The Musée de la Légion d’honneur comes up trumps!
I’m delighted to be able to report that I have received (from the very nice people at the Musée de la Légion d’Honneur) the page of the original Légion d’Honneur register that I’ve been trying to...
View ArticleWas Joachim Vieillard the Missing Corsair?
Of all the Légionnaires d’Honneur whose full names first appeared just a few days ago, I have to say that Joachim Vieillard currently seems to me – even though we have no family tree for him, so no...
View ArticleYale’s Voynich Manuscript photo-facsimile has just arrived here…
…yes, on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a slick piece of publishing, well-scanned and well-printed with top-notch images that are the crispest I’ve seen. The foldouts (something every previous...
View ArticleJoachim Vieillard and La Confiance…
For a few weeks, I’ve been trying to reconcile the reference in BN3 (the third of the papers associated with Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, but which I firmly believe was written much later by someone I...
View ArticleJean-Marthe-Adrien Lhermitte and La Preneuse…
Cipher mysteries usually offer us multiple bubbles of probability to work with, e.g. whether the Somerton Man was Charles Mikkelsen (close but no cigar, despite the former’s nicotine-stained fingers),...
View ArticleMultispectral images of Voynich f116v…
Of all the text in the Voynich Manuscript, one section stands a particularly high chance of giving us information: f116v, the final page. This has a set of marginalia that (by all rights) ought to have...
View ArticleThe Voynich Manuscript and the Heroic Outsider…
I’ve just been interviewed about the Voynich Manuscript for an article in an upcoming Sunday Times (apropos of the Yale University Press photo-facsimile, of course), which was a lot of fun. Even so,...
View ArticleWas the Dying Captain François-Thomas Le Même?
Because the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang papers manage to combine specificity and vagueness in such a frustrating way, some people like to conclude that they must be outright fakes, or (at best) false...
View ArticleSome Voynich reviews, summarized for you…
Since the recent release of the Yale University Press photo-facsimile, a number of quite different takes on the Voynich Manuscript have appeared online. Here are a fair few, brutally summarized:...
View ArticleCicco Simonetta’s Treatise on Decipherment, in modern English…
When I was writing “The Curse of the Voynich” a decade ago, my friend Philip Neal very kindly translated Cicco Simonetta’s Treatise on Decipherment (BNF Fonds Italien 1595 ff. 441r-442r) into English...
View Article100 Voynich problems that nobody has (yet) solved…
Inspired by Julian Bunn’s just-released “Puzzles of the Voynich Manuscript” ebook (review to follow), I decided to post a list of a hundred Voynich problems – that is, issues that researchers...
View ArticleWas it Dr Malcolm Glen Sarre who found the Rubaiyat?
…it might be, simply because his name and address appear (lightly crossed out) on p.6 of the production notes for the 1978 Littlemore television piece on the Somerton Man. If you search for barcode...
View ArticleThe second Voynich owner’s mark…?
It’s well known that f1r (the very first page of the Voynich Manuscript) has an erased ownership mark. Under UV light, you can see that it says (something along the lines of) “Jacobj à Tepenece / Prag”...
View ArticleWhere in Jetty Road was the Rubaiyat car parked?
A few days ago, I suggested that a person of interest to Somerton Man researchers might well be Dr Malcolm Glen Sarre, simply because his name and 118 Jetty Road address appeared (admittedly crossed...
View ArticleHow about a British Academy Voynich Manuscript Conference?
I was mooching round the British Academy’s website a little earlier (I was trying to find the Neil Ker Memorial Fund, which I had forgotten the name of), when I noticed its page on British Academy...
View ArticleWWE Ultimate Smackdown: Donald Trump vs The Voynich Manuscript…?
Put wrestling fan US President-elect Donald Trump in the ring with the Voynich Manuscript, and who would win? Actually, the two may be more evenly matched than you think… For a start, both are...
View ArticleReview of “Tales From The Black Chamber: A Supernatural Thriller” by Bill Walsh…
A few years back, Bill Walsh sent me a (fairly early, as I recall) draft of his vaguely-Voynich-Manuscript-themed novel to have a look at. And now that a proper copy has finally landed on my doorstep,...
View ArticleBernardin Nageon letter BN3, Napoleon, and haches d’abordage d’honneur…
One of the intriguing (yet annoyingly hard to pin down) parts about the third Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang letter BN3 (that I have argued was probably written by an as-yet-unidentified French corsair...
View ArticleThe Nageon Family (Part 5): A Missing André Nageon de l’Estang?
I should mention that there’s another André Nageon lurking in a gap in the Nageon de l’Estang timeline (slightly after the others that I covered in parts one to four): and he actually has quite a funky...
View ArticleVoynich metatheories, theories, and pseudoscience…
What is the difference between theories and metatheories? Given that the former can sensibly range from hand-wavy general theories (“the Voynich Manuscript was written by a mad alchemist“) to specific...
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