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Re: VMs: The Friar...

James A. Reeds wrote:

I have been asked by Larry Goldstone to pass this message along:

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1. Nancy and I HATE the subtitle!!! We fought like hell to keep Doubleday from marketing Friar/Cipher as a code book--which it isn't--or primarily about the VMS--which it isn't. Our book is primarily about Roger Bacon and the struggle to pursue science in a world of dogma. Thomas Aquinas--who
our publisher doesn't mention--has a good deal more space in our book than
does the VMS. (Our original title, before our editor changed it, was "Sacrament of Knowledge.")

Methinks they do protest too much! I just read the book. They do talk quite a bit about the VMs; in fact they have the best treatment of the known history of the VMs that I have seen in print. However, they also talk about the work on ciphers of Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon, as well as the espionage exploits of Francis Bacon, Walsingham, Dee, and WMV... Is it just the fault of Doubleday that "The Friar and the Cipher" is being marketed to capitalize on the success of "The Da Vinci Code"?

3. For us, the main point of including the VMS is that, with Manly's debunking,
Bacon's reputation was tarred as well.  We read through the Opus Majus and for
it not to be included as one of the great documents in the history of science
is a crime.

See above. With that said, the book's main theme is indeed that Roger Bacon invented modern experimental science.

They say that Roger Bacon invented the idea of experimental science, his ideas were suppressed and forgotten, but then Dee revived them and Francis Bacon stole them and popularized them. I hadn't heard that Francis Bacon was gay.

I hadn't heard that the end of Roger Bacon's *Opus Majus" contains a recipe for the Philosopher's Egg = the Philosopher's Stone to change lead to gold, a recipe that is completely incomprehensible. Many have concluded that, since this follows a section on ciphers, it is a cipher or steganographic message. One H. W. L. Hime claimed that Bacon had used an Argyle cipher (a Cardan grill), and that the message thus hidden was a recipe for gunpowder. All this immediately brings to mind the third book of Trithemius' Steganographia, which Jim Reeds solved.

4.Nancy and I have great respect for you and the others who have done such marvelous research on the VMS. We would never presume to contradict any of the conclusions to which you have come. But that only adds to the mystery. We live near Yale and have been through the manuscript a number of times. One
cannot fully appreciate the intricacy, or the artistic merit of the manuscripts
from the web pages.

They direct people to Rene's site, as they should. They give the Beinecke's site for images

http://highway49.library.yale.edu/photonegatives/

but this does get the sid's as well as the old photonegatives.

They note at one point, "Someone even completed a master's thesis in library science with a statistical analysis that demonstrated the the 'gallows characters' in the manuscript were not nulls." Who, what, and where was this?

The treatment of the VMs is good. There are some detail errors, but that is to be expected in a subject with such uncertainties. At the end they give an odd endorsement of Newbold's solution which unnecessarily detracts from the book:

"Other than the spectral Daimler, there are few today who are willing to say that Roger Bacon had anything to do with the Voynich manuscript at all. Bacon may well not have been directly involved, but, with all the conjecture and inconsistency in every other theory, Newbold's hypothesis makes the most sense. If the key does decrypt into Bacon's name -either by Newbold's reasoning or Brumbaugh's - and the probability that Edward Kelley would go to all that needless effort to fool Rudolf is small, why not accept Newbold's decryption, at least in part? None of the artificial language arguments has gotten anyone anywhere. Newbold's solution at least matched the illustrations, and he may *not* have subconsciously known of the Andromeda Nebula or riots at Oxford."

The most I can say for that is that the rest of their treatment of the VMs is far better. I do recommend the book. It is quite enjoyable and worth reading.

I wonder whether we might capitalize on the success of *The Friar and the Cipher*, if any, by interesting some publisher in a facsimile publication of the VMs? I would love to see a high quality publication on paper of the sids. We have talked since the foundation of the list of something like this. This might generate enough public interest to make it commercially viable.

Dennis

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