Cipher Mysteries

Though Professor David A. King is best known, academically speaking, for his detailed study of astrolabes, I first ran across him via his epic (2001) tome "The Ciphers of the Monks" (summarised here): there, what happened was that one particular 14th century astrolabe from Picardy had some markings in an unusual number system first devised by Cistercian monks, and - ...

For a decade, I've wondered whether any of the Voynich Manuscript's circular drawings depict astronomical instruments - for before satnav there was celnav ("celestial navigation"). Here's a brief guide to three key instrument types from the VMs' timeframe, and my current thoughts on the enigmatic circular diagram on f57v... * * * * * * * A key navigational problem of the 15th ...

Following on from Philip Neal's translations, I wondered to myself: what might be lurking in Jesuit archives (specifically to do with Jacobus de Tepenecz / Sinapius)? And so I thought I'd have a quick snoop... For Jesuitica in general, sjweb.info has a useful list of Jesuit archives, of which the big three are (1) Georgetown University's numerous ...

As I mentioned recently, I'm working my way through James E. Morrison's book "The Astrolabe": seeing so many astrolabes at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford was good fun, but I still want to get all the maths and celestial mechanics straight in my head - I'm ...

TVE, the Spanish national TV company, wanted to interview me about my History Today telescope article. For visual props, they requested a 17th century telescope and a copy of Girolamo Sirtori's book - fair enough. A quick search of COPAC revealed eight copies across the UK: but what jumped out at me from the list was that there was a copy ...

Here's a nice bit of craft by someone called "iisaw" (Eric Coyote Elliott), who's made a fabulous astrolabe-like instrument and posted a couple of pictures of it on the DeviantArt website - click on the picture there for a detailed view. As you should be ...