Cipher Mysteries

Once again, it's time to roll out and dust off the Cipher Mysteries crystal skull crystal ball (no, I didn't buy it on eBay, nor did I nick it from the British Museum) to peer dimly ahead to 2010. What will it bring us all? Of course, 2009's big news was the radiocarbon dating of four slivers of the Voynich Manuscript's ...

I've just found a German summary of the 2006 "Knowledge, Discipline and Power, 12th-17th Centuries" conference in Sheffield, at which Volkhard Huth of the University of Freiburg apparently presented a paper on the Voynich Manuscript. According to the description, Huth (whose expertise is in handwriting) broadly localizes the manuscript to Germany, provisionally dates it to 1480-1500, and places ...

Day One of the Early Modern Research Techniques course was easy to write about, as was Day Two: but Day Three? Tricky... If I close my eyes, the single image from it burnt into my retinas is of Charles Hope sardonically half-warning participants about the historical Class A drug that is archival research. Yes, he personally had partaken of ...

Another Voynich-themed novel is announced: "In Tongues of the Dead", written by Canadian author and forensic psychologist Brad Kelln, to be published by ECW Press in October 2008. It's his third book ("Lost Sanity" and "Method of Madness" were his others, with some kind of Dead Sea Scrolls prophecy hook to the second one). According to Kelln's ...