Cipher Mysteries

Such a stupid thing for a bright kid to do: pinballing through her mid-teen rebellion, Jena Kyng had wanted to demonstrate some kind of unbranded online tribal allegiance, and ended up with two lines of Voynichese across her lower back (from the end paragraph of page f67r2, as if anyone off-list really cared). Though in many ways, she'd had a lucky escape: imagine ending ...

When is Easter? A simple question, but one with quite a tricky answer: following the decision of the First Council of Nicaea in 325AD, it is the first Sunday after the full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is simplified to be 21st March): hence, Easter can fall anywhere between 22nd March and 25th April. A moment's reflection should be ample to reveal what ...

In a comment to a recent post on Alberti & Averlino, 'infinitii' asks what my recommendations would be for a Voynich Manuscript reading list... a deceptively hard question. Apart from the direct literature on the subject (Mary D'Imperio's "An Elegant Enigma", my "The Curse of the Voynich", and perhaps even Kennedy & Churchill's "The Voynich Manuscript"), probably the best first ...

Back in 2001, David Hockney proposed a radical new take on art history: that around 1430, artists began to use a camera obscura arrangement to focus images onto a canvas. This was to help them attain a level of draughting accuracy not available to artists who were simply "eyeballing" (Hockney's term) a scene. The key paintings he employs as evidence for this claim are ...

Symmetrical and repetitive prey behaviour is the key tool exploited by hunter gatherers: and so it goes with Voynich Manuscript websites. Once you've seen the same damaged pattern a few times, the shared wonky rationale behind it is usually fairly transparent. And so here is a suggested critical reader for those fruity (but decidedly wobbly) jellies we all love to dip ...

It's a mystery: when there is abundant evidence that people in the Middle Ages knew for sure that the earth was basically spherical, why has the myth persisted until the late 20th century that Columbus had to argue against Flat Earth proponents to gain backing for his voyage? And where did this whole mythology come from? In his fascinating (if all ...

Somehow, I think it was inevitable that a determinedly analytical mind like Lynn Thorndike's would have left a well-organized archival record: and so it was that he and his successors left his extensive collection of papers to the University of Columbia, the last place he worked as a History Professor. The archival finding aid went online here only ...

A copy of Marcello Simonetta's new book "The Montefeltro Conspiracy" (2008) has just arrived in the post (I first mentioned it here). I must admit to being a bit excited, as he covers a lot of ground I'd had to wade slowly through in the Italian sources when writing my own book - Cicco Simonetta, Francesco Sforza, the ...

I've often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich's cipher manuscript mania/hype was at its ...

OK, I'll admit it: people who talk about the Renaissance as a coherent historical phenomenon get on my nerves. There were numerous strands of thought at the time, all vying for the oxygen of attention, all trying to supplant medieval scholasticism: but arguably the two biggest new kids on the block circa 1400 were Renaissance humanism (think of Petrarch, etc) ...