and Geography at the University between the 15th and the 18th centuries" exhibition at ...

A nice edition of "In Our Time" on Radio 4 this morning (a tip of the blogging hat to Chris R and Paul C, who both wished the morning Guildford traffic jam had been slightly worse so that they could have heard it all), all about our old Holy Roman Emperor pal, Rudolph II. You can also download ...