Hello from the girls! We want to thank you all for the overwhelming support, we could cry. But we won’t. Instead, I (Madeline) will share some fun facts and free associations inspired by The Gadfly. Enjoy!
My first exposure to the Voynich name wasn’t through Ethel Lilian Voynich (1864-1960), the Irish author of The Gadfly (1897), now available from Mandylionpress.com!! It was through the Voynich manuscript, an early modern codex housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The book was named for Ethel’s husband, Wilfrid Voynich (1865-1930), a London-based antiquarian and book dealer whose Soho shop regularly supplied volumes to the British Museum. Wilfrid landed in London after escaping a Siberian prison camp where he was interred for organizing with the Polish nationalist movement. Using his store as a convenient cover, he continued to circulate banned books and subversive writing even after going into exile in the UK.
Alluring mythology surrounds the Voynich manuscript, earning it the superlative “the world’s most mysterious text.” In a letter to Ethel, sealed until after his death, Voynich claimed that, in 1912, the eponymous manuscript had been pilfered from a shipment of books bound for the Vatican. It is rumored that when author and medievalist Umberto Eco visited Beinecke in the 1960s, it was the only thing he asked to see. A large part of the book’s mystique is the script itself, it is composed in a strange looping alphabet, now called “Voynichese,” otherwise unknown and completely indecipherable. One set of characters is called “the gallows,” the author’s careful hand traced out glyphs evocative of the hangman’s scaffold. While the book remains illegible to this day, it appears to be divided into sections dealing with botany, astrology, pharmacology, and balneology (“the study of therapeutic bathing and medicinal springs,” apparently). These sections are identified by equally bizarre illustrations—bizarre because, for example, the celestial maps correspond with no known stars, and plants are drawn with animal-like traits. In the section on baths, robust bathing beauties—some scholars have suggested they’re pregnant, a common trope in alchemical texts—wade in a series of interconnected pools and tubes.
The manuscript’s early history only adds to its intrigue. These images are drawn on vellum that researchers have carbon-dated to the fifteenth century, and the first recorded account of the manuscript comes from 1666 when Joannes Marcus (1595-1667), rector of the University of Prague, sent it to German polymath, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). Marcus wrote that the manuscript had come out of the kunstkammer of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612). Rudolph’s kunstkammer was a collection of over 8,000 wonders that, in addition to the manuscript, included a five-and-a-half inch bezoar stone, taken from the intestines of a cow, with an enameled gold stand and clasp.
According to Marcus, the Voynich manuscript originated with Roger Bacon (1219-1292-ish), a scientist/alchemist—they were really the same thing at the time—and Franciscan friar whose love of Aristotle and the scientific method helped inspire the Renaissance. Marcus’s claim was likely a lie. There are a few giveaways that the book was made long after Bacon’s death including a drawing of a sunflower—a New World delight that wouldn’t have been known in Europe until after 1492—and a depiction of what was considered, in the fifteenth century, a very fashionable hat. Evidently, poor Emperor Rudolph II was suckered out of 600 gold ducats. It is famously hard to do accurate currency conversions between the past and present. Even so, I spent a long time trying to figure out a comparison and this is the best I could come up with: on his death, world-historical genius Leonardo da Vinci was worth the equivalent of 600 gold ducats. To Rudolph, the manuscript was worth one da Vinci.
Kircher, who erroneously claimed to have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs over a century before Napoleon’s troops discovered the Rosetta Stone, was unable to break the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher. Voynichese resembles another cipher, an unintelligible text given to Kircher by orientalist Andreas Müller. Müller claimed that he had discovered the text in Egypt, only revealing it to be a cryptographic prank after Kircher proudly announced that he had solved the puzzle. Kircher was made a laughing stock but Müller is remembered as kind of a jerk, which is worse. There’s no way to know whether the Voynich Manuscript was simply another prank gone wrong, but when he could not decipher the text, the humbled Kircher admitted defeat. He dumped the book at a Jesuit university, where it remained until Voynich snatched it up in 1912.
Until his death, Voynich maintained his belief that the manuscript had incredible historical value. In 1921, the New York Times quoted him saying, “I will prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of twentieth-century science.” Voynich made his statement to the Times in response to certain findings by Dr. William Newbold of Pennsylvania. After studying the manuscript under a microscope, Newbold announced that he had made astonishing new discoveries. The doctor revealed that each glyph of Voynichese was, in fact, made up of microscript—the text was IN the text. When a US Army cryptologist repeated the experiment, he found only “random cracks left behind by drying ink,” concluding that Newbold’s hidden microscript was “the [product] of his own intense enthusiasm and his learned and ingenious subconscious.” This was, in my opinion, a very gentlemanly interpretation of the findings.
Some months ago, I became obsessed with microscript after a series of synchronicities. When I read about Newbold’s theory, I felt a strong kinship—I, too, am often led astray by my learned and ingenious subconscious. First, I fell in love with Robert Walser, the Swiss author adored by Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin. After a brief but brilliant career among Berlin’s literati, Walser spent the bulk of his adulthood destitute, in and out of mental institutions. Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten (1909) no longer sits correctly in my bookshelf because I dog-eared so many pages marking perfect passages. The book follows its titular character, Jakob von Gunten, as he works toward his stated goal, “To be small and to stay small,” to fit neatly into the little space of the Benjamenta Institute, a school for servants. A lifetime of misfitting is on display in Walser’s writing, drawing on his own desire to shrink himself into social conformity. After suffering psychosomatic hand cramps, Walser began resenting pens. He switched to composing his work in pencil, developing what he called his “pencil system.” The “pencil system” was a meditative, almost incantatory, manifestation of micrographia. Walser’s writing became so tiny that executors of his estate assumed it was an elaborate code. His final novel, The Robber (1925) was composed with just 24 pages of microscript. When Walser was institutionalized, a visitor asked if he was writing; he replied with the incredibly lucid statement, “I’m not here to write. I’m here to be mad.”
Around this same time, I guess it must have been summer 2022, I bought an eighteenth century drawing, ink on vellum, from Catalog Sale, an auction house in Queens. I hadn’t thought much of it, it was a drawing of Christ on the cross, it had faded in an interesting way and I put in the minimum bid a few days before the auction, forgetting about it until I received an email that I had won. On my way home from picking up the picture, I discovered that the images were made up, not of lines, but of tiny Hebrew characters—so tiny as to be illegible, leading me to question whether what I thought I saw was really there. I felt a surge of excitement and panic, this thing was now too special to be in my possession. Frantically googling micrography led to some interesting discoveries like Matthias Buchinger, an eighteenth-century German calligrapher and performer who, though born without hands or feet and standing at just two-and-a-half feet tall, created masterful images composed of miniature letters.
I was able to place my drawing in a long tradition of Hebrew micrography, dating back to the ninth century. Originally a way to skirt iconoclastic provisions in the Bible, the tradition continued in both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Europe, spreading with the diaspora. By the eighteenth century, the medium, originally reserved for manuscripts, was commonly used to create religious scenes meant to be hung in the home, like my cross (I still don’t have an answer as to why the very un-Jewish scene of the crucifixion was depicted in this style). And while I found out that it isn’t particularly valuable or unique, it remains precious.
The text that makes up these religious icons was probably believed to have an apotropaic effect itself. When reading about the microscript images, I was reminded of medieval speaking bowls. These bowls, used in folk magic rituals, often featured pseudo-script, decorations that resembled writing but corresponded to no language. These “texts” created a kind of schizophrenic semiotics in which signifiers, cleaved from meaning, became the content in themselves. It is often presumed that magicians duped the mostly illiterate population into believing these bowls featured real text. But it has been argued, and I tend to agree, that people came to see writing itself as possessing magical properties regardless of its meaning.
On the internet, text functions differently: it is a deluge of information made up of a kind of disembodied glossolalia and hanging signifiers—Eco likens it to a Borges story: “Funes the Memorious” in Ficciones wherein, after falling off a horse, Ireneo Funes is cursed with a virtuosic memory that leads only to an overwhelming mundanity. There is a gift in a book’s finiteness as well as its physicality.
It’s only fitting, as we launch Mandylion, that this turned into a bit of a ramble on texts that weren’t meant to be read. In the least corny way possible, there is magic in books whether we read them or not. I’ve known this since I was little, when I slept clutching a book in each hand the way other kids slept with plush toys. The only stuffed animal I ever loved was The Velveteen Rabbit, which I memorized when I had scarlet fever (yes, I’m that committed to the nineteenth-century). I pretended to care about the real stuffed rabbit I was given after I survived my ordeal, but in reality I never did. No security blanket particularly interested me. A blanket can only cover you up, offering a thin veil of protection in your current reality. A book’s magic is that it allows you to disappear completely into another world.
XOXO
Madeline
Love love love that this exists!