Cipher Mysteries

I recently received a note from independent Dutch researcher Esther Molen describing her Voynich theory: she was happy to see it given a post of its own, so... here it is! * * * * * * Here is my [Esther Molen's] translation and ideas. The Voynich Manuscript is mainly written in medieval Latin in combination with medieval French and medieval ...

To get 2012 rolling, I thought you might like to know that Walter Grosse has just started an English-language blog about his Voynich Manuscript theory. Briefly, he proposes that each Voynichese 'word' super-verbosely enciphers a digit, based purely on the number of letters it contains. So, the first six words of page f1r (in EVA: "fachys ykal ar ytaiin ...

In the pub after the Kingston Round Table of Inventors meeting this evening, a nice guy from Kingston Uni told me that he had recently had two "dry migraine" attacks, and that he was waiting for the results of the follow-up CT scan. This reminded me that I had a German Voynich explanation (i.e. not quite a theory, or perhaps ...

Apparently, today's big cipher mystery news story is the announcement that Finnish businessman "Veikko Latvala, a self described 'prophet of god'" has allegedly "decoded the book and unlocked the secrets of the world's most mysterious manuscript.". Voynich researchers will no doubt be amazed to learn that "The sound syllables are a mixture of Spanish and Italian, also mixed with the ...

A quick apology to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers: some illegal text characters (now fixed) that accidentally sneaked into a recent post caused Feedburner (the Google service I use to email posts to you) to go all huffy for a few days. Hence I'm very sorry to say that you've missed out on three recent updates to the site. They were (in ...

Go on, admit it: for all your research rationality and historical smarts, you secretly love nutty Voynich theories - the fruitier they are, the more in control of your own thoughts you feel. Of course, that feeling of superiority is merely the most fleeting of illusions: the only real difference is that you're smart enough to keep your mouth ...

Amid the me-too Voynich blog repost deluge of recent days comes - at long last - some genuinely new information courtesy of the Yale Daily News. From talking with the Beinecke's Assistant Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts Kathryn James, we now learn that:- Andreas Sulzer (the film maker) was originally utterly convinced that the VMs was 17th century, and ...

I've just watched the National Geographic / Naked Science documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, courtesy of a Stateside friend (thanks!). Regular Cipher Mysteries readers will already know how my review of it is supposed to go - 'that, despite a few inaccuracies, it was great to see the Voynich Manuscript being brought to a popular audience'. But actually, the whole thing made me utterly furious: ...

A few days ago, I posted here about my dissatisfaction with the current Wikipedia page on the Voynich manuscript, and about the kind of changes I proposed should be done to make it a better 'shopfront' for Voynich research. Basically, my idea was to move all the speculative theory-filled discussion across from the main Wikipedia page over to two or more new pages, ...

A few days ago, I was emailed by Gerry Scott from Cornell who recently, with the help of a friend, started putting together his own Wiki (a set of webpages editable by anybody) to try to give structure to the seething mass / wobbly jelly that is Voynich Manuscript research. Here's a direct link to what they've done so far. One of ...