The century since Wilfrid Voynich unearthed his now-eponymous manuscript has seen many groups of codebreakers take a tilt at its cryptographic windmills. The most famous of these was William Friedman’s “First Study Group” of WWII cryptologists: but I’ve recently become interested in finding out to what degree WWI codebreakers tried to get in on the act. Those were the halcyon days of what modern crypto people now call (perhaps with a touch of disdain) “non-machine ciphers”, and so we shallow computer-centric moderns might have plenty to learn from what they had to say (if they left any notes for us to find, which we don’t currently know).
Did the Voynich manuscript, then, have a Zeroth Study Group circa 1920? John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert were part of the same American First World War codebreaking team, and certainly had far more than a passing familiarity with the VMs (Rickert briefly corresponded with WMV, for example). However, their attention subsequently turned to producing critical edition of Chaucer’s work, a challenge which was to occupy them both for many years.
Not that much has been written about Edith Rickert: when I blogged about her before, I found only a few online sources (such as this one) to work from. However, a very nice 2009 paper by William Snell just turned up on the Net – A Woman Medievalist Much Maligned: A Note in Defense of Edith Rickert (1871–1938) – which seems to meet this lack well.
Probably the most telling comment on Manly’s relationship with Rickert was this:-
…Manly’s remarks written in April 1934 to David H. Stevens, the English teacher at Chicago who worked on the cipher team with them during the First World War, two years before Rickert’s final heart attack: “Miss Rickert is working twenty-five hours a day, as usual, and is on the verge of a breakdown, but she won’t break. She never does.” (Qtd. in Ramsey 1994: 77)
But then she did, alas. 🙁