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Podcast Host
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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Narrator
This show is sponsored by American Public University. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, APU's programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire. Apu will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. On the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It's one of the largest of its kind and its vast collection includes the Gutenberg Bible, the first text printed mechanically, as well as a 1250 year old Buddhist text and thousands of other folios. But hidden in the stacks is also a tome that has baffled scholars for over a Century, a 480 page work covered in calfskin, written in a language unknown to any living person. Its pages are filled with cryptic tables and illustrations of bizarre plants and astrological signs. Carbon dating places it in the early 15th century, but there is no explanation for its purpose or even a name for its author. It's called the Voynich manuscript, and it has utterly baffled scholars for over a century. UV imaging has shown a signature in the book from the 17th century of 1 Jacobus Horsicki de Tepenesch, the court pharmacist to the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf ii, suggesting that it was once held in their imperial library. And from there we know that it ended up decades later in the hands of a Jesuit scholar named Marcus Barisch because of the small note that he left in the margins. In it, he asked a colleague to help translate the script. He never found a solution to the question of its meaning or its origin, though the manuscript then disappeared from record until 1912, when it reappeared at an auction at Sotheby's in London and was sold to a Polish American antiquarian named Wilfrid Voynich. Voynich must have been gobsmacked when he first perused the manuscript. Inside its calfskin cover there were six distinct sections. The first, containing herbs, presented over 100 drawings, each labeled in the inscrutable language. Only about 30% of the illustrations of medieval plants are familiar to scientists. The other 70% seem to be composites of known herbs or are else made up entirely. The next section was astronomical in nature, showing star clusters, suns and moons and zodiac signs. The biological section is truly bizarre, showing naked women in water interacting with strange tubes and anatomical structures. Many who have studied the manuscript believe it concerns alchemy or maybe human reproduction. Then there's the pharmacological section, with bottles, vials and jars that one might find in an old apothecary shop. And then there's another section with blocks of text that's interspersed with numbers, leading scholars to believe they are formulas for medicine. All of this was written in a language that no one can decipher, that eventually became known as Voyniches. The language itself contains about 200 glyphs used to form the words of the text. Scientists have found that their distribution across the document is extremely similar to modern languages, meaning that it isn't merely random gibberish, but it follows its own real linguistic logic. Voynich spent years studying and sharing the book with his contemporaries, to the point that his name itself became its unofficial title. Eventually, the Voynich manuscript landed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, where cryptologists and linguists all used different types of language models and statistical analysis to try to understand how the language works. They were able, using simple ciphers and machine learning, to reproduce Voynich style texts, but still could not translate it into a modern language. Experts from other areas of study have likewise tried to make sense of the strange document. Historians have suggested a Northern Italian style to the illustrations, and the carbon dating, as well as that original signature in the book, place it squarely in Bohemia. Botanists have thoroughly catalogued its illustrations and have identified many of the real herbs portrayed. Astronomers have confirmed that the symbols of the zodiac and the positions of the planets and stars depicted adhere to what their medieval predecessors knew. Recently, the Beinecke Library's digital archives of the manuscript have been made public, allowing amateur sleuths and cryptographers to assist in deciphering a relic that has continued to prove itself stubbornly unreadable. An annual symposium brings together experts across all interested fields to discuss new discoveries. And recent advances in machine learning have uncovered thematic groupings of text that support the idea that text is organized around specific topics. But the puzzle at the core of the Voynich manuscript remains the the language itself. Could it be a lost tongue? Or the author's personal shorthand? Maybe an intricate cipher? Whatever it is, neither experts nor AI have been able to solve it. And so it stands a reminder of humankind's unrelenting curiosity, whether its secrets are ever fully uncovered or remain an enduring enigma. It reminds us that the thrill of a mystery unites professional scientists, technologists and amateur sleuths alike, all drawn together by the shared desire and to crack a good puzzle. This show is sponsored by American Public University. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, APU's programs are designed for people who never stop you bring the fire. Apu will fuel the journey. Learn more at apuapus.edu.
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Sponsor Representative
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Narrator
Foreign. There is one thing that unites almost every culture across human history the love of dancing. It's a primal part of who we are. Whether it's at a concert or a nightclub or a family wedding, whenever anyone around you is moving to the same rhythm, the urge to get up and join them can seem uncontrollable. But for the residents of Strasbourg in the year 1518, that urge was literally uncontrollable. It started on a hot July day when a woman walked onto the cobbled streets outside her home and started twisting and shaking, as if she were dancing to music only she could hear. As minutes turned to hours, she kept dancing, and nearby merchants and curious townspeople gathered around to watch. The woman was breathing hard and sweat was rolling down her face, but it was like she physically could not stop, no matter how hard she tried. As the sun went down, she finally collapsed to the ground in exhaustion. A man in the crowd stepped forward and knelt down to check on her. But after taking a moment to catch her breath, the woman got right back up and kept on dancing. By the next morning, she was still going, and another passerby was so inspired that he dropped what he was doing and joined the dance as well. So did another and another, and within a week, there were 30 people compulsively dancing in the streets. Every so often, one of them would fall down in exhaustion, but after a bit of rest, they would get back up, despite bloody feet and even broken limbs. As July turned to August, the number of dancers had climbed into the hundreds. City officials were so worried, they called together a group of doctors and religious leaders to figure out a solution. The clergy thought that the townspeople had become possessed by St. Vitus, a Christian martyr whose feast day is celebrated with dancing. But the doctors theorized that it was a disease caused by overheated blood. Essentially, they diagnosed the locals with boogie fever. The group of experts, however, agreed on the same solution. They just had to dance it off and get it out of their system. So, in an effort to encourage the frenzy, the city hired carpenters to build massive dance floors for the dancers to gather on. They brought in musicians to accompany the movement, and they even hired professional dancers to help everyone keep up the tempo. But the city officials had underestimated what they were dealing with. The dancers indeed wore themselves out, but they didn't or couldn't slow down. So as the weeks wore on, some of them began to drop dead from strokes or heart attacks. By late August, around 400 people were dancing, and more than a dozen of them were dying each and every day. In an act of desperation, the city council reversed course and banned both music and dancing. The dance halls were torn down and anyone who refused to sit still was hauled off to the shrine of St. Vitus and forced to pray for forgiveness. Within a couple of weeks, the so called dancing plague began to subside just as mysteriously as it had begun. By the end of September, after two months of chaos, it was finally over. To this day, no one is sure what caused the dancing plague. Some historians believe it was food poisoning from a mind altering fungus called ergot. Others think that it was simply a case of mass hysteria, an extreme version of something that we all know to be true. In the right time and place, dancing is contagious. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by me, Aaron Manke, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the Grim and Mild team and produced by Jesse Fung. Learn more about the show and the people who make it over@grimandmild.com curiosities. You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well as ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking for an ad free option, consider joining our Patreon it's all the same stories but without the interruption for a small monthly fee. Learn more and sign up over@patreon.com grimandmild and until next time, stay curious.
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Podcast Host
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