Cipher Mysteries

For the most part, constructing plausible explanations for the drawings in the Voynich Manuscript is a fairly straightforward exercise. Even its apparently-weird botany could well be subtly rational (for example, if plants on opposite pages swapped their roots over in the original binding, in a kind of visual anagram), as could the astronomy, the astrology, and the water / balneology quires (if all ...

Perhaps because of its geography (spanning a mountain range) or its powerful neighbours (France, Milan), Savoy is one of those nebulous, hard-to-grasp historical regions with a perimeter seemingly made of rubber. Here's a map of 15th century Savoy courtesy of the very useful sabaudia.org: as landmarks, you can see Milan, Turin, Genoa and Lyon - just off to the lower left are ...

Because of the lack of satisfactory evidence to work with, there are two basic Voynich research methodologies: concrete (which focus on those miserably few things we know about the VMs); and speculative (which try to determine which of the quadrillion possible explanations for the VMs are most inherently plausible). In line with the first of the two, I've spent a long time hacking away ...

In the last few days, several people have independently asked me to summarize my "The Curse of the Voynich" Voynich Manuscript theory (that it is an enciphered copy of Antonio Averlino [Filarete]'s lost books of secrets). Good theories generally improve when you retell them a few times: for example, back when I was first pitching my new type of ...

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 ...

For decades, Voynich Manuscript research has languished in an all-too-familiar ocean of maybes, all of them swelling and fading with the tides of fashion. But now, thanks to the cooperation between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the documentary makers at Austrian pro omnia films gmbh, we have for the very first time a basic forensic framework for what ...

Further to the recent (and much-commented-upon) post on Godefridus Aloysius Kinner's correspondence, I had a snoop around to see what other early modern correspondence roadkill I could scrape off the infobahn's oh-so-narrow historical lane. The most useful page I found was from the Warburg's Scaliger Research Project (kindly established by Professor Anthony Grafton): this contained a long-ish list ...

Though the Dean at All Saints in the Citadel of Prague was one of the earliest people to mention the Voynich Manuscript (in two letters to his old friend Athanasius Kircher), poor old Godefridus (Gottfried) Aloysius Kinner of Löwenthurn hasn't really featured much in the discussion so far. In Kinner's letter dated 4th January 1666, he mentions to Kircher that their mutual friend Johannes Marcus Marci ...

Much as I enjoyed watching Micky Bet covering the Voynich Manuscript, I couldn't help but wonder how much better it would be had it had a slightly funkier script. So (courtesy of the kind people at Overstream) I added my own captions. Enjoy! :-) (If you can't see this in your browser or email client, here's a ...

Podcaster "thevampiresamurai" has just posted up part 1 of "The Incrutable Dr Woo Manchu", his audio story linking Sherlock Holmes, the Voynich Manuscript, Roger Bacon, Khmer shorthand, and a murdered Chinese laundryman, all being investigated by dogged cigarette-smoking private eye Carson Albion....