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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is this about philosophy or a book?, 10 April 2006
Don't you hate it when a book description isn't completely accurate? While I wouldn't necessarily say that's true in the case of Lawrence & Nancy Goldstone's The Friar and the Cipher, it does come very close. Ostensibly, the book is about the Voynich Manuscript, a document that has never been deciphered and which many believe was written by the noted thinker Roger Bacon, who lived in the thirteenth century. There has been a lot of controversy about this manuscript and its possible authorship, with many people believing that there's no way that Roger Bacon could have written it, or that it must be a hoax. It appears to be in some sort of code with strange illustrations in the margins. And yes, the book does discuss the great debate about this, detailing the many attempts to decode it and the many theories about who might have written it. Was it all a hoax committed by a friend of John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's trusted advisor, back in the late sixteenth century?
Of course, the problem is that this debate begins on page 223 of the edition I have. The book runs just over 300 pages, which presents kind of a problem. The rest of the book is a history of Western thought and the constant struggle between science and religion in the Middle Ages, when the Catholic church was all-powerful. It gives a very detailed history of Roger Bacon, supposedly to give the background to the debate on the manuscript. It also details his philosophical adversaries, as well as demonstrating how Europe came out of the Dark Ages due to the rediscovery of some of Aristotle's works. In fact, the book goes all the way back to Aristotle himself, and his differences with Plato.
All of this is fascinating stuff, and if you're in the mood for a discourse on logical thought and its struggles to get through religious dogma, then this book is definitely for you. I know I enjoyed it immensely. I just wish it had been better advertised as such. It covered a lot of ground that I was slightly familiar with, yet for which I had no real details. The Saracen empire was stretching into Spain at this point, and many of its scholars were well aware of Aristotle and his ideas of Logic. In fact, many of these scholars faced their own persecution from conservative Imams and other Moslem leaders, as the Goldstones show us in this book. As Europeans began to push back against this invasion, parts of Spain were recaptured, and these Moslem studies of Aristotle began to spread over Europe.
The Gladstones do a really effective job in giving this history in a concise, yet detailed format. I never felt like they were glossing over anything and I found these sections extremely valuable. If you've studied Western philosophy or the history of the Dark Ages, than this may not be new to you, but I found it intriguing. The authors then give a short history of the Dominican and the Franciscan orders of the Church, and how opposed to each other they were. They give the story of Francis of Assissi and how the Franciscans were formed, as well as the Dominicans and their noted scholar, Thomas Aquinas, and they discuss the university system as it existed in Europe at the time. Then they begin to delve deeply into Roger Bacon's biography. That's when the focus of the book begins to shift. However, it doesn't move that far at first. They use the differences between Thomas' thought and Bacon's to highlight the differences between those using Aristotle's logic and those using Church dogma, and it's a very enlightening section of the book.
Finally, we get to the manuscript itself, and where it may have gone (as it disappears from history periodically). Unfortunately, this is where the book really begins to drag. We are given fairly detailed passages on cryptology as many twentieth-century cryptologists try to decode the manuscript. I found I was much more interested in the discussions on Western thought than I was in the decoding of the manuscript, especially after remembering that nobody has ever solved the riddle. Some of these stories are interesting, but I found my interest flagging as I read about what happened to these various people.
Which brings me to the ultimate problem with this book and how it was marketed (and even titled). The Friar and the Cipher is a wonderful book on Western philosophy. However, there's nothing really new in the book when it comes to the manuscript. It doesn't take sides in the controversy, only saying that it seems likely that Bacon did write it. They raise questions, but they don't really provide anything new to anybody who has any knowledge of the subject. The book seems to be a way to gather a bunch of different sources into one volume, sort of a "this is where we're at" kind of thing.
It also is almost a love letter to Roger Bacon. They ferociously defend him against any of his critics who claim he wasn't what his fans make him out to be. He has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, and the Goldstones bring it all up and knock it down. Who's right and who's wrong is not for me to judge, as this is my first exposure to Bacon. However, one positive aspect of this defense is that they do acknowledge that the criticism *could* be right, but that it's misplaced. Bacon may not have been the leading light his fans make him out to be, but it was his methods that made him special, regardless of the ideas themselves. And perhaps that could be a defense of the book as well. The Friar and the Cipher may not be as special as it could be regarding the Voynich manuscript, but the method of getting there is extremely well done.
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