Cipher Mysteries

Peter Marshall's (2006) "The Mercurial Emperor: The Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague" takes a sideways look at everyone's favourite mad Holy Roman Emperor, by using those around him as a kind of slightly wonky mirror. The choice of who makes the cut is a bit arbitrary in places: John Dee (who never came close to gaining Rudolf's favour) gets rather more ...

Well, you can't say I'm not looking ahead. News reaches my ears of a lavish Voynich documentary being made by the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) "Universum" Natural History Unit and Pro Omnia Film & Video Promotion GmbH, in association with "ARTE, ZDF and the Smithsonian Network". Now we've got past the broadcasting acronym jungle, what is its angle? It's still early ...

Here's another historical mystery from my favourite neck of the woods (the Quattrocento), and involving the amazing trompe-l'oeuil wooden intarsia (decorative inlays) in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, something I've wanted to visit for years. Basically, when Federico da Montefeltro was decorating his new palace, he commissioned a wonderful set of intarsia, mainly destined for his studiolo (study room). When ...

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 ...

Flicking through a fairly recent copy of the New Yorker in the dentist's waiting room just now, I read a review of Jean Hollander's translation of (and Robert Hollander's extensive notes on) Dante's Paradiso, the third part of the Divine Comedy. To be honest, I never had much patience with the Paradiso, all the fun in Dante was in the ...

It's been a rollercoaster of a day for me at the Warburg Institute on the Early Modern Research Techniques course, like being given the keys to the world twice but having them taken away three times. I'll try to explain... Paul Taylor kicked Day Two's morning off in fine style, picking up the baton from Francois Quiviger's drily laconic ...