Cipher Mysteries

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" ...

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 ...

A vast constellation of curious books revolves around the hazily uncertain core of the Voynich Manuscript: as with most things, some are outright good, some are just plain bad, while most live in a mixed-up zone in the middle. Henry Carrington Bolton's (1904) " The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II" is a poster-child for that mixed-up zone - equal parts ...

My last post on Elmar Vogt's new blog received a comment from infinitii, asking me for the source for the suggestion that the zodiac motifs may have been copied from a (possibly 14th century) German woodcut calendar. I had long forgotten the story's origin, but a quick grep through the VMs mailing list archives (the ones before 2002 that aren't ...

Alchemy arguably dates back to Alexandria, and there are many alchemical manuscripts dating through to the 13th and 14th century (though Lynn Thorndike noted that the 15th century was something of a fallow period). However, the modern organization The International Alchemy Guild traces its practical roots back to what was going in 16th century Bohemia, specifically with the work ...