Tag: Julian Bunn

‘Weaving the Voynich’ -reprint by request.

The author’s rights are asserted.

c.2300 words

Introduction: (2022)

In 2012 Julian Bunn did something entirely new; he colour coded pages from the Voynich manuscript to show the position of the ‘gallows’-glyphs.

I had expected that Julian’s blog would appear among those listed in the Voynich ninja ‘Blogosphere’* but today I see that while a number of non-existent blogs are in their list, Julian’s is not. [update – 20th Dec. 2022 – Julian’s blog is now back in the list. 🙂 ]

*The ‘Ninja’ forum’s claim to “track the Voynich blogosphere so you don’t have to!” is a nice example of theorists’ putting higher value on assertion than on fact. 🙂

When Julian’s new approach was first published, his posts met near-complete silence. No buzz, few comments. Recently, though, it has re-surfaced and one would hope that credit is being accurately assigned by the more recent revivalists to the author of that ground-breaking study.

By June of 2021 2012, Julian had presented every page of the manuscript with the gallows glyphs colour-coded, and presently those images remain visible online.(HERE).

He would later publish a full-colour version, giving every glyph its own colour, but the post I’ve been asked to re-print (the request didn’t come from Julian) was written before he found time to make the full-colour version.

I might add that Julian is no crony of mine. He is (or was) an arch-conservative of deepest dye – and as you will see from the list of researchers whose existence he chose to advertise on his personal blog.

When he first published that work in 2012, I was still mulling over something he had written a few months earlier:

I am convinced that it is not as simple as it appears (i.e. that the words are not words at all)

Julian Bunn, ‘How was the Voynich Manuscript text written?‘, computistical attacks (blog), August 23, 2012.

The post from which I’m republishing what you see below contained more than I republish now, and was one of perhaps only four or five I’ve ever published that wasn’t a summary of my own research and its conclusions.

As a rule I consider it a complete waste of time to publish mere “ideas” and as a rule I try not to offer opinions about the written part of the text.

In this post, published almost a decade ago, I set aside both self-imposed rules, one of only four or five times I’ve ever done so.

—————-

taken from:

D.N.O’Donovan ‘Weaving the Voynich – seriously’, Voynichimagery (first published December 28th., 2012).


Here is a new set of images, for each of the folios in the VMs, that shows the positions of the various gallows glyphs.

To clarify – these “positions” are not the positions as seen on the image scans of the manuscript itself, they are the positions in terms of glyph position along each line.

The difference between these and the ones in the previous post is that these have Gallows “f” coloured blue, “g” coloured green, and the other gallows coloured red (as before).

Julian Bunn, ‘Page positional gallows Mark II’, computistical attacks (blog) 28th December 2012.

Shortly before publishing this recent post, Julian said in another that “I am convinced that .. the words are not words at all).

to which the natural response is – “well, if not words, what are they?”

I have received Julian’s permission to include some pictures from  Julian’s blogpost.

As he says, the distributions of gallows on those pictures aren’t exact matches with positions on the folios, but I don’t think it matters very much.

You will see that in Julian’ s picture for  f.58v  the left-hand margin shows a vertical series separated from the rest –  separated in Julian’s picture by grey, though the interval is filled with non-gallows glyphs in the manuscript.

One section in that margin resembles one of the simplest  arrangements for thread in a woven fabric. and in this same image you will see (to the right of the margin), a staggered vertical line of blocks echoing another which is typical of some patterns generated in weaving from that first.

How are the two related?

The two most basic forms of weave are linen weave (‘tabby’) and twill.

Tabby is the usual 1×1 over-and-under pattern used for linen. Twill creates a diagonal line, achieved partly by the way the loom is threaded up, and partly by the order in which certain elements are brought up while others are lowered. The first is called the ‘threading pattern’ and the second the ‘treading pattern’. More technical details are included further below.

Distinction between a separate representation a fabric’s threading pattern, and (with a more sophisticated loom) the treading pattern. Today, a weaving pattern will use the margin (left or right) to record the treading pattern, with the basic threading pattern shown across the top of the diagram, as shown in the illustration below.

Patterns represented on graph paper, and modern gridded instructions will present an artificial, theoretically-even thickness and distance for warp and weft.

Julian’s illustrations have an artificial regularity of a different kind. If any were weaving patterns, what you see on a diagram would come closer to a pattern’s intended form but in practice hand-woven fabrics rarely emerge so regular.

As you see from the following example, the illustration (below, right) is  a copy of Julian’s data for  f.103v, but I’ve stretched it to reflect a typical difference between a formal diagram and what one sees in practice.

The second illustration (below, centre) comes from a different inner Asian [Turkmen] rug from that illustrated on the far left, but shows more clearly the ‘gol’ pattern whose equivalent is seen in a number of Julian’s diagrams – that is, facing diagonals which form just two sides of a potential lozenge motif. In other words, I’m suggesting the glyphs could be used to represent (by alpha-numeric?) as many different hues or tones.

To colour opposite sides of a medallion (gul/gol) differently is characteristic of the Turkmen style, sometimes called the Kurdish. The regions native to Kurdish people include southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria.

Glyphs, Number, colour.

This brings up the question of the glyphs’ number and how they might relate to a colour-range. I hadn’t any notion, when I wrote a first brief version of this post some days ago [in 2012] that the ‘weaving’ technique can be equated more-or-less roughly to a ‘bilateral cipher’.

Here is an old post (ciphermysteries of course) referring and crediting Tony Gaffney with making the [bilateral cipher] suggestion. 

Nick himself raised the theme of bilateral ciphers again very recently [26th December 2012] and  shortly after my original short preview- for this ‘weaving’ post went up.

I suggested that if there were seventeen distinct gallows glyphs (an idea I’d picked up at some time), they would offer a natural system for someone to describe a type of colour-wheel, if they were being employed by persons accustomed to describing a circuit of 32 in terms of a basic 17, as occurs among the eastern mariners, who named each Pole by a separate word, but the other thirty by naming 15 around the eastern curve with the epithet ‘rising’, with the same fifteen on the opposite curve as ‘setting’.

Thirty-two is a number well-suited to recording languages. A quick check of Omniglot gives 32 components for:

Islandic; Estonian; modern Persian; Coptic; Tigrinya; Russian; Lithuanian; Perso-Arabic; Belarus; Bulgarian and Kurdish (Kurmanji-).

To use the ’17’ system, you’d need a  couple of  glyphs that were unique, and fifteen having their ‘pairs’ – one supposes, in the present case, as a gallows-and-glyph with each gallows having a different following glyph.

I’m not suggesting that the Voynich text refers to nothing but weaving and colours; I’d assume colour would be one of many sets of associations that could be built on an alpha-numeric series, just as Latins built upon the Roman alphabet and from a foundation in the Psalter or – to take another example, as Ibn Arabi built his set of associations upon the series of  27 lunar mansions.

If there were a correspondence here between the set of colours and the set of  glyphs ( or simply of gallows glyphs), and they were disposed as pairs (and or as darker and lighter tones), that correspondence, if it could be established,  might be a way into identifying the language natural to the maker of the manuscript. A slender hope but a possibility.

Relationship between a ‘letter’ and sound might be direct, but between a letter, its position, and/or a colour the relationship need not be so simple.

I mean that – to give an example – the word for green might start with  ‘g’ but by custom that colour imagined the primary element in a people’s cosmology and so, by that people, accorded the number one or letter ‘A’ position.

A wheel of numbered hues which could be described in terms of the ‘bright’/rising and the ‘dark’/setting curve

OMNIGLOT has a table for colours in many languages. I think it was extremely brave of them to post it!

This isn’t the only suggestion of textiles and textile arts in the manuscript.  In discussing the botanical section last year [i.e. in 2011] I illustrated fairly copiously the way the drawing style in many folios from that  section echoes those of inner Asia ( especially patterns of Suzani work in Uzbekistan) and also types of textiles created near ports of medieval India and south-east Asia.  I wont’ repeat it all, but here are a small number of the illustrations from traditional Suzani work. (However, the picture in the bottom row, a Javanese batik,  was allegedly made in the 10thC AD, and though I haven’t been able to check its provenance, I do wonder if the caption didn’t confuse the Islamic for the Christian system of dating years.

Note (2022) – a few months after I’d shown those examples of Suzani embroidery in the course of discussing stylistics in various folios of the plant-section – the first time textile art had been referenced in Voynich studies, so far as I could find – a woman promoting her theory of the entire manuscript as an expression of a European Baltic and female ritual culture posted images of Baltic embroidery. I’m afraid I’ve since forgotten her name.

TECHNICAL NOTES:

[note – some repetition here, but it keeps this section self-contained]

I have never seen any type of weavers’ instructions or recipes from the fifteenth century nor earlier – not from Europe; not from anywhere.

It is often easier to produce a complex pattern by having someone call out the order of operations. I know this was done until recently in workshops producing Persian carpets but as with so many skills, I expect that in the case of traditional weavers most had simply learned their craft at the elbow of their parent or trade master.

Not even Agnes Geijer, whose masterful study of textiles is now sadly out of print, has much to say about how detailed instructions were preserved and transmitted for such complex designs as those on damasks and cut- velvets. From the accuracy with which some western medieval centres such as Venice were able to re-create eastern patterns, we know some sort of textile-analysis must have been possible and this also implies some system for recording and transmitting the information. I’ve never encountered any study which addressed that question for a period earlier than 1450.

The basics of a modern pattern consist of the pattern’s depiction in a grid, with the pattern of threading-up in the margin of one axis, and of treading in the other. Like this. (The section in the upper right corner describes how the heddles, through which the warp threads are strung, are to be linked to one another and the treadles)

The basic threading-up pattern (here the upper margin) has variations created by the treading pattern (in the image above, the right margin). The threading pattern thus provides you, more-or-less, with a profile view of the design, and this will also appear in the selvage.

A modern hand-weaver will find fully graphed patterns in any reference book,  but an experienced weaver wouldn’t trouble to draw up a whole design unless it were extremely complex.

Most modern hand-weavers use numbers for threading and treading order, but if the warp is multicoloured, it’s possible to use colours instead and I have seen it done in some American graphs.

To show how many variations on a basic threading can be produced, here are twelve from a single threading-up.

[2022].  The link to that diagram is broken, though if you care to chase it through ‘Wayback’ etc., just undo the caps below.

http://www.weavingtoday..com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Discussions.Components.Files/50/4606.4Shaft4BlockSamplerProfileA1.jpg

Postscript “not words at all”

A most important question which any reader is bound to ask of a Voynich writer is “What first suggested this idea to you?”

If the answer is ‘It just came to me’ or ‘It is a theory’ or they refuse to reply but adopt a pose of hauteur, then you’re entitled to wonder if their argument is actually unjustifiable, whether because it is literally a baseless notion or because it is not a result of the speaker’s own work but merely what they could grasp from work done by someone else.

You can see clearly enough how Julian came to conclude (temporarily or permanently) that Voynich words were ‘not words at all” by following the series of posts he published leading up to that one published on August 23, 2012..

You might also enjoy some posts that bear a more recent date:

Julian Bunn, ‘Nine Cipher Wheels‘, Computational attacks… (August 9th/update August 12th., 2021).

___________, ‘Word-length Distributions‘, Computational attacks (August 12th., 2021)

___________, ‘Fun with Grove Words and Cipher Wheels‘, Computational Attacks.. (August 18th., 2021)

_____________, ‘Grove Word lengths’, Computational attacks… (August 19th., 2021)

O’Donovan notes #5. Selecting your sources.

c. 2,000 words.

The author’s rights are asserted.

Reminder – these ‘Notes’ are mainly for people unused to researching in a cross-disciplinary area of study; who want to avoid repeating Voynich studies’ past mistakes, and who would like to begin from a foundation more solid than guesswork-as-theory.

SO now – having thought long and hard about your own strengths and weaknesses, your natural talents and trained skills, and found some specific question that appeals to you, it’s time to compile a list of material that will give your effort as solid a grounding as possible and help you avoid wasting time on re-inventing wheels.

The more precise the question you want to tackle, the more detailed will be the material you’ll need to have under your belt before you begin.

Suppose for example you were to take up the ‘ten-month-calendar’ question, side-stepping interference from Voynich theorists trying to suggest you’re asking ‘unnecessary’ questions. There are two questions here, one more difficult than the other. The more difficult question is why certain months are doubled. One might first consider lunar calendars which often had intercalary months to bring them into line with the solar year. There are also liturgical calendars which had optional schemes for (e.g.) years in which Easter did, or didn’t, fall in a given month. But that’s just an example. It would be a mistake to restrict your exploration to any one region or period, if the aim is to put the Voynich calendar in its proper context and learn more of its original home. It has to be remembered that we don’t know where, or when, the calendar diagrams were first given their form.*

*The central emblems are a different question, because a a number of display characteristics and attitudes distinctly different from the main part of these diagrams.

I don’t recommend relying on wiki articles or Voynich-specific materials for your foundational reading. The question is about calendars and intercalated, doubled or alternative months, so you’ll need to see what is already known about such things and that means reading the opinion of scholars who’ve specialised in that area.

Don’t try to wing it. If you haven’t time or opportunity to access specialist studies or fairly high-tech databases, it would be better to pick another question.

You might look at the easier question of why the calendar has been reduced to a ten-month period. Here again, look out for interference in the form of ‘top-of-the-head’ bits of imagining by theorists who don’t like to see people asking questions and doing work that might show up a flaw in their preferred theory. Any question to which there’s not an answer able to stand up to (non-Voynich) peer-review is a question still deserving investigation.

To be sure that it hasn’t been treated in depth already, you will have to survey past Voynich writings and see if anyone has asked the ‘doubled months’ question and answered it from something better than guesswork or an intention to support some theoretical narrative. Test their assumptions, the range and depth of their evidence adduced, and also test the writers’ balance.

One way to do this is to look at the writer’s bibliography – does it look as if they’ve done enough background study themselves? Another way is to see who they, themselves, name-check. If the only names they mention are cronies, wiki articles and theory-supporting material, it’s not a good sign.

Here you will encounter a major difference between the standards of documentation expected in the pragmatic sciences as against the higher standards expected in the critical sciences.

It’s a difference of which many Voynich writers appear to be unaware, which means that when someone whose training has been in the pragmatic sciences (chemistry, cryptography, computer sciences etc.) attempts to produce material touching on the critical sciences (history, art history, iconographic analysis etc.), they often produce material that seems pretty woeful in its lack of evidence, slack attitudes to citing precedents, thin and biased bibliographies and so on.

There’s a good reason for the difference, though.

In one sense, the pragmatic sciences are less demanding than are the critical sciences, because if you’re working a problem, you’re normally working from a basis of data that has already been independently tested and verified, and which can still be subjected to verification independently of any previous hypothesis or theory.

Darwin’s birds were real birds; to establish that they were real and not a product of Darwin’s imagination, poor memory, poor range of knowledge, mis-perception or were pseudo-facts invented to give his theory a better impression of plausibility, you didn’t have to start by subscribing to any theory about them, including Darwin’s. Their existence was objective fact. You could ask the simple question, ‘Is that true’ about his description of those creatures and find a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.

But the critical sciences – which include most of the subjects bearing on questions raised about a medieval manuscript – aren’t like that.

Once more, SirHubert put it best when he addressed cryptographers:

.. breaking ciphers is all about testing hypotheses and finding the consistent solution, of which there will be only one. Historical research doesn’t admit of one neat solution and works very differently.

“SirHubert” – comment to ciphermysteries, (December 10, 2013)

When you find a combination of historical and scientific matter, the usual rule is to follow the stricter rules for documentation that apply in the critical sciences. You must show by citing precedent studies that you are aware of them, and by referring to more than one point of view that you have formed a balanced opinion on a given topic. This is done in the body of the text, in the bibliography and in footnotes whose purpose is to answer some additional question likely to arise for the reader.

The aim of scholarly apparatus (bibliography and footnotes) is not to convince a reader to accept your opinion, but to provide them the means to consider your work critically. They are entitled to know what background work you’ve done, where you got your information, and whether you have dealt fairly with previous work by other scholars, with the material itself, and with the core question.

For people trained in the pragmatic sciences, it is quite common to refer only to the specific sources which provided data and methodology for the specific paper or essay, and to include only sources which verify data used in that paper and support the paper’s conclusions or theory.

But in terms of the critical sciences that’s just not good enough. Which is probably why so many Voynicheros produce material which would not survive for a minute if exposed to the heat of external scholarly review.

So how can you decide if a Voynich writer’s work is good enough to add to your own initial reading list, the foundation on which you intend to build?

It’s easiest to give an example of a computer scientist whose work shows both range and balance even if its actual documentation seems a bit sparse at first.

IN August of last year, Julian Bunn wrote an essay, published through his blog, on the subject of cipherwheels and the Voynich text.

It was the fifth post in a series and if you’re interested in cryptography and statistical studies of Voynichese, I suggest you pause long enough to read his post before reading the rest of mine.

https://voynichattacks.wordpress.com/2021/08/22/the-wheels-hit-a-bump/
Julian Bunn, ‘The Wheels hit a bump’, Computational Attacks on the Voynich Manuscript (blog), August 22nd., 2021.

A most important question which any reader is bound to ask of a writer is “What first suggested this idea to you?”

If the answer is ‘It just came to me’ or ‘It is a theory’ or they say nothing but adopt a pose of hauteur, then you’re entitled to consider their argument to be, in the most literal sense, base-less.

Julian does answer that question, because readers can follow the train of thought through the preceding four posts in that same series. In reverse order, they are:

I don’t think Julian will object to my describing him as a ‘Voynich traditionalist’ in the general sense, but as you’ll see he doesn’t admit, or blank, other research according to whether it does or doesn’t conform to a preferred theoretical narrative.

Bunn’s bibliography might look a bit sparse, but the text shows that he has studied carefully both the methods of statistical analysis in the broader context, and earlier studies by other Voynich writers.

He can appreciate and acknowledge Jorge Stolfi’s statistical studies, though I’ve never seen any suggestion that he agrees with Stolfi’s conclusion that Voynichese was an inner Asian language (Stolfi suggested perhaps Jurchen). Again, though I’ve not seen Emma May Smith campaign for adoption of any theoretical narrative, Bunn easily and naturally refers to her work as a linguist. So that indicates an honest and balanced attitude and while Bunn might just add a link to another researcher’s work, this has become usual for the sciences.

If I were researching some question about historically appropriate cipher-methods, Bunn’s work would be included in my preliminary bibliography.

Whether his findings are right, wrong, or a bit of each is a different matter. The work is solidly based, fairly documented, shows balance and range (within limits) and Bunn is plainly no theory-fanatic.

His work aims at making a contribution to our understanding of Beinecke MS 408.

There is another type of Voynich writing which is the antithesis of the ‘contribution’ sort. I think of it as aiming only to puff up a Voynichero’s self-image – wanna-be ‘owners of‘ the study.

Ideally, now, I’d find an example to contrast with Bunn’s study, and one which also talks about cipher-wheels, Grove words and word-distribution but I haven’t the taste for it, so I’ll instead quote someone who has expressed better than I can how it feels to read material of that kind.

“What particularly frustrates me is that …there are plenty of ways Voynich researchers can make genuine progress towards understanding what is going on: but ..they instead persist in trying to airball their own personal Voynich match-winner from the other end of the basketball court. They seem seduced by the glamour of being The One Who Solved The Voynich, instead of getting on with the graft of making a difference to what we know”

I still think it a pity that the moderator of a certain forum was lobbied to gag discussion of methodology, and did so without so much as taking a vote on the subject.

Ignorance of appropriate method is one reason that so much that is produced by Voynich writers presents the wider world with an image of the study as foolish, dishonest and generally ill-informed when it comes to those subjects which belong to the critical- rather than the pragmatic sciences.

These are why Jacques Guy’s remarks made almost twenty years ago remain true today:

Much of what has been written on the subject [of this manuscript] would have been laughed out of court under normal circumstances. Why it has not been is another enigma.

Jacques Guy, ‘Folly Follows the Script: the Voynich Manuscript’, Times Higher Education Supplement, September 17, 2004.

In the next post, I’ll outline ways to weigh the worth of comments made about images in the manuscript using the criteria of an analytical-critical approach.

Just remember the basic issue – a reader is entitled to ask of anything you assert about this manuscript. “Is that true?” and is also entitled to an informed answer to that question.

As a rule of thumb, I downgrade the value of assertions made by any person who relies more on their imagination than on research; any person who tries to suggest that to even to accept that fundamental question, let alone to provide an honest answer for it, is beneath their dignity. Reputable scholars just don’t do that.

Expert opinion vs materials science 4

Header illustration: (left) A swiss pocket-watch, the most complicated in the world; (inset) ‘no hammers’ sign; (right) bench of Swiss watchmakers’ tools. And for the smart-guys who immediately look for a hammer among the watchmaker’s equipment: that’s not a hammer but a very small mallet.
two previous:

This post is about the equipment, chiefly intellectual equipment, needed to treat with a manuscript as problematic as Beinecke MS 408 – so it’s  more about expertise than about materials science; I’ll get back to codicology in the next post.

I expect that my broaching this subject may cause hackles to rise on some readers, while others will think it self-evident that any person who knows too little can only misinform those who know still less.

But from the range of matter on the internet, in papers issued as pdfs and even books in print, it is evident that the idea is general that with this medieval manuscript anyone can ‘have a go’ .

The bar for newcomers is certainly set highest for cryptological theories, of which few survive unless the proponent has taken time to study the history of cryptology and of methods already tried.

 

Next are studies that involve linguistics and statistical analyses. New readers should consider the work done by Julian Bunn, E.M. Smith and Koen Gheuens‘ latest post (and comments made to it) to get a clear idea of the present level of discussion in that subject.  Nick Pelling‘s recent post on ‘Currier A’ and ‘Currier B’ should also prove illuminating.

The bar against novices is less high when translations are claimed – hence the regular claims that the text has been translated.  Part of the problem in this case is the lack of persons with the time, languages and inclination (Voynicheros or not) to test and review such claims.  One wonders what sort of ‘peer reviewer’ is being invited by the publishers today; the book by Tucker and Janick was published by Springer (no less) but it is only thanks to the kindness of Magnus Pharao Hansen  that we know their claimed “Nahuatl” is not.

A neat illustration of the fact that it is inherent value, nor format, which makes information valuable.   Tucker and Janick’s book appeared in print;  Hansen’s refutation of their ‘Nahuatl’ translation in a blogpost.  The benefit of information published as book or blogpost is that it comes with a date-stamp – very helpful when trying to clarify questions of precedence, originality and attribution. 

Poorest of all are standards for accepting or rejecting assertions made about the manuscript’s iconography or quasi-historical narratives.  Some adopt the form of scholarly papers while lacking such quality. Others don’t bother. Some few are by scholars who (like Newbold) made the basic error of accepting, untested, other persons’  unfounded or ill-founded assertions as their ‘givens’.

I am not suggesting everyone must leave the field who hasn’t formal qualifications in manuscript studies, materials sciences, comparative cultural history, or cryptography… or anything else.

A doctorate is no promise of  a balanced attitude and the history of Voynich studies shows its course regularly de-railed or misdirected by individuals who, being qualified in one field, imagine themselves omni-competent.

William Friedman is one of the earliest examples; his skill in cryptography is a matter of record but he was mistaken in supposing that all other matters – codicology palaeography, and the pictorial text – were inherently inferior studies which might be treated as ancillary to his own.

Where he might have set reasonable  limits for his search for ‘the cipher method’ by accepting the opinions of those better qualified to date and provenance manuscripts, his narrow focus meant that on the one hand he accepted many of Wilfrid’s assertions uncritically and, on the other, pursued his imagined ‘author’ as far as the seventeenth century.   He treated persons such as Fr. Petersen and Erwin Panofsky less as valuable guides than as sources from which to extract computable ‘yes-no’ data and overall showed that lack of balance and over-confidence that ensures failure, barring a miracle.

Again, Hugh O’Neill was a qualified  botanist, but his area of competence was the native flora of  Canada – and to a lesser extent, of Alaska.  Nothing in his writings, or in what others said of him during his lifetime  indicates any particular knowledge of, or interest in, medieval history, art, or manuscripts.  Nor does he seem to have paid due attention to Fr. Petersen, who had told him plainly and repeatedly that no palaeographer could support O’Neill’s bright idea.  O’Neill himself had so little interest in the question of historical context that he cannot have even tested the  ‘Columbus brought sunflowers’ theory against primary documents relating to Columbus’ voyages.  As for his ability to read the manuscript’s imagery  …  well, let’s call it naive.

And again,  Robert Brumbaugh.   A professor of philosophy with a chair at Yale, his area was the philosophers of classical Greece and, to a lesser extent, of Rome.  Presumably he knew something of classical history and languages as necessary adjunct to those studies, but his papers about the Voynich manuscript show no evidence that he was at pains to learn more about manuscripts, medieval history, botany, or the range and variety of star-lore and -science known in the medieval (or earlier) periods   What he read of cryptography seems only to have been in connection Voynich theories.  His acknowledgements reinforce the impression that he, too, imagined himself competent in all things because formally qualified in one.    His paper on ‘Voynich botany’ credits Hugh O’Neill’s paper, his own nephew Mr Eric Arnould and “a Mr Pero, of Syracuse, New York”.  Not a single colleague in botany or any other relevant discipline, not even from those at Yale.

  • Robert S. Brumbaugh, ‘Botany and the Voynich “Roger Bacon” Manuscript Once More’, Speculum, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 546-548

Claiming to have ‘solved’ the text, Brumbaugh mentions Marjorie Wynne and Louis Martz, one being the Beinecke’s head librarian and the other its honorary director, a Professor of English.  But neither is mentioned as helping him learn more of codicology, medieval manuscripts or even medieval English texts –  but only for their ‘encouraging’ him.

  • Robert S. Brumbaugh, ‘The Solution of the Voynich “Roger Bacon” Cipher’, The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 49, No. 4 (April 1975), pp. 347-355.

However, give Brumbaugh some credit for keenness in observation.  As I write this, I see that I may cite him as precedent for noting as Dana Scott, and then I would later do, that the Voynich ‘aries’ are drawn as goats, not sheep, for he wrote in another paper the paper above that they are “[as] much like a goat as like a ram…”. See Robert S. Brumbaugh,’The Voynich ‘Roger Bacon’ Cipher Manuscript: Deciphered Maps of Stars’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 39 (1976), pp. 139-150.  (p.147)..  That the same observation had to be made independently in 1976, and (by Dana) about thirty years later, and again by me forty and more years afterwards can be attributed to two things: first, that a goat did not fit the usual theories and secondly the ‘groundhog day’ phenomenon which sees little accounting for precedence – an error which becomes exponential.  Today (in August 2019), the fact is being absorbed and repeated (if not explained) in a number of blog-posts and chat-rooms.  (Note corrected and expanded –  19thAugust 2019)

The issue, then, is not about qualified as against unqualified Voynicheros, but rather of an individual’s unreasonable self-confidence in their capacities, despite their limited range of intellectual tools, and their underestimating the complexity of problems and evidence presented by this manuscript.

To say that ‘anyone with two eyes’ can understand the imagery in the Voynich manuscript, or date its hands, or correctly attribute its manufacture to a time and place is as stupid as  a carpenter’s saying that because he has two hands and a hammer  he can put together a plane as good as any now flying.

To have one skill and a theory may be enough to make a useful contribution, but to suppose that instills the capacity for all other skills is to act like a child who claims they can fix a broken clock with just a  hammer.

The task of understanding this particularly difficult manuscript is better compared to the work of an old-fashioned watchmaker, who must put together a great many separate, interlocking elements, aware of how each relates to and contributes to the workings – and whether each has been accurately formed by the makers. In this case the parts are explanations for those cues embodied in manuscript’s materials, structure and iconography; in connecting the historical and cultural cues with the evidence of linguistics, palaeography .. and quite possibly cryptography…

It is not a simple process.  It requires solid evidence and input from a range of competencies.  It is not as simple as theory-creation, effective theory-promotion, relying on the age of ‘canonised myths’, nor simply of logical thinking.  As one of my students once said, “This is hard because you have to know so much stuff”,

Logic is the pride of many Voynicheros, but logic is a tool which produces results no better than its ‘givens’.  Nor should people with an ability in the critical sciences suppose those of the pragmatic sciences are less intellectually demanding or easier than their own – or vice versa.

As one scholar said, in speaking to a group of cryptologists in 2013:

“.. breaking ciphers is all about testing hypotheses and finding *the* consistent solution, of which there will be only one. Historical research doesn’t admit of one neat solution and works very differently.”

“SirHubert” in a comment to Ciphermysteries, December 10, 2013)

We should be seeking less to ‘break’ the text, or ‘solve’ the manuscript than to understand it.  The manuscript isn’t the problem; the problem is that some basic flaws in the manuscript’s past study leave us still – after more than a century –  unable to rightly interpret the evidence  embodied in the manuscript’s form, materials, script and content.  I’d suggest a prospective revisionist always keep two questions to the fore when reading what has been, or is being said of the manuscript’s content: ‘Where’s the evidence for that idea?’ and ‘Is that inference valid?’.

Because, to repeat the revisionist’s theme-song:

It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful the guess is. It doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”