Cipher Mysteries

I've had it suggested that to entertain a popular audience, a Voynich Manuscript documentary should showcase a live reenactment of its naked ladies bathing in green muddy slime. In this film-making scenario, the cameras could linger longingly on their most interesting period features, which (I can only presume) means their hair and makeup. Doubtless it would look great in HD, etc. But where does ...

It's time for a new Voynich research direction! Thanks to Benedek Lang's "Unlocked Books", I'm starting to realise that I've perhaps spent too long thinking solely about codicology of the single text, when what is often as important is the 'codicological context' - i.e. the collection of other (but presumably conceptually related in some way) texts that were bound alongside by ...

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 ...

For the recent Hungarian Voynich summer camp, I offered to do a couple of IM sessions over Skype, both of which seemed to go down very well. I thought many Cipher Mysteries readers might enjoy going over the transcript, so here it is (lightly edited for house style, as usual, and with after-the-event section dividers to make it not quite so unwieldy). ...

Following six years of arduous research, an unnamed 44-year-old German industrial technician has been trying (unsuccessfully) since 2005 to get his/her Voynich theory "De Aqua" published, either as a book or as an article. Frustrated by the lack of progress, last month he/she placed thirty-three sizeable chunks of it onto YouTube. Of course, I fully understand that a busy person like you can't really spare the ...

One of the (frustratingly small) number of art history leads the Voynich Manuscript's author dangles before our eyes is the balneology part of Q13 ("quire 13"). Specifically, there are two bifolios that depict baths and pools, where the pictures helpfully allow us to reconstruct what the page layout originally was:           84r/84v - contains Q13's quire number (which should be at ...

As should be apparent from recent posts, for the last few weeks I've had Glen Claston bouncing a number of his Voynich ideas, observations and hypotheses off me. In many ways, he and I are like conjoined research twins - though truth be told, if I happen to say "poe-tay-toe", he'll go out of his way to say "tuh-may-duh". :-) But now ...

Another day, another provocative (but good) question from my fellow contrarian Glen Claston (we're both part of the Contraria diaspora):- So Nick, since you're one of those who think that the book was dropped and put back together haphazardly, you'd be the one to ask for evidence that the various quires you think are misordered are actually misordered. [...] What about the ...

Nick: here's another full-on guest post from Glen Claston, with a little bit of friendly banter from me in blue... The different ways some little detail can be viewed is so much of the fun we have with the VMS.  Until supporting [or refuting] information can be found for either view, neither is more valid than the other; and indeed, ...

I've just had a nice email from my old friend GC, asking what I think happened with Quire 8 ("Q8"). You see, the problem is that Q8 contains a whole heap of codicological oddities, all of which fail to join together in a satisfactory way:- f57v has a bottom-right piece of marginalia that (I think) looks rather like "ij" with a bar ...