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 ...

Just as it says on the tin title, here are some nice manuscript-related links for you. :-) First off, I didn't know until very recently that there was a Wikipedia entry on manuscript culture, which contains all kinds of manuscript-related bits and pieces (it puts the decline in trade for parchminers circa 1500, for example). However, I ...

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 ...

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 ...

Here's something neat and slightly unexpected from long-time Voynich Manuscript researcher (and Voynich theory über-skeptic) Rene Zandbergen I think you'll probably appreciate. Arguably the least-discussed subject in the VMs is the set of tiny plant drawings in the two 'pharma' (pharmacological) sections, which somehow usually manage to fly beneath most researchers' radars. Yet it has been known for decades that a good number of these plant ...

A nice email arrived from Paul Ferguson, pinging me about Giovanni Antonio Panteo/Pantheo (i.e. not the Giovanni Agostino Panteo who wrote the Voarchadumia as mentioned here before) and his book on baths & spas that is listed in the STC as Annotationes ex trium dierum confabulationibus (printed in Venice 1505).  According to The Story of Verona ...

OK, even though there's a whole lot of Voynich-related stuff backed up here, I felt I really had to pass on this link to an excellent page on the birth of the Illuminati conspiracy before I do anything else. Though I already knew a little bit about nutty Adam Weishaupt and his Bavarian Order of the Illuminati (with all its speculative Freemasonesque ceremonies ...

Since the recent Austrian Voynich Manuscript documentary (where the age of the VMs' vellum was tested using radiocarbon dating), there has been debate about how vellum was created, stocked, sold, stored and used in and around the 15th century. The #1 issue is that if uncut pieces of vellum were routinely held for long periods (years? decades? centuries?), Voynich theories that require a later use dating ...