Cipher Mysteries

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 ...

Blogger of the visually bizarre BibliOdyssey has a number of nice online herbal scans you might well enjoy: each page has a brief description of the related manuscript and links to other places you can read more about the subject, while each picture links to its own Flickr page (which is handy). 'Arzneipflanzenbuch' [BSB Cod.icon. 26], Augsburg circa ...

Here are two German papers (from 2007 and 2008) by Dr. Michael Mönnich on the Voynich Manuscript I stumbled across a few months ago, both of which place it within the context of the history of pharmacy: Pharmazeutische Aspekte im Voynich-Manuskript. In: "Drugs and medicines from sides of the Atlantic Ocean" 38th International Congress of the History of Pharmacy, Seville, 21st September 2007 Das Voynichmanuskript aus ...

Jan Hurych has very kindly emailed in a translation of the short piece of text I uncovered relating to the 14th century Prague apothecary Antonio of Florence. With a few minor style tweaks, here it is:- The restoration of gothic painting in the house U Lilie ["By Lilly"] no. 459/1, Malé náměstí ["The Little Square"] 11. During the 14th century, this house ...

Italian scientists claim to have solved two mysterious deaths from the Quattrocento: those of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Agnolo Ambrogini, two big-brained Florentines at Lorenzo de' Medici's court who suddenly passed away within only a few weeks of each other in 1494. Though some historians had conjectured the pair might have died of syphilis, the contemporary rumours ...

A few days ago, my wife suggested that the plant depicted on f36r might be a variety of geranium: on a hunch, I thought I'd compare it with the plants in Fuchs' famous herbal - and Google quite unexpectedly directed me to a museum in Tuscany. You see, in 2002 the Aboca Museum in Sansepolcro embarked upon an ambitious ...

Once upon a time, history was a really hard subject to enjoy: a dreary rollcall of [macho/loser] kings and [powerful/scheming] queens, endlessly (a) conspiring against other, (b) fighting expensive wars where both sides tended to lose, and/or (c) endlessly frittering extorted tax money on self-glorifying monuments masquerading as high culture. Then along came a new generation of "social historians", who despised ...