Wheat from Chaff – Books of Secrets and the ‘Secretum secretorum’

Header picture: (detail) Brit.Lib. MS Harley 3719 f.31v (1275-1540), excerpt from the Secretum Secretorum

This post follows from ‘Wheat from Chaff – ‘Bacon ciphertext’ (Dec.15th., 2018)

… investigat secreta naturae …- Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, II

As we do what Wilfrid should have done, testing his assertions severally against the secondary evidence and the manuscript’s own testimony – it becomes clear that Wilfrid’s “history” for the manuscript is anything but. His failure to establish the truth of what he said about the manuscript before making those assertions public – and the failure of others to do so before adopting them, meant that the manuscript’s study was misdirected from the first, and researchers diverted into innumerable dead-ends simply because their first premises – their ‘givens’ – were groundless. The habit is still widespread by which a fictional narrative ( habitually if wrongly called ‘theory’) is first promoted and its success thereafter evaluated by the number of believers – but not by what demonstrable value it has for a more accurate understanding of the manuscript – not of its materials, nor of what it was intended to convey. We’ll look at this in more depth when considering false analogies, false equivalents and ‘argument from association’. (List of logical fallacies)

His imagining the text written in Bacon’s own hand is unjustified. To suppose Bacon or anyone else might encipher an entire book about ‘natural history’ in the mid-thirteenth century runs counter to the historical evidence; there is no evidence to support the idea that Bacon ever enciphered an entire book, either – not about natural history or anything else. And the content which Wilfrid imagined (‘natural history’) cannot be accepted at face value, given the lack of evidence for Bacon’s ever being afraid to speak of such matter and the wide enthusiasm which met Cantimpré’s book on that subject – despite its using Aristotle and being written in 1230-1245, during the ‘ban’ years: (see previous post).

To believe that Voynichese is unreadable because written in a Baconian cipher demands, today, not only suspension of disbelief but its elevation beyond this mortal world – for if Bacon’s methods of encryption were unsophisticated, modern decryption algorithms are not. And there is the other point – that whether or not our present manuscript was made in Latin Europe, there is no way to know yet where the content was first enunciated, nor whether the text’s underlying language (if any) is European. Such things are also treated as ‘givens’ – maintained without critical scrutiny since 1921 and despite the very obvious fact that if the text or the imagery conformed to Latin European practice, the latter, in particular, would not have proven illegible in those terms – for a century.

And finally, as we’ve seen, Bacon’s sentence from De secretis.. (‘he’d be a fool….’ ) is neither a text’s justification nor the manifesto which it is so often portrayed as being. It is, rather, part of an introduction to a subject which Bacon thought might prove useful at some later time.

On the other side of the scale, one item is potentially in favour. Bacon was much impressed by the Secretum Secretorum. It can be called a book of secrets, was attributed to Aristotle and its title might suggest a need to keep its content secret, even though it is just as much a text in the tradition of the ‘Mirrors of Princes’.

‘Books of Secrets’ genre.

Eamon describes it:

… To the modern reader expecting to encounter some mysterious, arcane wisdom, these works are bound to be disappointing. What was revealed, typically, was not the lore of ancient sages or magi, but recipes, formulae, and “experiments”, often of a fairly conventional sort, associated with one of the crafts or with medicine: e. g., quenching waters for hardening steel, recipes for dyes and pigments, instructions for making drugs, and “practical alchemical” formulae such as a jeweller or tinsmith might use. When a medieval or sixteenth century writer claimed to have discovered a “secret,” he often had this meaning in mind; and when a contemporary library catalogue referred to a “book of secrets,” it usually indicated a compilation of such recipes…

….They exist in countless medieval Latin and vernacular manuscripts, and in printed books of almost every European language. Nor did these writings disappear with the “triumph of modern science” in the seventeenth century. Despite [Thomas] Browne’s warning, books of secrets continued to be written, copied, published, and read by a sizeable portion of the reading public, and by some whom all would agree were among the leading scientific personalities of the day….

William Eamon, ‘Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science’, Sudhoffs Archiv, Bd. 69, H. 1 (1985), pp. 26-49.

That’s exactly how Roger Bacon understood the matter, too. His ‘scientist’ is master of practical techniques and know-how – as we see in Bacon’s letter to Pope Clement (1267):

Hence he has peered into all the processes of smelters, of goldsmiths, of silversmiths, and of other workers in metals and minerals; he knows everything pertaining to war, weapons and hunting; he has examined everything pertaining to agriculture, surveying and other occupations of the countryman; he has even taken into consideration the experiments of witches and their fortune-telling and charms and those of magicians in general, likewise the tricks and illusions of legerdemain — so that nothing worth knowing might remain unknown to him and that he might know what to condemn as due to sorcery or magic.

from: Letter of Roger Bacon to Pope Clement (1267), as quoted in William Romaine Newbold, ‘The Roger Bacon Manuscript’, p.435.

Nick Pelling is among those who have believed that the Voynich manuscript may be a ‘book of secrets’. For details see (e.g.)

Nick Pelling, ‘Research Breakthrough‘ ciphermysteries (blog), 8th. May, 2008.

“Confounding demons” detail from folio 51r, Brit.Lib. Yates Thompson MS 28

Aristotle’s ‘Secretum Secretorum’:

Today we deny Aristotle’s authorship, but Bacon and his successors did not, so I have omitted ‘pseudo-‘ from the heading.

One reason Bacon expended so much energy on his project [an edition and commentary on the ‘Secretum Secretorum’] is that he valued [the text] as possibly Aristotle’s greatest production. Not only did it impart sage counsel on issues of morality, politics, and health: Bacon, for example, ate rhubarb on the Secretum‘s advice, and felt much the better for it! In addition, Bacon believed the Secretum treated important subjects deliberately omitted in the books Aristotle wrote for a general audience.

quoted from Steven J. Williams, ‘Roger Bacon and His Edition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum’, Speculum, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 57-73.. the passage is pp. 64-65.

Origin of the Latin versions:

Salim Abu l-ʿAla’, secretary to the caliph Hisham ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 724–743), initiated the translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian letters on government to Alexander the Great. This collection forms the nucleus of the most famous among the “mirrors for princes”, the Sirr al-asrar…, known in the Latin Middle Ages and early modern times as the Secretum secretorum. One of the Arabic translations of the pseudo-Aristotelian De Mundo also traces back to this period… However, it was under the ʿAbbasids (750–1258), and in particular in the first two centuries of their caliphate, that the translations blossomed.

quoted from ‘Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy‘, in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (entry revised 2017)

A different account is given by Robert Steele,

In the introduction to the work as we now have it we are told that it was translated from Greek into Rumi, and from Rumi into Arabic, by Yuhanna ibn el-Batrik (or Ibn Yahya al-Batrik). Rumi is the common word for Syriac, when it does not mean Greek, and Yuhanna, who died a.d. 815, was a well-known translator, physician of Al- Ma’mun, who is said to have rendered the Politics and the Historia Animalium into Syriac, and the De caelo et mundo and the De anima in epitome, with other works, into Arabic. There does not seem anything obviously unlikely about the statements that a Syrian text has existed, and that it was translated into Arabic about the beginning of the ninth century by Ibn al-Batrik, while it is to be hoped that English scholars, at any rate, have dropped the pose that a manuscript attribution is a decisive argument against the supposed author or translator having any connexion with the work.

A curious confirmation of the possible existence of a Syriac version has lately turned up in the publication by Dr. Budge of a thirteenth-century collection of medical treatises and receipts in Syriac (Syrian Anatomy, Pathology, and Therapeutics, 2 vols., London, 1913). Among them (ii. 540) is the formula for calculating victory by taking the numerical value of the names of the generals and casting out the nines (see pp. Ix, 250). This formula is identical with one which exists in both forms of the Arabic text, though it is omitted in the Vulgate Latin version.

It is unlikely that the Syriac text, if it should ever be found, will bear the name of the Secret of Secrets. Perhaps the traditional name preserved by Al-Makin, The Book of the knowledge of the ‘ Laws of Destiny, or the Kitab-al-siyasa of Ibn Khaldun, its alternative title in Arabic, may afford some clue.

Roger Bacon, Robert Steele, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi V: Secretum Secretorum (1909) Latin text; Steele’s notes in Eng.
Roger Bacon, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, 5: Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis, ed. Robert Steele (Oxford, 1920).

Wheat from the Chaff – ‘Bacon ciphertext’

Header picture: detail from Brit.Lib. Add MS 21917 f.71v

The two posts previous to this are:-

‘Cipher versus language – assertions and bundles’ (November 20, 2018); and
Provenance: Wilfrid-style and real-world. (November 24, 2018).

The radiocarbon dating which, in 2011, finally ended efforts to describe the Voynich manuscript as an autograph by Roger Bacon, also saw the perhaps arbitrary abandoning of his view that the appearance of the manuscript, and the content, suggested origin in works from the thirteenth century. No-one has taken on the task of testing whether the content mightn’t be a fifteenth-century copy of a thirteenth-century text (by Bacon or anyone else) but another problem with Wilfrid’s narrative is the limited range and type of techniques for enciphering that were known in Europe before 1400. Not that we necessarily accept that the written part of the text is in cipher.

I add the above paragraph as clarification today (29th Dec. 2018) because I hear on the grapevine that this blog, whose aim is to demonstrate the need for a re-visiting and revising of ideas long-held or tenaciously maintained about the manuscript, is being rumoured an effort to re-instate Wilfrid’s ‘Bacon ciphertext ‘ idea. …. **sigh**

Bacon’s cipher methods

Note (updated 18th. Jan. 2019). Whether it still applies, or was just a touch of influenza, just before this post originally went up, Nick Pelling had said that he felt discussion of methodologies inappropriate for his site. Time mellows many opinions, of course.

Bacon described seven methods by which a text might be rendered obscure in his De Epistola de Secretis … (“Letter concerning the marvellous power of art and of nature and concerning the nullity of magic“).

I’ve transcribed the section in a separate Page (‘see right: Addendum…’). adding some explanatory notes from John Dooley’s book[J.D.] and a couple of my own. [D]

The same Page illustrates and links to Aethicus/Ethicus’ alphabet.

Newbold said in 1921, and Power remarks more recently, that Bacon felt great admiration for Aethicus.

( Wilfrid addressed the Philadelphia College of Physicians on the same occasion that Prof. Newbold delivered the Fifth ‘Mary Scott Newbold’ lecture. Newbold held the chair of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and speaking dates are planned well in advance, so it seems a reasonable assumption that Wilfrid’s invitation was due to Newbold’s good graces.)

Roger Bacon and ciphers. Addendum to…’
John Dooley, History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis: Codes, Ciphers, and Their Algorithms. (2018)
Amanda Power, Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom, ( 2013) pp.221-2.
Professor Romaine Newbold, ‘The Roger Bacon Manuscript’, Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Series 3: Vol.43, (1921) pp. 431- 474. Section occurs pp.456ff.

Illustration: (detail) Roger Bacon, Wellcome Image V0000284

Some early ciphers

Scholars are yet to pay much attention to European ciphers pre-1400, and the seminal paper is still regularly cited:

Bernhard Bischoff, « Ûbersicht ûber die nichtdiplomatischen Geheimschriften des Mittelalters», Mitteilungen des instituts fur Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 62 (1954) 1-27.

but see also:

Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim, ‘Introduction: Ciphers and the Material History of Literacy’, in Ellison and Kim (eds.), A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers: Cryptography and the History of Literacy. (New York: Routledge, 2018).

The best known study of early cipher available in English is surely

David A.King, The Cipher of the Monks. (2001) The table of contents is (here). King’s work was introduced to public Voynich discussions online by Nick Pelling in 2010, while discussing a 14thC astrolabe from Picardy. (here).

An English cipher, in de Foxton’s Liber Cosmographiae (composed in Oxford in 1408):

John Block Friedman, “The Cipher Alphabet of John de Foxton’s Liber Cosmographiae,” Scriptorium 36 (1982), 219-35. accessible as a pdf through Persee. I have now also found a note by (the honorable) Marco Ponzi who says (here) that de Foxton’s cipher was introduced to Voynich studies by Nick Pelling, in a comment t o the first mailing list (in 2002).

The history of ciphers is older than Bacon, of course.

The cipher, part of which is shown in the header dates to the late tenth century, from the Abbey of Luxeuil and according to the catalogue entry at the British Library reads:

Hbfc Stfphbnxs scrkpskt p[er] prfcfptb brchkinb[er]tk mbgkctrk’ – solved by Sir Frederic Madden to read: ‘Haec Stephanus scripsit per precepta Archimberti magistri’ (‘This was written by Stephanus at the command of Master Archimbertus’).

The first reference below describes an ostracon (MMA 14.1.219) said to date from before the eighth century AD. I have chosen this example partly for its age, and partly because the editors describe the cipher as one formed by ‘the mixture of several types of letters’ – which is the fourth method described by Bacon in thirteenth-century England. That ostracon also lets me send a nod to Georg Baresch, who believed the Voynich manuscript contained ‘ancient’ and ‘Egyptian’ matter as he made clear when asking Athanasius Kircher’s help to identify the Voynich script.

Paulinus Bellet, ‘Anthologia Palatina 9.538, ‘The Alphabet and the Calligraphic Examination in the Coptic Scriptorium’, The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (1982), pp.1-7.
cf. Liv Ingeborg Lied, Hugo Lundhaug, Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology (2017) p.157 & note.
Letter of Georgius Barschius to Athanasius Kircher (1639). Transcription, translation and notes by Philip Neal.

Apropos of Baresch’s ‘guess’ that the manuscript’s content relates to medicine:

George W. Corner, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Medical Cryptogram’, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 4 (1936) 745-750.

Several researchers have commented on similarities between the Voynich script and other scripts, including Coptic. One sometimes sees observations of this sort collected – sometimes with attributions included – at agglomerative sites such as voynich.nu.

**Why would Bacon want to write in cipher?**

“the Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, an infinitely greater scholar, who had been persecuted on account of his writings and whose scientific discoveries had been misrepresented as black magic. Moreover, for many years he had been forbidden by his Order to write, and he himself referred in his works to the necessity of hiding his great secrets in cipher.”

Wilfrid Voynich, ‘A Preliminary Sketch of the History of the Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript’, Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Series 3: Vol.43, (1921) p.416.

As far as I know we have not a scrap of evidence to show that Roger Bacon ever wrote at length in cipher, and Wilfrid appears not to have known that his conception of Bacon as ‘persecuted scientist’ derived ultimately from the Draper-White thesis, which had been refuted in print four years before Wilfrid laid eyes on his ‘Bacon ciphertext’.

James Walsh had written in 1908,

That Dr. White’s book, contradicted as it is so directly by all serious histories of medicine and of science, should have been read by so many thousands in this country, and should have been taken seriously by educated men, physicians, teachers, and even professors of science … only shows how easily even supposedly educated men may be led to follow their prejudices rather than their mental faculties …

[pdf] Walsh, James Joseph, The Popes and Science; the History of the Papal Relations to Science During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Own Time, Fordam University Press, New York 1908. quoted passage from p.19.
Andrew Dickson White, A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom (1896)

And in 1921, Lynn Thorndike again objected to that ‘persecuted scientist’ notion when writing to Scientific American (see end of post).

Despite objections from persons both intelligent and well-informed, the myth/’theory’ of Bacon’s persecution ‘for science’ continued to be promoted and thus to infect writings for the rest of the twentieth century. As example of their tone I list the publications from 1922 ( from Reeds’ Bibliography).

Feb 4th., Cons, Louis, ‘Un manuscrit mystérieux: Un traité scientifique du treizième siècle, attribué a Roger Bacon’, L’Illustration 159 (Number 4118, 4 Feb 1922) p. 112. [Copy in BL Facs 439. J.R.]
May 20th., Garland, Herbert. ‘A Literary Puzzle Solved?’ Illustrated London News 160, (20 May1922), pp.740-742.
Dr. R. Loeser. “Roger Bacons Chiffremanuskript.” Die Umschau. 26 (1922), pp.115-117.

When Bacon was censured, it was in England, and as a result of his serving as ‘whistleblower’ when requested by the Pope to write about poor management and practice in the church in England. Others claim Bacon incurred displeasure by taking it on himself to criticise the system of education decided by ‘elders and betters’ in the church hierarchy.

Natural History?

Bacon’s contemporary, Thomas of Cantimpré (1201 –1272), wrote at great length about natural history, in his ‘De naturis rerum‘, a text that was (so to speak) ‘an instant run-away best seller’, being soon translated into French, Belgian and German vernaculars. Clearly, ‘natural history’ didn’t have to be hidden in cipher during Bacon’s lifetime.

The following illustration, comparing script in a fifteenth-century copy of Cantimpré’s thirteenth-century text with script taken from one folio of Beinecke MS 408, was first published by the present author in May 2016. That post was one item in a more detailed exposition of the internal evidence which indicates the content’s evolution over time. The last substantial stratum, prior to the present volume’s manufacture, I have dated to the period between 1250 and 1330 AD, that conclusion confirming an earlier opinion (by the present author) which had been reached and shared in posts online by 2011. Certain minor alterations, additions and marginal inscriptions were treated separately.

illustration from D.N. O’Donovan, ”An early 15th C copy of a 13th C text: Thomas of Cantimpré’, *voynichimagery* (blog), May 9th., 2016. I regret that in 2017, after almost a decade of being obliged to protest plagiarism and other abuses, I withdrew from public access the research I’d shared online.

Postscript: I am indebted to correspondent for reference to a comment made by Derek J. de Solla Price in 1975, indicating that some had earlier wondered if this might be the case:

Scholars … have surmised that it may well be a copy of a lost original— a fifteenth-century copy of a thirteenth-century text.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages (1975) p.203
The interesting work recently done by Koen Gheuens, tracing examples of an anomalous form of ‘lobster-style’ Cancer, refers to Cantimpré’s work. It is worth readers’ attention, though here will be left for a later series.

Aristotle prohibited?

In theory – only in theory – it could be argued that there is a period of about ten years when Bacon might (just ‘might’) have needed to encipher some text attributed to Aristotle.

As mentioned in the previous post, the Arts Faculty of the University of Paris were told in 1210 that:

“Neither the books of Aristotle on natural philosophy or their commentaries are to be read at Paris in public or secret, and this we forbid under penalty of excommunication.”

On the other hand, members of the Faculty of Theology could read what they liked, and no prohibition existed at all in England.

Bacon came to Paris while the ban was in place (at least nominally), arriving in 1233/4 and remaining until 1250, according to some accounts. But the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy says Bacon was already “teaching Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy and metaphysics by the 1240s”, and a ‘British Heritage’ article says Bacon was invited to Paris in 1241 “to present a lecture series on the Aristotelian corpus.”

Which would leave only the period between 1233-c.1243(?) when it might have been necessary to obscure the content of a notebook or some Aristotelian text.

E. Westacott, Roger Bacon (1945)
‘Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy’, Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
Karen Kenyon, ‘Roger Bacon‘.

In Paris again by 1257, Bacon would have now found Aristotle’s works freely available:

By 1255, all of Aristotle’s works were available plus a range of commentaries and expansions of his ideas. [These] were not only widely read in Paris but were prescribed texts in the Arts Faculty.

Next post: medieval ‘Books of Secrets‘; Aristotle’s Secreta Secretorum; and Roger Bacon’s ‘De Secretis‘