Cipher Mysteries

...where I've been filming in Venice and Milan for a Voynich documentary to come out (I guess) in late 2012. So, I'm very sorry if I've been somewhat quiet of late, but this process has involved a fair amount of behind-the-scenes preparation to try to get the most out of all the different locations. Apart from nearly getting sunstroke in the ...

Regular Cipher Mysteries readers will know that I'm pretty good at digging historical things up, at shining lights under long-unmoved archival rocks. Well... my challenge this week was to find some mid-Quattrocento Milanese enciphered letters, and though I've possibly got most of the way to an answer, I've ended up a bit stuck, and would really appreciate some help from ...

I've just watched the National Geographic / Naked Science documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, courtesy of a Stateside friend (thanks!). Regular Cipher Mysteries readers will already know how my review of it is supposed to go - 'that, despite a few inaccuracies, it was great to see the Voynich Manuscript being brought to a popular audience'. But actually, the whole thing made me utterly furious: ...

Last week  (3rd February 2011) saw the US premiere of "The Book That Can't Be Read", the long-awaited National Geographic channel airing of the recent ORF documentary on the Voynich Manuscript. Though it prominently features the benign beardiness of everyone's favourite Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen, for a pleasant change the star of the show is undoubtedly the manuscript itself, with the ...

For a while, I've had an itch (a Voyn-itch, if you prefer) I couldn't work out how to scratch. You see... about six years ago, I found an old history book digitized on archive.org (if I remember correctly): it related how Francesco Sforza assembled an ongoing ad hoc council of representatives of various city-states surrounding Milan, told them all the inside news of ...

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 ...