Cipher Mysteries

A nice little thing just arrived in the post: I had contacted the Prague-based Society for the History of Sciences ("DVT" = dějiny věd a techniky) to ask how to get hold of a copy of its 2000 monograph on Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku. To my surprise, the DVT's Igor Janovský said - don't worry about paying, we'll just send ...

Was the "Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus" really written by John Dee? I first saw this several years back, when I stumbled upon Joseph Peterson's transcription of it on the Esoteric Archives website. The link with Dee seemed (and still seems) to me to be spurious: even though he is mentioned right at the start of the text, for ...

In his 1959 book "The Sleepwalkers", Arthur Koestler painted a rather damning picture of Renaissance European astronomers and scientists, where the only person not sleepwalking was Kepler. As part of the process of tarring everyone else with the same soporific brush, Koestler derided Copernicus' famous "De Revolutionibus" as "The Book Nobody Read". It's true that only a small proportion of "De ...

I recently posted about Rudolf's physician before Jacobus de Tepenecz [Sinapius], Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku: and wondered aloud whether he might have bought / owned / sold / annotated the Voynich Manuscript. It's a good question: the f17r marginalia seems to have been emended to read "mattioli..." (I believe it originally began "melhor"), and Hájek famously translated Mattioli's Herbal. The ...