VMs: Brumbaugh / 1972 / Milan / numbers...?

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I bought a copy of Kennedy & Churchill's VMs book a while back: while it 
benefits from being up-to-date, and does manage to cover most of the areas, 
their descriptions of cryptography are quite clunky, and all in all its 
content feels slightly dated - for me, D'Imperio's concise prose retains 
(despite its age) much more stylistic verve, with much more "present-tense" 
feeling for the VMs.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I think K & C's approach tends to reduce 
the VMs to a purely historical object, where reading Voynichese (which, 
after all, is the real point, surely?) gets lost along the way. Really, 
their book is a perfectly OK introduction to the world of the VMs, but 
somehow not much of an introduction to the VMs itself.

However, their page 129 might have one thing worth pursuing: that 
"Brumbaugh's first and most important breakthrough was in the spring of 
1972, when he noticed that some of the Voynichese symbols were similar to 
others [...] on the back of another old manuscript" in Milan, where they 
represented numbers in an astrological diagram. Does anyone know what the 
reference for that other MS is?

On the subject of Brumbaugh, I'd also still like to know what a 15th 
Century Florentine archer's hat looks like - but perhaps we'll never 
know... :-o

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....


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