Cipher Mysteries

Self-professed Voynich skeptic Elmar Vogt has been fairly quiet of late: turns out that he has been preparing his own substantial analysis on his "Voynich Thoughts" website of the Voynich Manuscript's teasingly hard-to-read marginalia, (with Elias Schwerdtfeger's notes on the zodiac marginalia appended). Given that Voynich marginalia are pretty much my specialist subject, the question I'm sure you want ...

For years, numerous Voynich researchers have pored over the VMs' confusing images, hunting for any tiny clues that might possibly be hidden beneath the clumsily-applied paint. And yes, I admit that I've done probably more than my fair share of this kind of thing (Curse pp.96-102 stands as testament to this endeavour): so it's now interesting to hear that René ...

Here's something neat and slightly unexpected from long-time Voynich Manuscript researcher (and Voynich theory über-skeptic) Rene Zandbergen I think you'll probably appreciate. Arguably the least-discussed subject in the VMs is the set of tiny plant drawings in the two 'pharma' (pharmacological) sections, which somehow usually manage to fly beneath most researchers' radars. Yet it has been known for decades that a good number of these plant ...

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) ...

Edith Sherwood very kindly left an interesting comment on my "Voynich Manuscript - the State of Play" post, which I thought was far too good to leave dangling in a mere margin. She wrote:- If you read the 14C dating of the Vinland Map by the U of Arizona, you will find that they calculate the ...

It's not widely known that the US National Security Agency has a small section at Fort Meade devoted to the history of code-breaking: The Center for Cryptologic History. As well as making scans of a number of useful documents available on its website (most notably Mary D'Imperio's "An Elegant Enigma"), the CCH convenes its own history of cryptology ...

Diane O'Donovan has asked if Cipher Mysteries can help make researchers aware of her recent work on the Voynich Manuscript. Rather than just host her paper here, I've split it up into a number of individual blog posts so that you can leave feedback on each individual section; and have added a commentary connecting each part with existing research. This first tranche relates to her herbal / ...

Here it is, the Austrian Voynich documentary we've been waiting so eagerly for - and you don't even need to have a satellite dish to watch it (as long as you hurry, it'll probably only be online for a few days). (Hint and tip: if you click on the diagonal arrow button just above the video, you can watch ...

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 ...

It's been an interesting day: Edith Sherwood's Voynich website got Slashdotted - given that Cipher Mysteries picked up 4900 visitors from that tsunami of geeky clicks, edithsherwood.com itself must have had (say) 30000 or more. And then (just now), ORF released a teaser press release for next week's "DAS VOYNICH-RÄTSEL" documentary to their (German-language) website. So, the ...