Nick wrote:
Quote:If anyone has access to articles written by John Matthews Manly about the Voynich I'd be very interested to see them. I suspect that he had a different opinion again, but it would be nice to know either way for sure.
I am aware of three papers:
- The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World: Did Roger Bacon Write It and Has the Key Been Found? in Harper's Monthly Magazine 143 (1921): pp. 186-97
- Roger Bacon's Cypher Manuscript, American Review of Reviews, LXIV, 1921, pp.105-106
- Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS. Speculum 6, July 1931, pp. 345-391
The second is probably a summary of the first and I don't have it. I have the other two, but suspect so has Nick. The first is a fence-sitting review of Newbold, while the third is a refutation.
More interesting is what Manly thought himself about what the text represents.
There is a note by Anne Nill in the Grolier Library that says:
Quote:Prof. Manly in his letter of March 26, 1920, to W.M.V says:
"I still think there is a possibility that the cipher is less complicated than he [Prof.Newbold] believes, and is largely disguised by the use of nulls. As we are entirely ignorant of the language underlying the cipher, it seems me the only way in which the nulls can be isolated is by comparing the relative frequencies of the symbols on a considerable number of pages. I have as you know, eight sheets. This number is, I think, hardly sufficient for the purpose in question.
It seems that Voynich then sent him more sheets. Also, he had sent a similar letter to Newbold.
The first letter is likely to be preserved in the Beinecke, but I have not seen it.
Thanks for that, Rene. I do indeed have copies of 1) and 3) but not 2), but I wasn't aware of the 1920 letter or Ann Nill's mention of it, so that's really great. :-)
I suspect that there may well be a more worked-through version of Manly's thoughts on the Voynich in You are not allowed to view links.
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Here is #2, from a copy scanned by Google:
Page 105:
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Page 106:
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Picking up this thread to report that I spent all day yesterday reading and photographing Nill's correspondence with Garland (manager of the London shop) at the Grolier Club in NYC. I don't think there's much of interest buried in there in terms of Manly's thoughts on the VMS, at least nothing that doesn't show up in the Speculum article. What I did find interesting, and rather sad, were Nill's increasingly desperate and poignant letters to Garland in the wake of Voynich's death in 1930 - debt, sluggish sales due to the 1929 crash (after which dependable buyers like Robert Garrett had to back off), and of course grief. A tough triple-blow. They had hoped that Manly's forthcoming review of Newbold in Speculum (which, you may know, is published by the organization of which I am executive director, the Medieval Academy of America) would make the VMS marketable by giving it some scholarly credibility, the lack of which had made it essentially unsellable in the 1920s in spite of the publicity generated by Newbold's work. Unfortunately, the 1931 piece in Speculum was such a savage demolition of Newbold's work that it seems to have had the opposite effect. When Nill started dismantling the business in the early 1930s, setting up several Sotheby's auctions and desperately trying to sell their remaining stock of books and manuscripts to collectors and small US collections, they kept the VMS not because they thought it was of particular value, but because they just couldn't find a buyer. Univ. of Michigan couldn't afford it. The New York Academy of Medicine was interested, but didn't have the cash. Baltimore collector Robert Garrett was fascinated by it, but had been essentially wiped out by the crash of 1929. Ethel began her work on the plants during this period, partially as a way to distract her from her grief over Wilfrid's death. In the end, the VMS was basically all she and Anne had left of Voynich's business. [this time period will be subject of my lecture at the Grolier Club on March 4]
Dear Lisa,
thanks for that, I wish I could be there to attend. There is likely still significant interesting material in the Grolier club. I have a summary in one of the darker corners of my web site:
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I wonder if you could give them a hint that it would be of great interest to have Voynich's catalogues digitised. I think that they are only one of two places who have a complete set.
Another piece of trivia (perhaps): ELV had a death mask made of Voynich. It is not clear what happened with it, but if it was still in their possession when ELV died, it just possibly may have ended up in the Grolier club, and it may not be recognised for what it is.
I have not had a chance to visit the Grolier club, and it is unlikely to happen in the medium-term future.
One of my great interests (and I am fairly alone in that :-) ) is what happened just before Voynich managed to acquire the collection including the Voynich MS. There is possibly some correspondence between Nill and the Vatican somewhere in there, that might shed some light. I have reproductions of a lot of the material, but not that part.
One of the highlights in the collection, I think, is the four-page letter by Nill describing Voynich's death.
Here's the complete article number 2 from above,
Roger Bacon's Cypher Manuscript, American Review of Reviews, LXIV, 1921, pp.105-106 article, here:
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I note the article specifically says that the MS was discovered by Voynich in Italy in 1912. To the best of my knowledge, at the time Voynich had moved on from claiming the MS to have been found in Austria to simply locate it in "southern Europe". But in the lecture, Dr Newbold has let slip it was Italy, which suggests he was in on the secret - correct me if I am wrong ReneZ?
The article also shows the nonsense of Newbold's theory. In it, he claims to expand seven original "shorthand" letters into no fewer than 172 Roman letters. There are then five more arbitrary steps to mix up, jumble, juxtapose and deduce words in pig Latin.
I don't think there is anything in the Grolier collection that would shed light on Voynich's acquisition of the VMS...there's a very small folder with some correspondence from the late 1890s, and then nothing until after about 1920, ending in the early 1930s. The correspondence is between Nill and the London office...this is because the collection focuses on his New York business, which got started several years after he acquired the VMS.
I didn't see anything having to do with the Vatican. As for digitizing, the Grolier doesn't yet have a systematic digitization project, but as you know, Rene, at least some of the information about the manuscripts Voynich bought/sold is discoverable in the Schoenberg Database (You are not allowed to view links.
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And yes, the letter in which Nill talks about Voynich's death is very poignant and evocative.
this is a link to a webpage from his inventory of essays You are not allowed to view links.
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