VMs: Literary sleuths probe medieval mystery (Miami Herald)

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http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/books/11001116.htm

Posted on Sun, Feb. 27, 2005 
 

NONFICTION


Literary sleuths probe medieval mystery

Husband-and-wife team suggests an intriguing solution to the puzzle of The 
Voynich Manuscript.

BY ANNE BARTLETT

abartlett@xxxxxxxxxx


THE FRIAR AND THE CIPHER: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most 
Unusual Manuscript in the World.

Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. Doubleday. 288 pages. $26.

If you think Paris Hilton is a hot topic on the Internet, just check out the 
Voynich Manuscript -- 8,000 hits on a Google search. One Edith Sherwood, 
Ph.D., thinks it was written by Leonardo da Vinci. Hooey, assert the followers of 
Dan Gibson: It's obviously written in Nabataean, an ancient Middle Eastern 
language. But ''Big Jim'' favors an extraterrestrial connection.

You can't beat a good mystery, and the Voynich Manuscript is nothing if not 
that. It's (probably) a medieval illuminated manuscript that's one of the most 
famous cryptographic puzzles in the world. Going on 100 years after book 
dealer Wilfred Voynich found it at a Jesuit school in Italy, no one has been able 
to crack the cipher it was written in, despite the efforts of the best 
codebreakers and computer programs.

The 200-page cipher book, illustrated with drawings of improbable plants, 
astrological symbols and naked women, now resides at Yale University's Beinecke 
Library. It provides an ideal topic for bibliophile co-authors Lawrence and 
Nancy Goldstone. The husband-and-wife team started out writing about 
book-collecting, but expanded in their last book, Out of the Flames, into a clever 
combination of book lore and intellectual history. They carry on that entertaining 
formula in The Friar and the Cipher.

UFOs aside, there are any number of respectable theories about the origins of 
the Voynich. The Goldstones conscientiously go through the more rational, but 
their hearts belong to one of the earliest: That it was written by 13th 
century English scholar Roger Bacon, the ''friar'' of the title.

According to the Goldstones, Bacon's historical reputation has been at a low 
ebb in recent years, because his scientific achievements were modest. They 
argue he deserves rehabilitation as an intellectual hero not because of his 
results, but because he championed the empirical scientific method at a time when 
the Roman Catholic Church establishment repressed any serious attempt to expand 
knowledge.

Just as the Goldstones pit freethinking Michael Servetus against theologian 
John Calvin in Out of the Flames, they use St. Thomas Aquinas as Bacon's foil 
in The Friar and the Cipher. Aquinas was a more attractive character than 
Calvin, but his writings did help stifle scientific advance for several hundred 
years.

Much of the book is devoted to Bacon, but the story moves more quickly when a 
manuscript that sounds like the Voynich first surfaces in the early 17th 
century, the property of the colorful Elizabethan astrologer John Dee. From there, 
we race to the Hapsburg court in Prague, the Jesuits in Italy, the book 
dealers and cryptographers of the 20th century and the current Internet debate.

The Goldstones pack considerable information into 300 pages, and perhaps 
inevitably commit a boner or two. For example, they describe King Henry VII of 
England as King Henry VIII's ''brother'' -- the most casual student of English 
history knows that he was his father. (They confuse him with Prince Arthur.) On 
the same page, they make reference to Mary, Queen of Scots, being ''born'' a 
Frenchwoman. Again, wrong. She was raised in France but born in Scotland. What 
else might be inaccurate?

Did Roger Bacon write the Voynich cipher? The Goldstones don't make an 
airtight argument that he did. But it's an amusing dispute. And you'll be checking 
into the chat rooms to see what the latest brainstorm might be.

Anne Bartlett is the Herald's Miami-Dade politics and government editor.
 
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