Dear all,
this is to let you know that I am planning two, largely overlapping, talks about the Voynich MS.
The first will be on Saturday evening 9 October near Frascati. It will not be online. The title is:
The Voynich MS in Rome and Latium.
Please contact me directly if you are in the area and would like to attend.
The second will be on Sunday 17 October at 16:00 UTC. (That's 18:00 Central European Time, or 12:00 US Eastern time). It will be online only. The title is:
The "discovery" of the Voynich MS by Wilfrid Voynich.
I will provide registration details for this event as soon as I have them.
About the second event, on Sunday 17 October at 16:00 UTC. (That's 18:00 Central European Time, or 12:00 US Eastern time):
This will be held via Webex , which can be accessed via your browser (i.e. no installation needed).
I will only have the link a few days before the event, and it is not allowed to post it on social media etc.
Therefore, I will collect E-mail addresses of those who wish to attend.
If you have my E-mail address, just contact me directly. Otherwise, send me a Private Message here.
You will then receive an E-mail with the details.
The abstract of the talk is:
Quote:The “Discovery” of the Voynich MS by Wilfrid Voynich
René Zandbergen
Abstract:
The Voynich MS is a 15th century illustrated manuscript with more than 200 pages of text in an unknown script. It has resisted 100 years of cryptographic attacks. Every year, several new tentative solutions are presented, only to be rejected very quickly.
The present talk will not follow this doomed path, but look at a remarkable, and largely unknown part of the history of this MS, namely its supposed discovery by Wilfrid Voynich in the Villa Mondragone near Frascati, Italy. Voynich was very secretive about this, and essentially all we know from him was his statement in 1921 that he discovered it in some forgotten chest in a castle in Southern Europe. The later owner of the MS Hans P. Kraus proclaimed in the 1960’s that this was Villa Mondragone.
What really happened has only been unravelled in recent years, based on independent sources about these events. It involves confiscations of major monastic libraries, books hidden in cellars, fights between the Italian State, the Vatican and the society of Jesus, and Hungarian attempts to recover the treasures of the lost library of Matthias Corvinus. We will see that Voynich did not discover anything, but got involved in a very good deal due to his personal character. In this deal, the Voynich MS was just one of approximately 30 books, and not even one of the most important ones.
We will also see that there are several compelling reasons why Voynich could not talk about any of this.
A few mysteries still remain, but there are still important resources that have hardly been explored.
The presentation of these events will be illustrated profusely with pictures of the people, the places and the documents involved.
I just realised that I missed this entirely. Will something be published later?
Both events took place. The "live" event in Frascati was particularly memorable !!
There should be a recording of the second event, but I don't have details yet.
I will probably post the slides at academia at some point, but without the explanations they won't be entirely meaningful.