Cipher Mysteries

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 ...

A short note just arrived from Enrique Joven, concerning a recent talk he attended at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) by Dr. Paolo Molaro from the Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste: "On the invention of the telescope and the paintings of Jan Brueghel" Jan Brueghel depicted telescopes in four paintings spanning the period between 1609 and 1621. We have ...

Another day, another Voynich theory to add to the list of theories. Today's one (courtesy of Rolando Hernandez Rivero) proposes that the VMs is written in old Spanish, though with some Latin and English words thrown into the mix. Rolando also asserts that [what he calls] Hand 1 is "scatterbrained" and has many errors, while [what he calls] ...

I've been meaning to put this Big Fat List of English-language Voynich-related novels together for a while: I've appended links to the most significant review / blog mentions I've made about them. I'll update this every once in a while, so please feel free to drop me a line if you have or know of a Voynich-themed book you ...

After my recent (and unexpectedly extended) foray into Voynich-themed novels, I thought it would be a good idea to get back to proper manuscript research. One small feature I've been mulling over is the "starred paragraphs" in Quire 20, the final gathering in the VMs (the one which famously ends with the ...