Here’s a quicky list of books I’m looking forward to reading in the near future, some of which will doubtless already have been gift-wrapped by oddly-familiar elves. Of course, those with book tokens or pockets wadded full of spare cash may prefer to wait until January/February 2009 to read my reviews first, but where’s the fun in [...] Read more »
I’ve had a number of off-blog posts, all commiserating with my apparent Voynich research burnout. All very kind, thank you for your support - but it ain’t actually so. Rather, what has happened is that I’ve been facing up to the shape of Voynich research to come - a change of direction so huge that I [...] Read more »
The high point of the Medieval Studies conference calendar is undoubtedly the International Congress at Kalamazoo, Michigan: but career academics have long demonstrated reserve about (if not outright fear of) presenting anything there on the minefield that is the Voynich Manuscript.
For a start, even its name is historically imprecise: if it turns out to be post-1450, it’s not [...] Read more »
Fancy a walk around London? There are some real scorchers to choose from at London Walks, a company offering fascinating pedestrian slices through the many-layered cake that is our dear Londinium. But for Voynicheros, one walk in particular stands out: “Anarchy in the UK - Mob Rule & Terror Tactics” hosted by writer Ed Glinert, and [...] Read more »
While snooping around the (mostly empty) user subsites on Glen Claston’s Voynich Central, I came across a page by someone called Robin devoted solely to the Scorpio “Scorpion” page in the VMs. This has an unusual drawing of a scorpion (or salamander) at the centre, and which I agree demands closer attention…
My first observation is that, while [...] Read more »
Here’s a quicky idea…
I have (possibly literally) a ton of books in my library, most of which seems to revolve around early modern / Renaissance history, telescopes, ciphers, and themes touching on aspects of the Voynich Manuscript. And somehow the mound keeps on growing, week on week. Even though I love them all, I can appreciate that (actually) this is a bit of a [...] Read more »
As regular Cipher Mysteries readers will know, I’ve recently become particularly interested in early modern correspondence as a way of peering into the dispersed scientific networks that began to develop and extend during the late sixteenth century (the so-called “invisible colleges”), very much along the lines described for Tycho Brahe’s familia by Adam Mosley in his recent book Bearing [...] Read more »
As a Brit, there’s a very particular class of American-made sequel that fills my film-watching soul with despair. On planes and slow Sundays, you’ve doubtless caught a few exemplars yourself: “Garfield 2″, “Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London”, “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” all spring readily to my mind, but these form but the tip of a particularly yellow-coloured [...] Read more »
Here’s something I stumbled upon recently & thought I ought to share…
Between 1935 and 1940, French scholar Seymour de Ricci published his gigantic Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. Not content with that, he quickly moved on to a similarly epic project: a Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United Kingdom. However, following his [...] Read more »
..and not a drop of ink to spare. A quick digression about some unexpected UK archives…
I’ve long been a fan of the M25 Consortium: no, it’s not some wryly-named Croydon-based arts collective, but a searchable multi-library catalogue, a bit like a WorldCat for Londonista academics. However, until today I didn’t know that there are other parallel meta-catalogues under broadly the same geographical [...] Read more »
