Cipher Mysteries

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 ...

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 ...

Stephen Chrisomalis, "anthropologist, linguist, historian, and all-around numbers guy" (oh, and author of the soon-to-be-released "Numerical Notation: A Comparative History"), recently blogged about being interviewed as a talking head for a Canadian TV documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, a show that will apparently be hosted by none other than (as he delicately puts it) "WILLIAM FREAKIN' SHATNER". Chrisomalis seems pretty ...

The recent Austrian Voynich documentary gave a nice clear radiocarbon dating (1404-1438 at 95% confidence) for the vellum, and finished by suggesting (based on the swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle) a Northern Italian origin for the manuscript. But I have to say that as art history proofs go, that last bit is a little bit, ummm, lame: it's a single detail ...

Sometimes the biggest issues can hinge on the smallest questions. It seems that, from Rene Zandbergen's recollection of this week's press conference, the Voynich Manuscript's inks and paints are merely consistent with its vellum's radiocarbon dating. Naturally, for the 'smoking gun' brigade, that alone is insufficient proof to rule out any later dates for the creation of the VMs. The argument against ...

Earlier this year, I was contacted by a 58-year-old US Army / Navy computer programmer from North Carolina: he claimed to have solved the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, and wanted me to post details on my Cipher Mysteries blog, but without revealing his identity. Yesterday, however, Richard Rogers went public with his claims (which is why I can now say ...

In 1931, John Matthews Manly (who was very sharp, both historically and cryptologically) pointed out that the Voynich quire numbers were written in a 15th century hand - you can tell this from the characteristic '4's, '5's, and '7's. To be precise, even though a fair few of the VMs quire numbers appear to have been added later (most obviously the ...

A fascinating email just arrived at Cipher Mansions from Tony Gaffney, our virtual cryptologer-in-residence at the British Library. While looking at BL Add. MS 39660 recently, he noticed a set of dates for ten popes written in an unusual mixture of Roman numbers and Arabic numerals ("an9 pm9" = "annus primus", and "ufq3" = "usque"):-...

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). ...