Cipher Mysteries

I love this picture from the Porco Cane blog:- During 1992 restoration work on the Cathedral of Salamanca, this astronaut ensnared by vines was added by Jeronimo Garcia, along with "a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, and a crayfish", all approved by the appropriate committee etc. Perhaps ...

Even when I've shown the VMs' marginalia to some very clever, very experienced historians / palaeographers, you can see that there's a easy stopping point tempting them: that because they are unreadable, they must necessarily be cryptographically unreadable. But the two types of mark are manifestly not the same: they have quite different types of unreadability. That is, one seems intentionally unreadable, the other ...

Over the years, people have suggested all manner of languages (Tagalog, Hawaiian, Chinese etc) as the Voynich Manuscript's plaintext, but might it be written in enciphered Romanian? Historically, the notion is just about plausible: the earliest known piece of written Romanian is a letter written by a Neacşu of Câmpulung in 1512 (there's a facsimile online, as well as a mercifully brief ...

Following on from yesterday's post on Elmar's marginalia PDF, I've once again been looking really closely at the Voynich marginalia. I'm using the modern kind of fuzzily-overlapping codicology / palaeography / linguistic methodology that sometimes gets mentioned online (but which may be more to do with university administrators' desire to collapse three history lecturing posts into one) to try to model the ...

Self-professed Voynich skeptic Elmar Vogt has been fairly quiet of late: turns out that he has been preparing his own substantial analysis on his "Voynich Thoughts" website of the Voynich Manuscript's teasingly hard-to-read marginalia, (with Elias Schwerdtfeger's notes on the zodiac marginalia appended). Given that Voynich marginalia are pretty much my specialist subject, the question I'm sure you want ...

For years, numerous Voynich researchers have pored over the VMs' confusing images, hunting for any tiny clues that might possibly be hidden beneath the clumsily-applied paint. And yes, I admit that I've done probably more than my fair share of this kind of thing (Curse pp.96-102 stands as testament to this endeavour): so it's now interesting to hear that René ...

This week is "Shakespeare Week" at my son's school: his year have been allocated A Midsummer Night's Dream, and so get to do their lessons in costume for a day. All of which yielded an ideal family opportunity to break out one of those tediously aspirational The-Bard-For-Kidz boxed sets and run through a heavily abridged version with him to see which ...

I remember when I first saw the "Roger Bacon Manuscript": Wilfrid Voynich brought it with him to Philadelphia for his lecture back in 1921 - my old friend Bill Newbold was there, taking in every word, nodding like the crazy-but-brilliant spiritualist and Antioch-obsessed nutter he was. So it just had to be Bacon behind it all, right? I sat at the ...

I just posted up a ten-word description of the VMs on the cool-website-du-jour TenWordWiki: Unreadable Quattrocento cipher manuscript. Maddening trollbait for PhDs, but cool! OK, it's a fairly reasonable first attempt, though perhaps not quite achingly ironic enough for today's ADD generation. Far hipper bloggers than me would probably have smirkingly jirked:- Secretly reads: "All your Renaissance base are belong ...

Just a quick Voynich thought for you (I've been typing all day and my fingers are tired, so apologies for keeping it very brief) . On f86v3, have you noticed how the two spotty, side-profile beak, wings-outstretched birds are almost identical? Apart from the fact the one on the right here (which is in the bottom right corner of the actual ...