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 all you good people!

The starting point was that I was sure that the Archivio di Stato in Milan contains a vast number of documents from the period I’m most interested in (Milan’s Francesco Sforza era, i.e. 1450-1465), so that ought to be the first place to look for these. But (as is normally the case) relevant manuscript catalogues are few and far between online, so I initially drew a blank.

Then I (somewhat luckily) stumbled across a 1995 book online called “Fifteenth-century Dance and Music: Treatises and Music” by A. William Smith. Page 6 of its “Fifteenth-century Italian Dance Sources” chapter mentions a letter: “26 July Archivio di Stato milanese. Potenze estere. Napoli 1455. in cifre from Albrico Maletta, Sforza ambassador in Napoli to Duke Francesco Sforza in Milano.” Interestingly, f20v of the famous Tranchedino cipher ledger is marked as “Cum Francisco Maleta” (though this is sandwiched between a 1458 cipher and a 1459 cipher, so might well have been entered into the ledger later than 1455): all the same, it would be interesting to compare the two. But how to find the manuscript reference for this?

The first thing to note is that “Potenze Estere” is actually the name of a large set of documents within the Milanese Carteggio Sforzesco archive. Obviously, I then searched like crazy for (I’d guess a scan of a 19th century) inventory of this, but without any luck. So where next?

Then I remembered Aloysius Meister’s “Die Anfaege Der Modernen Diplomatischen Geheimschrift” (1902): p.30 contains a (surprisingly complex, I think) Milanese cipher key and nomenclator dated 14th March 1448, with the reference “Mailand, Staatsarchiv. Pot. Est. Cifre Fasc. 2 Nr 5.” There’s also a 1483 cipher (p.31) noted as “l. c. Fasc. 1 Nr 15” (interestingly, this contains a “4o” composite character (for ‘z’) but with the ‘o’ attached to the downstroke of the ‘4’), and a 1530 cipher key (p.32) listed as “l. c. Fasc. 4 Nr. 53 Grofs 4o”.

(I should add that Meister 1902 also lists ciphers for Modena, including one [p.35] dated 23rd June 1435 “In Milano” which fascinatingly contains “4” for ‘Q’ and “4o” for “Qua”. [“Canc. duc. Arch. Proprio Mappe II. Nr 1.”]: and for Florence, he lists the Cifra di Galiotto Fibindacci da Ricasoli 1424, which similarly uses “4o” for “Q” [p.50])

So there you have it: it seems that the Carteggio Sforzesco’s Potenze Estere archive contains several specific bundles of cipher documents (“Cifre Fasc[iculus/-i]”) that sounds like what I’m looking for. But then again, Meister was writing over a century ago and much may well have changed there: specifically, here’s a link to the best listing I could find for the pre-1535 part of the Potenze Estere archive, but note that there is no obvious cipher bundle or subset to be seen. And that would seem to be the end of the line – though I’d expect the 1455 letter from Naples listed by Smith is probably filed in the Napoli section of the Pot. Est. archive (which is more or less entirely arranged geographically).

At the end of all that, I don’t know whether I’m really close or really far away. Are the cipher bundles Meister referred to still in the Potenze Estere, and what do they contain? Or have they been moved, split, stolen or lost at some point during the last century? Regardless, where do I need to go to see them and what should I ask for? Any pointers you can turn up to help me answer these questions would be much appreciated! [Please leave comments on the page below, or email me at the normal address]. Thanks!


Update: I subsequently found a more detailed listing on p.927 of this sizeable inventory: it says that the Atti Ducali (1392-1535) section of the Archivio Sforzesco contains “Cancelleria segreta 1450-1535, scatole 11. Raccolta di documenti relativi all’attività quotidiana della cancelleria: sommari, cifrari, occorrenze (carta, inchiostro ecc.), archivio, documenti relativi alla biblioteca del castello di Pavia.” So perhaps the cipher documents Meister saw were later moved over to this Atti Ducali section?

Alternatively, the Carteggio Sforzesco’s Potenze Sovrane archive also holds a section marked “Cancelleria segreta – Chiavi e cifrari (scatt. 1591, 1597 – 1598)”, which is what Lidia Cerioni relied on for her book “La diplomazia sforzesca”, and might instead be what I’m looking for (it’s hard to tell). Oh, and just a few bundles away, the same archive has the intriguing-sounding scat. 1569: “Miscellanea, astrologia, occultismo, superstizione etc.” Really, what historian of mysteries could resist sneaking a peek? 😉

Here are some piquant canapes to twingle your Voynich tastebuds, a bit like “Space Dust for researchers”.

(1) Gerry Kennedy has discovered that a deathmask of Wilfrid Voynich was taken, and that it still exists.

(2) Jackie Speel tells me that “in 1916 Wilfrid Voynich was involved in a friendly law case with the Lincoln Cathedral authorities over the ownership of one of their books he had acquired in good faith from another American dealer (The Times May 11, 1916 pg 4 refers). In the event he donated the book back to the cathedral.”

(3) Jackie also notes that Wilfrid Voynich’s British Museum (i.e. what is now the British Library) “ticket/renewal details still survive – he first joined on 19 October 1895 and the ticket was last renewed 29 November 1907.”

(4) Diane O’Donovan points out that “Chinese inks are high carbon”.

(5) While Ludi Price concurs that f1r’s “glyph 3 does look uncannily like yuan, the [Chinese] character for ‘first'”, the key problem with VMs Chinese theories is that “(spoken) Chinese in the 14th/15th century was completely different to modern Mandarin Chinese. It had more tones, more glutteral stops, and was more akin to modern day Cantonese than it is today. People who want to tackle a VMS as Chinese theory would need to approach it from a Classical Chinese standpoint, not a modern one.”

(6) Henry Berg has just published his own breathtakingly syncretic Voynich theory, and hacked it on as a link to the bottom of the Wikipedia page (shame on him). It’s a heady mix of Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare (Hamlet in particular), Athanasius Kircher, Isaac Voss and even Shugborough Hall (no, I kid you not), with 17th century conspiracies and disinformation aplenty. Great fun for the the next Voynich pub meet: but little genuine chance of being a workable hypothesis, alas.

(7) On the diametrically opposite side of the color wheel, here’s a reasonably balanced (but, even so, frequently wrong) view of the VMs’ ciphertext, courtesy of Sravana Reddy and Kevin Knight, hot off the presses. Enjoy!

Wowza – the long-awaited chemical analysis of the Voynich Manuscript’s inks by the McCrone Institute (you know, the one commissioned for Andreas Sulzer’s 2009 ORF documentary on the VMs) has just appeared sans fanfare on the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Voynich page.

Feel free to read the report as a PDF, though note that it wouldn’t render in Internet Explorer for me, so I downloaded it directly (“Save Target As…”) and opened it in Adobe Reader. Its key conclusions are:-

* A single ink [typical iron gall] was “in all probability” used for both the main body of the text and for the drawings.
* A second ink [high iron] was used for the folio numbers.
* A third ink [high carbon, very low iron] was used for the quire numbers .
* A fourth ink [high carbon, very low iron] was used for the Latin alphabet on f1r.
* The blue paint was ground azurite “with minor amounts of cuprite, a copper oxide”.
* “The green paint is a mixture of copper-stained amorphous organic material optically consistent with copper resinate, and copper-chloride compounds consistent with atacamite or similar compounds”, but without any resins obviously present.
* Gum (presumably gum arabic) was used to bind the green paint and all the inks (apart from the Latin alphabet ‘a’ on f1r, which seems to have been bound with a protein), though “the spectra include several sharp peaks […] that are not expected for a gum as per the spectra in our library”, which “suggests the possibility of other constituents, which remain unidentified as of this date”. Note that the blue and red-brown paints were not tested for gum.

It’s going to take a while to digest this properly, basically because the Beinecke has only released the text part of the report, and none of the figures, photographs or reference spectra mentioned in the text. Other scans referred to in the text (such as UV scans of f1r, and presumably of f17r as this appeared in publicity montages for the documentary) are similarly absent: it would be particularly nice to see these as well, wouldn’t you say?

To my mind, the various ink compositions would seem to suggest that there were three distinct codicological phases: a first text/drawing phase (normal iron gall), a second quire number and f1r Latin alphabet phase (where the inks are different, but made to broadly the same house style), and a third folio numbers phase. All of which should be no great surprise to most Voynich researchers, but all the same I personally find it interesting that the quire numbers seem to have been added in the same general phase as f1r’s attempted cipher alphabet. It therefore seems likely that the quire numberer did not know how to decipher the VMs, a conclusion I reached several years ago via quite independent codicological means.

Finally, it is somewhat disappointing that the single most-debated piece of information is conspicuously absent: I refer, of course, to the suggestion that the ink was added not hugely long after the vellum was originally made. Which unfortunately means that many of the nuttier theories are still in play. Oh well: apart from that, it’s a nice piece of work, highly recommended!

Yes, the weather forecast looks pleasant enough to go for ye verilye pleasantte (and genuinely historical) olde Londonne pubbe The Prospect of Whitby at 4.30pm this Sunday 3rd April 2011, a mere ten minute stroll from Wapping station. As normal, the BeerInTheEvening page for the pub has practical details of getting there; or feel free to Google Map its postcode (E1W 3SH) etc.

Plan A is to meet on its beer terrace in the middle looking out over the Thames. Hope to see you (and Klaus Schmeh) there!

Just to let you all know that I’m setting up a Voynich pub meet for the afternoon of next Sunday (3rd April 2011), location to be decided over the next few days depending on the weather forecast (seeing as we’ve had such glorious weather this last week, it would be a crying shame to be indoors on a nice day).

All being well, our special guest will be German über-skeptic / cipher mystery writer Klaus Schmeh who will be in town for a few days, and who says:-

“I look forward to meet people interested in cipher mysteries and to discuss the VM and other topics (e.g. the Rohonc Codex, the Beale ciphers, and the Tamam Shud cipher) with them.”

I rather enjoyed the historical Thameside ambience of The Prospect of Whitby at our previous Voynich pub meet, and (for a change) that would be my first choice again, but let me know if you have any better suggestions! Please email me at the normal address if you’d like to come along, plenty of room for everyone. Cheers! 🙂

Here’s a particularly interesting Voynich Manuscript paper declassified by the NSA in 2002 (but only recently released as a PDF scan) – so many thanks to the ever-vigilant Moshe Rubin (of Chaocipher Clearing House fame) for pinging me with a link to it, much appreciated! 🙂

Of course, Brigadier John Tiltman’s The Voynich Manuscript – “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World” is in many ways no more than an introduction to the VMs (and we have far better scans nowadays, so its pages 15..46 need not really concern us): yet all the same, it does contain plenty of incidental meaty morcels for modern Voynichologists to lightly dine upon. For instance:-

  • Newbold’s solution left a legacy of ill-feeling which persisted for many years and which I found reflected in a letter which Charles Singer wrote to me in 1957.
  • Plate 5 [f56r] – “has been identified as some sort of Bindweed (Convulvulus)
  • Plate 6 [f4r] – “seems to me a fairly natural representation of cross-leaved Heath (Erica)
  • All the zodiacal drawings carry the name of the month in the centre in a later hand and in readable script though the language has been disputed.
  • Tiltman was introduced to the VMs in 1950 by William Friedman (which to me reads a bit like a cryptologic version of Cluedo), and started by looking at some of Quire 20’s starred paragraphs.
  • Charles Singer, in a letter to me, put the date at late 16th Century. Professor Panoffsky [sic] and the keeper of the manuscripts at the Cambridge Library both independently insisted on a date within 20 years of 1500 A.D., and the manuscript as we have it may be a copy of a much earlier document.”
  • Tiltman discusses Cave Beck’s 1657 universal language at reasonable length (pp.9-10, Plates 21-23), given that Friedman had told him that this was the kind of thing he believed the VMs to be. However, Tiltman was plainly far from convinced.
  • In 1957, Tiltman showed photostats of the VMs to various medieval herbal specialists. One of these was Dr. T. A. Sprague in Cheltenham, who – having spent many years on beautiful, well-annotated herbals – found that its “awful pictures” made him “more and more agitated“.

Yet the real substance of the paper arguably lies in the summary of Voynichese’s properties which Tiltman passed back to Friedman in 1951 (remember that Tiltman was arguably the 2oth Century’s greatest non-machine cipher cracker). Tiltman’s own transcription reads Voynichese as being comprised of 17-odd symbols, several of which have second variant forms. The reproduction of Plate 17 is far from crystal clear, but I’m reasonably sure the following is what Tiltman means (converted to EVA), though I’m not 100% sure about “2” because it seems to overlap with “R” and/or “S”:-

Tiltman:     D H E G 8 4 O A L S 2 R I C  T  DZ  HZ
EVA:         k t l y d q o a n s ? r i e ch ckh cth
2nd variant: f p m                       sh cfh cph

Though most of the paper is dryly factual (though written in an accessible style), Tiltman managed to sneak his own summary into page 9 – “My analysis revealed to me a cumbersome mixture of different types of substitution.” Of course, this is exactly my conclusion too… but regular Cipher Mysteries readers knew that anyway, so I won’t press the point. 🙂

So, the rest of this post contains Tiltman’s notes (but with the notation converted to EVA), with a few light annotations from me. Note that Peter Long mentioned was a senior figure at GCHQ who corresponded extensively about the VMs (he died in 1999): he’s also mentioned on p.216 of Kennedy and Churchill’s book, though mostly in regard to the “K:D:P” (Kelley/Dee/Pucci) theory of Long’s nephew Tim Mervyn, who has continued his uncle’s Voynichological interest. Enjoy!

* * * * * * * *

(a) Following are some notes on the common behaviour of some of the commonly occurring symbols. I would like to say that there is no statement of opinion below to which I cannot myself find plenty of contradiction. I am convinced that it is useless (as it is certainly discouraging) to take account at this stage of rare combinations of symbols. It is not even in every case possible say what is a single symbol and what is not. For example, I am not completely satisfied that the commonly occurring <a> has not to be resolved into <ci> or possibly <oi>. I have found no punctuation at all.

(b) <ckh/cfh> and <cth/cph>appear to be infixes of <k/f> and <t/p> within <ch>. The variant symbol represented by <m> appears most commonly at the end of a line, rarely elsewhere.

(c) Paragraphs nearly always begin with <k/f> or <t/p>, most commonly in the second variant forms [i.e. <f>/<p>], which also occur frequently in words in the top lines of paragraphs where there is some extra space. [Also known as “Neal Keys”.]

(d) <y> occurs quite frequently as the initial symbol of a line followed immediately by a combination of symbols which seem to be happy without it in any part of a line away from the beginning. Otherwise it occurs chiefly before spaces very frequently preceded immediately by <d>. Hence my belief that these two have some separative or conjunctive function. (I have to admit, however, the <y> also seems sometimes to take the place of <o> before <k/f> or <t/p> (though rarely, if ever, after <q>); this is particularly noticeable in some of the captions to illustrations in the astronomical section of the manuscript – these most commonly begin <ok>/<of> or <ot>/<op> and it is here that we occasionally see <yk>/<yf> or <yt>/<yp>.)

(e) I have tried, for convenience of handling, to divide words into what I call “roots” and “suffixes.” This arrangement is show in the bottom of Plate 17. [Which is, as best as I can tell, the following table:-]

Roots: <ok>/<of>, <ot>/<op>, <qok>/<qof>, <ch>/<sh>, <s>, <d>, 2 [??] <lk>/<lf>
Suffixes: either (i)  <e>, <ee>, <eee> followed by <y> or <dy>
            or   (ii) one or more of the following -
                <an> <ain> <aiin> <aiiin>
                <ar> <air> <aiir> <aiiir>
                <al> <ail> <aiil> <aiiil>
                <or> <ol>

Regarding the second type of suffix, some of the combinations are so rare that I have been uncertain whether to take any account of them at all. Some are very common indeed. It seems to me that each of these combinations beginning <a> has its own characteristic frequency which it maintains in general throughout the manuscript and independent of context except in cases where two or more <a> groups are together in series, as referred to later). These <a> groups e.g. <ar> or <aiin>, frequently occur attached directly to “roots,” particularly <od>, <ot>, <d> and <s>.  <okaiin>, <qokaiin> and <daiin> rank high among the commonest words in the manuscript.

(f) There are however many examples of 2, 3, 4 or even 5 <a> groups strung together on end with or without spaces between them. When this occurs, there appears to be some selective preference. For example, <ar> is very frequently doubled, i.e. <ar ar>, whereas <aiin> which is generally significantly commoner, is rarely found doubled. Perhaps the commonest succession of three of these groups is <ar ar al>. <al> very frequently follows <ar>, but <ar> hardly ever follows <al>.

(g) <o>, which has a very common and very definite function in “roots,” seems to occur frequently in “suffixes” in rather similar usage to <a>, but nearly always as <or> and <ol>. <or aiin> is very common.

(h) The behaviour of the <a> (and <o>) groups has suggested to me that they may in fact constitute some form of spelling. It might be, for instance, that the manuscript is intended to demonstrate some very primitive universal language and that the author was driven to spell out the ends of words in order to express the accidence [i.e. the inflectional morphology] of an inflected language. If all the possible <a> and <o> combinations can occur, then there are 24 possibilities. They may, however, be modified or qualified in some way by the prefixed symbols <k>/<f>, <p>/<t>, <ok>/<of>, <op>/<ot>, <ch>/<sh>, <s>, <d>, 2 [??], etc., and I have not so far found it possible to draw a line anywhere. This, coupled with ignorance of the basic language, if any, makes it difficult to make any sort of attempt at solution, even assuming that there is spelling.

(i) <l>, usually preceded by <a> or <o>, is very commonly followed by <k>/<f>, much less commonly by <t>/<p>, with or without a space between. In this connection, I have become more and more inclined to believe that a space, though not intended to deceive, must not necessarily be regarded as a mark of division between two words or concepts.

(j) Speaking generally, each symbol behaves as if it had its own place in an “order of precedence” within words; some symbols such as <o> and <y> seem to be able to occupy two functionally different places.

(k) Some of the commoner words, e.g. <okeed>, <okeedy>, <qokeedy>, <odaiin>, <okar>, <okal>, <daiin>, <chedy> occur twice running, occasionally three times.

(l) I am unable to avoid the conclusion that the occurrence of the symbol <e> up to 3 times in one form of “suffix” and the symbol <i> up to 3 times in the other must have some systematic significance.

(m) Peter Long has suggested to me that the <a> groups might represent Roman numerals. Thus <aiin> might be IIJ, and <ar ar al> XXV, but this, if true, would only present one with a set of numbered categories which doesn’t solve the problem. In any case, though it accounts for the properties of the commoner combinations, it produces many impossible ones.

(n) The next three plates show pages where the symbols occur singly, apparently in series, and not in their normal functions. The column of symbols at the left in Plate 18 [i.e. the vertical column at the left edge of f49v] appears to show a repeating cycle of 6 or 7 symbols <t> <o> <r> <y> <e> <o> <k> <s>. In Plate 19 [i.e. f57v] the succession of symbols in the circles must surely have some significance. One circle has the same series of 17 symbols repeated 4 times, an interesting column of symbols. Plate 20 [i.e. f66r] also has an interesting column of symbols. In all three there are symbols which rarely, if ever, occur elsewhere.

(o) My analysis, I believe shows that the text cannot be the result of substituting single symbols for letters in the natural order. Languages simply do not behave in this way. If the single words attached to stars in the astronomical drawings, for instance, are really, as they appear to be, captions expressing the names or qualities of those stars, there can hardly be any form of transposition system involved. And yet I am not aware of any long repetition of more than 2 or 3 words in succession, as might be expected for instance in the text under the botanical drawings.

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 this mad desire to be so gratuitously populist come from? “Voynich” already gets over 600,000 hits on Google – not as many as Justin Bieber, sure, but it does have far more hair styles to choose from. 🙂

[As an historical aside, the apparent presence of medicinal baths in the manuscript arguably gives it a terminus ante quo of around 1500, because that is when people began to blame those same baths for contemporary ills such as syphilis. Just so you know!]

Personally, I suspect that – for the most part – naked women are used in the Voynich as some kind of cryptographic / steganographic ruse to get people’s decrypting brains either to shut down completely or to open up too far to be useful: a systematic misdirection trick, drawing your attention away from where the real information is held on the page. But that’s another story for another day…

Anyway, a Voynich paper is currently being prepared by Lincoln Taiz and Saundra Lee Taiz: this revolves around the idea that (what they call) the “dominant” presence of the green pools with the water-section nymphs indicates that Quire 13 should receive, like the early herbal sections, a botanical interpretation. Specifically, they suggest that this section of the VMs might be based around various questions posed by Nicolaus of Damascus (who lived 2000 years ago) in his book De Plantis, and that its green paint leitmotif simply represents chlorophyll… and so on.

As with all Voynich theories, they might conceivably be right … but if they are, I suspect it will turn out be for quite the wrong reasons. You see, if you go to the trouble of reconstructing parts of the folio order for Quire 13 (and, generally, try to untangle the Voynich Manuscript’s codicological skein), you discover a number of curious things:-

  • The quire numbers were added after being misbound
  • The original quires almost certainly had no quire numbers
  • Quire 13 was originally painted in a (now faded and patchy) blue colour
  • The green paint was added much later, right on top of the blue paint

As direct visual evidence, I’m completely certain that the two pages (f78v and f81r) below originally sat right next to each other in the alpha state of the manuscript – there are numerous symmetries to be seen in the layout, design, shape. Yet on the left page, you can see where the (original) blue paint was added, while the right page has the same blue paint but is also overpainted with heavy green paint. I’m (furthermore) quite sure that the green paint was added after the quire numbers were added, and so were almost certainly not added by the original author (and, I’d add, probably not even in the same century as him or her).

Voynich Manuscript, f84v placed next to f78r

I also – along with Glen Claston – suspect that Quire 13 was constructed in two separate phases (GC calls these “Q13b” and “Q13a”), and that the balneology-themed part (Q13b) probably came first, with the trickier (and more conceptual?) water-themed part (Q13a) later. Overall I don’t see any botanical theme at all in either section, and so can only read the Taiz’s hypothesis as a plausible (but almost certainly wrong) guess based on a single visual element – a layer of green paint that was absent from the manuscript’s original state.

To paraphrase Rene Zandbergen slightly, success in Voynich research comes not from guessing well but from consistently avoiding bad mistakes. Sorry, but it seems very much to me as though this particular thesis is not destined for success. 🙁

With 2012 – the centenary of Wilfrid Voynich’s 1912 purchase of his subsequently-eponymous manuscript – inching ever closer, we will doubtless soon see a broad international wave of quick-turnaround documentary makers sniffing around its margins, snuffling for pungent historical truffles in the florilegial undergrowth of the Interweb.

If, dear reader, that thumbnail profile just happens to describe you, then here’s what you need: a brief guide on how to make a worthwhile Voynich Manuscript documentary that should continue to earn you money for years, regardless of whether its secrets somehow (and, frankly, against the run of play) get cracked in the meantime. Follow these basic rules, and I think you should do OK…

  1. The first rule of Voynich Fight Club is: evidence kicks theories. Don’t get tempted by fancy/fanciful hypotheses, just stick to the evidence – simply because it’s brilliant, confusing, paradoxical, splendidly detailed and evocative evidence. Sorry to point it out, but if you think Voynich theories are more fun than Voynich evidence, you’re probably the wrong person to be making the documentary. It’s a million-piece jigsaw, and everyone loves intricate puzzles!
  2. Don’t allow your own theories about the Voynich to guide you in any way whatsoever: they’re almost certainly wrong, and will just get in everyone’s way throughout production. And don’t trust Wikipedia to inform you (because it won’t)!
  3. The Voynich’s post-1600 history is worth no more than three minutes of anyone’s viewing experience. Don’t bother with overdressed period reconstructions of Rudolf II’s court, Sinapius, John Dee, Edward Kelley – by their time, the VMs had probably already had ten or more owners, none of whom showed any sign of their being able to read a word.
  4. Keep in mind at all times that there is no external pre-1600 evidence linking the VMs with anything, anyone or anywhere – yet radiocarbon dating indicates that the manuscript is 150+ years older. The only evidence we have to help us bridge that gap is hidden inside the manuscript itself – its pages, its inks, its design, its accidents, its execution, its forensic inner life.
  5. Hence, as early as possible, get high-calibre international experts on board to focus on the only two issues that really matter:-
    * codicology (How was the VMs constructed? What was its original state? What happened to it since?); and….
    * palaeography (What language are the marginalia written in? What do they say? What do the Voynichese letter shapes tell us? What structural similarities does Voynichese share with 15th century abbreviating Northern Italian scribal shorthands?)
  6. Once you have top-end experts on board, make friends with the Beinecke as quickly as you can. Go there; engage with the curators. Dismiss all theories (specifically don’t talk about alchemy or heresy, either would make you look speculative and foolish), while showing an appreciation of the limitations of the current evidence, and an active desire to improve academic knowledge.
  7. The viewer’s guide – the historical narrator – should be someone who can dive deep into a roiling mass of multi-faceted, heterogenous evidence and yet emerge the other side smelling of roses, all the while managing to make the (apparently contradictory) subject matter clear and accessible. An intellectual historian, in other words.
  8. Your challenge, therefore, is to produce a documentary that merges cunning forensic vision with big-brained intellectual history – essentially, “CSI: Voynich” meets Anthony Grafton. Can you do this? Really?

OK, it’s no big secret that the above basically describes the Voynich Manuscript documentary I’d really like to make. But all the same, I’d be utterly delighted if anyone else stepped up to the line (and in any language). But… will anyone ever do this? I’m not so sure… 🙁

PS:  I lied about there being ten rules – you’ll have to make up the last two yourself. 😉

Amid the me-too Voynich blog repost deluge of recent days comes – at long last – some genuinely new information courtesy of the Yale Daily News. From talking with the Beinecke’s Assistant Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts Kathryn James, we now learn that:-

  • Andreas Sulzer (the film maker) was originally utterly convinced that the VMs was 17th century, and so had to completely rewrite the documentary script when the 15th century radiocarbon dating came through.
  • Similarly, Kathryn James had to drop her own (16th century Paracelsian) Voynich theory for the same basic reason.
  • Kevin Repp suggests that a DNA test on the vellum might help locate the where the cow (assuming it is neither a goat nor a gnu, etc) came from, while Kathryn James “anticipates [that Andreas] Sulzer will offer to finance [this] testing sooner or later”.

Actually, until such time as a Quattrocento animal DNA database gets constructed (and I’m personally not holding my breath for that), I suspect a far better test would simply be analyzing a minute scraping of ink from every folio. The documentary mentioned in passing that ink variations between batches were detectable – so, follow that simple idea through to the end, and you should end up peering back through time to the original bifolio nesting, ordering, and the construction methodology. This is such a simple process to execute, but I’m certain it would yield a fascinating high-level codicological picture, quite independent of (for example) contact transfer evidence or other art history evidence.

Would any Yale History students care to step forward for an interesting afternoon’s project?

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: it was like watching yourself being airbrushed out of a family photograph. Let me get this straight: I researched the history like crazy, reasoned my way to the mid-15th century, stuck my neck out by writing the first properly new book on the Voynich for 30 years, talked with the documentary producers, sent lists of Voynich details for them to look at, got asked to fly out to Austria (though they later withdrew that at the last minute without explanation), kept confidences when asked, etc.

And then, once the film-makers got the radiocarbon dating in their hands, my Milan/Venice Averlino/Filarete theory became the last man standing (Voynich theory-wise). So why did it not get even a passing mention, when just before the end, they thought to edit in a map of Northern Italy with swallowtail-merloned castles and the narrator starts (apropros of nothing) to wonder what will be found in the archives “between Milan and Venice”. Perhaps I’m just being a bit shallow here, but that did feel particularly shabby on their part.

However pleased I am for Edith Sherwood that her Leonardo-made-the-Voynich-so-he-did nonsense merited both screentime and an angelic child actor pretending to be young Leonardo, the fact remains that it was guff before the radiocarbon dating (and arguably double guff afterwards): while much the same goes for all the Dee/Kelly hoax rubbish, which has accreted support more from its longstandingness than anything approaching evidence.

Perhaps the worst thing is that we’re all now supposed to bow down to the radiocarbon dating and start trawling the archives for candidates in the 1404-1438 timeframe. Yet even Rene Zandbergen himself has supplied the evidence for a pretty convincing terminus post quem: MS Vat Gr 1291 was completely unknown in Italy before being bought by Bartolomeo Malipiero as Bishop of Brescia, and so its stylistics could not sensibly have influenced the Voynich before 1457. In fact, 1465 – when the manuscript was carried from Brescia to Rome and became much better known – might even be a more sensible TPQ. And that’s without the cipher alphabet dating (post-1455 or so) and the parallel hatching dating (post-1440 if Florence, post-1450 if elsewhere in Italy).

And I’ll leave you with another thought: a couple of seconds after hearing the Beinecke’s Paula Zyats say “I don’t see any corrections”, the following image got edited in – a part of the f17r marginalia that looks to my eyes precisely like an emendation.

Voynich Manuscript f17r marginalia

Really, what am I supposed to think? *sigh*