Sorry for the short notice, but über-cipher-mystery The Voynich Manuscript is featuring prominently on an episode of “Castle Secrets & Legends” on the Travel Channel UK (Freeview channel 42) at 9pm tomorrow, i.e. 16th May 2014. It’s also playing on The Travel Channel Europe about now as well, if you happen to be elsewhere in our beloved United States of Europe EU. The blurb goes like this:-

“Behind the gates of the world’s most impressive castles, manor houses and mansions, many secrets are waiting to be revealed. Marvel at these amazing structures in all their glory and hear of the remarkable, mysterious and bizarre tales tied to the rich and powerful who once resided there.”

Yada yada yada. *sigh* All the same, there’s a reasonable chance they’ll have taken some nice footage of Villa Mondragone, which genuinely is an astonishing place in a wonderful location. If so, it’ll definitely be worth recording. Cryptography Schmyptography, eye candy wins out every time, right?

A few days ago I promised you my post-Frascati thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript radiocarbon dating. Errrm… little did I know quite what I was letting myself in for. It’s been a fairly bumpy ride. 🙁

Just so you know, the starting point here isn’t ‘raw data’, strictly speaking. The fraction of radioactive carbon-14 remaining (as determined by the science) first needs to be adjusted to its effective 1950 value so that it can be cross-referenced against the various historical calibration tables, such as “IntCal09” etc. The “corrected fraction” value is therefore the fraction of radioactive carbon-14 that would have been remaining in the sample had it been sampled in 1950 rather than (in this case) 2009. Though annoying, this pre-processing stage is basically automatic and hence largely unremarkable.

So, the (nearly) raw Voynich data looks like this:

Folio / language / corrected fraction modern [standard deviation]
f8 / Herbal-A / 0.9409 [0.0044]
f26 / Herbal-B / 0.9380 [0.0041]
f47 / Herbal-A / 0.9389 [0.0041]
f68 / Cosmo-A / 0.9338 [0.0041]

What normally happens next is that these corrected fraction data are converted to an uncalibrated fake date BP (‘Before Present’, i.e. years before 1950), based purely on the theoretical radiocarbon half-life decay period: for example, the f8 sample would have an uncalibrated radiocarbon date of “490±37BP” (i.e. “1460±37”).

However, this is a both confusing and unhelpful aspect of the literature because we’re only really interested in the calibrated radiocarbon dates, as read off the curves painstakingly calibrated against several thousand years of tree rings; so I prefer to omit it. Hence in the following I stick to corrected fractional values (e.g. 0.9409) or their straightforward percentage equivalents (e.g. 94.09%): even though these are equivalent to uncalibrated radiocarbon dates, I feel that mixing two different kinds of radiocarbon dates within single sentences is far too prone to confusion and error. It’s hard enough already without making it any harder. 🙁

The problem with the calibration curves in the literature is that they aren’t ‘monotonic’, i.e. they kick up and down. This means that many individual (input) radiocarbon fraction observations end up yielding two or more parallel (output) date ranges, making using them as a basis for historical reasoning both tricky and frustrating.

Yet as Greg Hodgins described in his Frascati talk, radiocarbon daters are mainly in the business of disproving things rather than proving things. In this case, you might say that all radiocarbon dating has achieved is to finally disprove Wilfrid Voynich’s suggestion that Roger Bacon wrote the Voynich Manuscript… an hypothesis that hasn’t been genuinely proposed for a couple of decades or so.

Of course, Voynich researchers are constantly looking out for ways in which they can use or combine contentious / subtle data to build better historical arguments: and so for them radiocarbon dating is merely one of many such datasets to be explored. In this instance, the science has produced four individual observations (for the four carefully treated vellum slivers), each with its own probability curve.

The obvious desire here is to find a way of reliably combining all four observations into a single, more reliable, composite meta-observation. The two specific formulae Greg Hodgins lists for doing this are:-

So, I built these formulae into a spreadsheet, yielding a resultant composite fractional value for all four of 0.93779785, with a standard deviation of 0.004169. I’m pretty certain this yields the headline date-range of 1404-1438 with 95% confidence (i.e. ±2 sigma) quoted just about everywhere since 2009. But… is it valid?

Well… as with almost everything in the statistical toolbox, I’m pretty sure that this requires that the underlying observations being merged exhibit ‘normality’ (i.e. that they broadly look like simple bell curves). Yet if you look at the four probabilistic dating curves, the earliest calibrated date (on f68) yields two distinct dating ‘humps’, whereas the latest calibrated date (on f8) has almost no chance of falling within the earlier dating hump. This means that the four distributions range from normal-like (with a single mean) to heteroscedastic (with multiple distinct means).

Now, the idea of having formulae to calculate weighted means and standard deviations is to combine a set of individual (yet distinct) populations being sampled into a single larger population, using the increased information content to get tighter constraints on the results. However, I’m not convinced that this is a valid assumption, because we are very likely sampling vellum taken from a number of different animal skins, very possibly produced under a variety of conditions at a number of different times.

Another problem is that we are trying to use probability distributions to do “double duty”, in that we often have a multiplicity of local means to choose between (and we can’t tell which sub-distribution any individual sample should belong to) as well as a kind of broadly normal-like distribution for each local mean. This is mixing scenario evaluation with probability evaluation, and both end up worse off for it.

A further problematic area here is that corrected fractional input values have a non-linear relationship with their output results, which means that a composite fractional mean will typically be different from a composite dating value.

A yet further problem is that we’re dealing with a very small number of samples, leaving any composite value susceptible to being excessively influenced by outliers.

As far as this last point goes, I have two specific concerns:
* Rene Zandbergen mentioned (and Greg confirmed) that one of the herbal bifolios was specifically selected for its thickness, in order (as I understand it) to try to give a reliable value after applying solvents. Yet when I examined the Voynich at the Beinecke back in 2006, there was a single bifolio in the whole manuscript that was significantly thicker than the others – in fact, it felt as though it had been made in a completely different way to the other vellum leaves. As I recall, it was not far from folio #50: was it f47? If that was selected, was it representative of the rest of the bifolios, or was it an outlier?
* The 2009 ORF documentary (around 44:36) shows Greg Hodgins slicing off a thin sliver from the edge of f68r3 (the ‘Pleiades’ panel), with the page apparently facing away from him. But if you look just a little closer at the scans, you’ll see that this is extremely close to a section of the page edge that has been very heavily handled over the years, far more so than much of the manuscript. This was also right at the edge of a multi-panel foldout, which raises the likelihood that it would have been close to an animal’s armpit. Personally, I would have instead looked for pristine sections of vellum that had no obvious evidence of heavy handling: picking the outside edge of f68 seems to be a mistake, possibly motivated more by ease of scientific access than by good historical practice.

As I said to Greg Hodgins in Frascati, my personal experience of stats is that it is almost impossible to design a statistical experiment properly: the shortcomings of what you’ve done typically only become apparent once you’ve tried to work with the data (i.e. once it’s too late to run it a second time). The greater my experience with stats has become, the more I hold this observation to be painfully self-evident: the real world causality and structure underlying the data you’re aiming to collect is almost without exception far trickier than you initially suspect – and I can see no good reason to believe that the Voynich Manuscript would be any kind of exception to this general rule.

I’m really not claiming to be some kind of statistical Zen Master here: rather, I’m just pointing out that if you want to make big claims for your statistical inferences, you really need to take an enormous amount of care about your experimental methodology and your inferential machinery – and right now I’m struggling to get even remotely close to the level of certainty claimed here. But perhaps I’ll have been convinced otherwise by the time I write Part Two… 🙂

If you simply can’t bear the idea of waiting a whole week until National Geographic airs its Voynich half-episode of “Ancient X-Files” in the UK, then you now have the option of watching the French dubbed version (courtesy of DailyMotion). Fast forward the time-slider to 22:00 to see a whole load of Venetian & Milanese Averlino Voynich theory stuff, including Francesco da Mosto doing his delightful historian thing. Love that guy.

I should perhaps also add that if you can’t find the UK airing of the same episode in your various TV channel guides, it may be (a) because it’s listed under “Sodom and Gomorrah” (which occupies the first half of the show), and (b) because the half with me in is listed as focusing on the “Voyinch Manuscript” *sigh*. Perhaps I spent last week at the Livva Mongradone in Crasfati, too, and never realised it. Oh well!

PS: my behind-the-scenes page is here, if you somehow managed to miss that.

…though not at all from the nice Frascati DOC we were pleasantly plied with at lunchtime on the Friday.

No: rather, my head is still buzzing from the giant mass of tangled, fascinating stuff that came my way – some from the presentations, but a lot from conversations and spirited debates. So alas, anyone hoping that I’ll post some kind of a conference-in-a-nutshell micro-report here is going to be sadly disappointed: it’s going to take me months to work through it all, there’s just too much.

So, in no particular order, what you broadly have to look forward to is:
* My reflections on the radiocarbon dating
* Voynich and the Rosicrucians (yes, really!)
* Rich SantaColoma’s ‘Optical Instruments Hypothesis’ (but radically revisited)
* Claudio Foti’s new ‘Poggio Bracciolini’ hypothesis
* Rafal Prinke’s news on Baresch & Sinapius
* Rene Zandbergen’s discussion of Carl Widemann
* Johannes Albus’s new angle on f116v’s maddening marginalia
* Why I think Voynich statistics are a roadblock, not a bridge
* The three next big challenges – scans, error rates, language mapping
* etc

PS: having said all that, if you were there and have any neat photographs you’d like to share, please upload them to one of the many filesharing sites out there and send me through a link to them, as it would be quite nice to put together a bit of a visual walkthrough here. (Thanks Karsten for your photos!)

My Villa Mondragone slides are getting ever closer to finished, which is just as well because the 2012 Voynich Manuscript conference is now a scant seven days away (*gasp*). Meanwhile here in Cipher Mysteries Towers, it should be no surprise that the caffeinated clatter of jittery journalists tap-tapping away at the walls for interesting angles on everyone’s favourite mysterious manuscript is starting to build up to a bit of a din, ahh bless.

So… here’s my latest version (#007) of Between Vellum and Prague. If you’ll be at Frascati (and I sincerely hope a good few of you will be!), please feel free to read it beforehand, I really don’t mind – in fact, I far prefer excruciatingly well-informed hecklers. 😉

However, the even bigger big news of the day is that the first screening date for the Voynich documentary I was filmed for in Venice and Milan last summer has just been announced: 9pm 22nd May 2012 on the National Geographic channel here in the UK, and then several times a day all the way through to the 27th May 2012. It’s part of a series called “Ancient X-Files”: my Voynich section time-shares an episode with a section on locating the Biblical cities of Sodom & Gomorrah.

It was a terrific lot of fun making it (despite the Venetian heatwave), as well as a truly amazing experience going to places as part of a full-on documentary film crew – doors that would stay resolutely shut to A. N. Other solo historian magically eased themselves wide, wide open. This meant that I got to see a whole load of wonderful, new surprising things – in fact, everywhere we went, everything we saw & everyone we met all far surpassed my expectations. So even if the Nat Geo documentary stands essentially zero chance of convincing you to drop your own Voynich theory for a picosecond 🙂 , I hope you’ll come along for the ride, a brief busman’s holiday to Quattrocento Italy with my Antonio Averlino / Filarete theory!

Come on, someone you know is bound to be a Nat Geo subscriber, surely? Go on, ask them! 🙂

Anyway, that’s all for the moment, but rest assured I’ll be able to post much more once it airs…

As promised, here are some preliminary slides for my upcoming Villa Mondragone / Voynich 2012 presentation, though not yet with any pictures to illustrate them (boo! hiss!).

Essentially, I’ve wrapped together all my various codicological analyses from the last decade into a single mega-sequence: these explain the step-by-step transformations that I’m fairly certain the Voynich Manuscript underwent once people started adding extra layers (quire numbers, marginalia, folio numbers, etc) to it.

Download the slides here: Between Vellum and Prague.

There’s also a mega-diagram handout to go with it: click on the following picture to expand it out into something you can navigate more effectively. The key graphic convention to note is that I’ve used underlines to denote where quire numbers were physically added (and on which individual digit!)

Ultimately, I think I’ve now managed to reach a level of codicological narrative that explains more or less everything that happened to the manuscript once it landed on the first quire numberer’s desk (though a question mark remains hanging over ‘Q6’, Quire #6 *sigh*). Having said that, I’m perfectly happy for you all to try to shoot any part of it down in flames… I wouldn’t present it to an international conference if I wasn’t reasonably convinced it was basically bulletproof. 🙂

Further reading:
* For basic background, my introduction to the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbering
* For much, much more on the ‘chicken scratch’ marginalia (and on Q8 and Q14), take a look at these posts: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

As many Cipher Mysteries regulars will know, the two reasons I focused my Voynich Manuscript research on the 15th century were (a) the Voynichese ‘4o’ sign reappears in a number of (far less sophisticated) 15th century cipher alphabets, thus pointing to a post-1400 date; while (b), as John Matthews Manly pointed out in 1931, the manuscript’s 15th century quire numbers strongly imply a pre-1500 date. (Though it was nice that the radiocarbon dating didn’t contradict this, the evidence was actually there all along. *sigh*)

All the same, numerous aspects of the codicology and palaeography of the Voynich Manuscript remain unresolved: for example, my presentation at next month’s Villa Mondragone Voynich centenary conference will revolve (at great speed) around quire numbers. Fascinatingly, a whole lot of interesting quire-number-related stuff has emerged over the last few weeks, thanks to French Voynich blogger Thomas Sauvaget.

You see, Thomas decided a while back to see whether he could dig up examples of Voynich-like features in scans of manuscripts available online, i.e. zodiac month names, gallows characters, the odd ij mark on f57v, and (of course) the quire numbers.

While trawling through St Gallen’s online manuscript collection, Thomas found something I’d missed when looking there (shame on me, but probably because I was looking for quire numbers at the bottom of pages) – a ‘pm9’ [primus] in the top margin of f176r of Cod[ex] Sang[allensis] 839 that is pretty similar to the ‘pm9’ used to number the Voynich Manuscript’s first quire. (The jpeg at the top shows the two overlaid).

Now… Cod Sang 839 [a copy of Nicolas Oresme’s five books of commentary on Aristotle’s Physics] was a copy made in 1459 by the same (according to Scherrer’s 1875 catalogue) scribe who wrote Cod Sang 840 in 1459 and Cod Sang 841 in 1462. Yet the ‘pm9’ appears not in the text, nor even in the scribe’s colophon, but in a table of contents added later, in a different hand.

Thomas concludes (from the back-to-front shape of the ‘4’ digit) that this table-of-contents scribe was not the same person who added the quire numbers to the Voynich: and that’s perfectly reasonable. Yet at the same time, it remains a pretty strong match, which I think in and of itself broadly points to the conclusion Thomas ultimately comes to (which I’ll get to further below).

Incidentally, Cod Sang 841 has an ownership note added by a Johannes [Hans] Lippis:

Johanes Lippis possessor h. libri bin uff Gais gsin und do hand mir die Heren das buch geben und hand es mir geschenkt.”

It was far from clear to me exactly what this was saying, so I passed it over to the ever-careful Philip Neal, who very kindly and lucidly translated it as follows:-

“I, Johannes Lippis, owner of this book, was at Gais, and there the lords gave me the book and made a present of it to me.”

This seems to be consistent with the Johannes Lippis mentioned as a lawyer in a 1441 charter, who was perhaps representing the St Gallen abbey’s local interest in the town of Gais. Might it have been some kind of sweetener or (dare I say it) bribe? Possibly! Even so, it also seems unlikely to me that Lippis was given all three as a gift, while his clunky text seems rather at odds with the person patiently trawling through Oresme’s commentary to produce an index.

I strongly suspect that all three manuscripts ended up at St Gall simply because they were from a single local hand, and that a fairly senior librarian in St Gall probably added the table of contents. However, you’ll have to make your own mind up in the absence of any better evidence – I emailed St Gallen’s manuscript cataloguer to ask about this, but didn’t get a definitive enough reply either way to confirm or deny this.

Anyway, Thomas carried on searching and found yet more pm9 marginalia in a 1467 music book by Hugo Spechtshart in Esslingen in Southern Germany, this time along with Voynich-like abbreviations for secundus, tertius and quartus… though once again, not as quire numbers.

Putting all the pieces together, Thomas thinks that they all point to a ‘Lake Constance hypothesis’: that the quire numbers were examples of an abbreviatory style that flourished 1450-1500 on the various edges of Lake Constance, where we now see Southern Germany, Switzerland (St Gallen isn’t far away at all), Austria, and even Liechtenstein (pretty much).

Al perfectly reasonable. Of course, rewind the clock 550 years and Switzerland was actually the Confederacy, with the conflict with the Habsburgs in the Swabian War (1499) yet to come. I’m not entirely certain, but it seems that the angsty neighbours around Lake Constance circa 1460 were:-
* the Prince-Bishopric of Constance to the North
* Thurgau to the West
* the Prince-Abbacy of St Gall to the South West
* the Federation of Three Leagues (i.e. the League of the Ten Jurisdictions, the League of God’s House, and the Grey League) to the South-East

[All of which sounds to me more like the turbulent political setting for an Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ space opera novel, but there you go.]

Heaven only knows where all the archives for these ended up! Good luck to Thomas trying to find them! Myself, I’m following another (far simpler) research lead entirely… but more on that later! 😉

Here’s what I think the Voynich Wikipedia page ought to look like. Enjoy! 🙂

* * * * * * *

History of a Mystery

Once upon a time (in 1912) in a crumbling Jesuit college near Rome, an antiquarian bookseller called Wilfrid Voynich bought a mysterious enciphered handwritten book. Despite its length (240 pages) it was an ugly, badly-painted little thing, for sure: but its strange text and drawings caught his imagination — and that was that.

Having quickly convinced himself that it could only have been written by one particular smart-arse medieval monk by the name of Roger Bacon, Voynich then spent the rest of his life trying to persuade gullible and/or overspeculative academics to ‘prove’ that his hunch was right. All of which amounted to a waste of twenty years, because it hadn’t even slightly been written by Bacon. D’oh!

Oh, so you’d like to see some pictures of his ‘Voynich Manuscript’, would you? Well… go ahead, knock yourself out. First up, here’s some of its ‘Voynichese’ script, which people only tend to recognize if they had stopped taking their meds a few days previously:

A nice clear example of Voynichese

Secondly, here’s one of the Voynich Manuscript’s many herbal drawings, almost all of which resemble mad scientist random hybrids of bits of other plants:-

Finally, here’s a close-up of one of its bizarre naked ladies (researchers call them ‘nymphs’, obviously trying not to mix business and pleasure), in this case apparently connected up to some odd-looking plumbing / tubing. Yup, the right word is indeed ‘bizarre’:

voynich f77v central nymph Q13 and Voynich balneology sources...?

Did any of that help at all? No, probably not. So perhaps you can explain it now? No, I didn’t think so. Don’t worry, none of us can either. *sigh*

Back to the History Bit

Anyhow, tucked inside the manuscript was a letter dated 1665 from Johannes Marcus Marci in Prague, and addressed to the well-known delusional Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Marci’s letter said that he was giving the manuscript to Kircher both because of their friendship and because of Kircher’s reputation for being able to break any cipher. The manuscript seems then to have entered the Jesuit archives, which is presumably why the Jesuit college near Rome had it to sell to Wilfrid Voynich several centuries later, just as in all the best mystery novels.

But hold on a minute… might Wilfrid Voynich have forged his manuscript? Actually, a few years back researchers diligently dug up several other 17th century letters to Kircher almost certainly referring to the same thing, all of which makes the Voynich Manuscript at least 200 years older than Wilfrid Voynich. So no, he couldn’t have forged it, not without using Doc Brown’s flux capacitor. (Or possibly the time machine depicted in Quire 13. Unless that’s impossible.)

Incidentally, one of those other letters was from an obscure Prague alchemist called Georg Baresch, who seems to have wasted twenty or so years of his life pondering this curious object before giving it to Marci. So it would seem that twenty lost years is the de facto standard duration for Voynich research. Depressing, eh?

So, Where Did Baresch Get It From?

Well… Marci had heard it said that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had bought the manuscript for the ultra-tidy sum of 600 gold ducats, probably enough to buy a small castle. Similarly, Wilfrid Voynich discovered an erased signature for Sinapius (i.e. Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, Rudolf II’s Imperial Distiller) on its front page. You can usefully assemble all these boring fragments of half-knowledge into a hugely unconvincing chain of ownership going all the way back to 1600-1610 or so, that would look something not entirely unlike this:-

Which is a bit of a shame, because in 2009 the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum was radiocarbon dated to 1404-1438 with 95% confidence. Hence it still has a gap of roughly 150 years on its reconstructed CV that we can’t account for at all – you know, the kind of hole that leads to those awkward pauses at job interviews, right before they shake your hand and say “We’ll let you know…

Hence, The Real Question Is…

Fast-forward to 2012, and Wilfrid Voynich’s manuscript has ended up in New Haven at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yet many Voynichologists seemed to have learnt little from all that has gone before, in that – just as with Wilfrid himself – they continue to waste decades of their life trying to prove that it is an [insert-theory-here] written by [insert-historical-figure-here].

If repeatedly pressed, such theorists tend to claim that:
* the ‘quest’ is everything;
* it is better to travel than to arrive; and even
* cracking the Voynich might somehow spoil its perfect inscrutability.
All of which, of course, makes no real sense to anyone but a Zen Master: but if their earnest wish is to remain armchair mountaineers with slippers for crampons, then so be it.

Yet ultimately, if you strip back the inevitable vanity and posturing, the only genuine question most people have at this point is:

How can I crack the Voynich Manuscript and become an eternal intellectual hero?

The answer is: unless you’re demonstrably a polymathic Intellectual History Renaissance Man or Woman with high-tensile steel cable for nerves, a supercomputer cluster the size of Peru for a brain, and who just happens to have read every book ever written on medieval/Renaissance history and examined every scratchy document in every archive, your chances are basically nil. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Honestly, it’s a blatant exaggeration but near enough to the truth true: so please try to get over it, OK?

Look, people have been analyzing the Voynich with computers since World War Two and still can’t reliably interpret a single letter – not a vowel, consonant, digit, punctuation mark, nothing. [A possible hyphen is about as good as it gets, honestly.] Nobody’s even sure if the spaces between words are genuinely spaces, if Voynichese ‘words’ are indeed actual words. *sigh*

Cryptologically, we can’t even properly tell what kind of an enciphering system was used – and if you can’t get that far, it should be no great surprise that applying massive computing power will yield no significant benefit. Basically, you can’t force your way into a castle with a battering ram if you don’t even know where its walls are. For the global community of clever-clogs codebreakers, can you even conceive of how embarrassing a failure this is, hmmm?

So, How Do We Crack It, Then?

If we do end up breaking the Voynich’s cipher, it looks unlikely that it will have been thanks to the superhuman efforts of a single Champollion-like person. Rather, it will most likely have come about from a succession of small things that get uncovered that all somehow cumulatively add up into some much bigger things. You could try to crack it yourself but… really, is there much sense in trying to climb Everest if everyone in the army of mountaineers that went before you has failed to work out even where base camp should go? It’s not hugely clear that even half of them even were looking at the right mountain.

All the same, there are dozens of open questions ranging across a wide set of fields (e.g. codicology, palaeography, statistical analysis, cryptanalysis, etc), each of which might help to move our collective understanding of the Voynich Manuscript forward if we could only answer them. For example…
* Can we find a handwriting match for the marginalia? [More details here & here]
* Can we find a reliable way of reading the wonky marginalia (particularly on f116v, the endmost page)? [More details here]
* Can we find another document using the same unusual quire numbering scheme (‘abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals’)? [More details here].
* Precisely how do state machine models of the Voynich’s two ‘Currier language’s differ? Moreover, why do they differ? [More details here]
* etc

The basic idea here is that if you can’t do big at all, do us all a favour and try to do small well instead. But nobody’s listening: and so it all goes on, year after year. What a waste of time. 🙁

A Warning From History

Finally: I completely understand that you’re a busy person with lots on your mind, so the chances are you’ll forget almost all of the above within a matter of minutes. Possibly even seconds. And that’s OK. But if you can only spare sufficient mental capacity to remember a seven-word soundbite from this whole dismal summary, perhaps they ought to be:

Underestimate the Voynich Manuscript at your peril!

Now ain’t that the truth!?

I’m just starting to put together my talk for the upcoming Voynich centenary conference. The session is provisionally titled “Between Vellum and Prague”, with a summary along the lines of…

“The Voynich Manuscript first pinged on the cultural radar in Prague circa 1600, yet its vellum has recently been radiocarbon dated to the first half of the 15th century. So… what happened inbetween? Nick Pelling has long been intrigued by this wide-open question, and in this session presents a summary of a wide range of codicological evidence that holds the promise of answering it.”

In many important ways, I don’t care much for Voynich theories (not even my own): the important thing for me has long been developing an evidence base that we can use to eliminate bad theories (long-time Cipher Mysteries readers will no doubt recall various times I’ve ranted about Popperian ‘falsification’, Karl Popper’s notion that theories are there to be knocked down, not puffed up).

But what would such usable ‘evidence’ look like? Mainstream history as currently practised is predominantly based on close reading of original documents within the context of large bodies of parallel evidence – even Art History falls within this methodology, as it places tiny observed details within an overall historical canon of evolving technique and materials.

The Beinecke’s splendid scans have enabled us to closely read the original document’s surface, so in some ways we’re halfway there: but as for “the large bodies of parallel evidence” part of the equation, we have at the same time too many and too few such bodies to choose from – by which I mean too many possible, too few probable.

As a result, the Voynich Manuscript remains an uncomfortable topic for historians, because even after a century of study it resolutely resists being pigeonholed within any cladistic strand or tradition. Basically, it is this core uncertainty about its internal nature and external tradition that dissuades many academics from wading too deeply into the Voynichian swamp… and frankly, I don’t blame them, because you’d need a wetsuit, not wellies.

It therefore seems much more prudent to me to go hunting for evidence than for yet more speculative theories. However, you need to have a really clear research question in mind when you do it, or it is likely that your efforts will be for nothing. For me, the best questions by a mile all relate to the Voynich Manuscript’s life before its apparent appearance at Rudolf’s Imperial Court in Prague: and so the class of evidence to look for is that which helps to bring out this otherwise invisible history.

As a result, I’m not hugely worried about things such as letters hidden in Voynich plants except insofar as they suggest links between the Voynichese hand and the marginalia hand. Similarly, the parallel hatching used in some of the drawings is not in itself important except for the way that it apparently directly conflicts with the radiocarbon dating (and indeed it would seem we have various 15th century hands in play, as John Matthews Manly noted over 80 years ago, which would seem to stop any kind of 16th century theory dead in its tracks).

The Voynich’s unusual quire numbers are puzzling too, and perfectly consonant with a mid-to-late 15th century dating. Yet frustratingly nobody has yet discovered a single example of another document with the same abbreviated longhand Latin ordinal numbering scheme: finding even one document using that same numbering style would surely open up a fascinating door into the manuscript’s early past.

But personally, I think there’s a high chance that the final page (f116v) marginalia will turn out to be some kind of scrappy French Secretary Hand, with “michiton oladabas” perhaps even saying nichil or even nichil obstat. The top marginalia line of f116v could also be a dedication or note to a “Simon Sint”, it’s hard to tell. These offer such tangible promise of connecting the Voynich to real people or places, yet so many speculative readings have been proposed that it’s all too easy to just ignore them.

And yet all the same, perhaps the richest vein to tap has been the raw internal codicology of the Voynich drawings themselves. If we could only find some ingenious way of connecting pages together (comparing DNA fingerprints of different bifolios, multispectral scans of inks or vellum, mapping the varying thicknesses of pages along their edges, etc), we could make a really great stab at reconstructing the original page order.

As examples, I discussed Q9 (“Quire 9”), Q13 and various out-of-order herbal pages at length in “The Curse of the Voynich”, while I’ve also discussed Q8 and Q20 here (as well as Q20’s paragraph stars), and indeed on Glen Claston’s thoughts on the nine-rosette foldout Q14 as well the ‘chicken scratch’ marginalia on its back.

But as should be apparent from the constellation of links strung through the preceding paragraphs like fairy lights, this remains an utterly fragmented research area. In each individual case, I can tell a speculative story about what I think happened to the manuscript to leave a particular set of details in the curious manner we find them arranged today, but I’m completely aware that that’s simply not good enough, even if I do try to take the totality of evidence into consideration at each point.

All the same, I continue to be of the opinion that it may not be to everyone’s tastes but studying the Voynich Manuscript’s codicology is pretty much as good as we can get – that finding historical parallels for individual drawings or indeed matching the roots of individual plants will never be enough to snip through its Gordian knot. Finding out what happened is the most pragmatic stepping stone back in time we have – so we should try harder to make what we have solid enough to step on, right?