Just so you know, I’ll be contributing a session to the London Rare Books School 2012, which is a yearly study week (this year running from 25th June to 6th July 2012) held at the University of London around Senate House, and intended to broaden participants’ exposure to the widely varied aspects of the history of writing. Myself excepted 🙂 , it has a stellar line-up of tutors covering a great diversity of subjects and eras: it’s a splendid thing, that almost anybody with a wide-ranging interest in history would benefit from (really, it’s a snip at £600).
My section, covering the early modern growth of ciphers, codes and shorthand, is provisionally titled “Writing for privacy, secrecy, brevity and speed“. The tentative session summary runs like this:-
“This session discusses many of the ways in which writing systems have been adapted to meet secondary needs such as privacy (cryptography), secrecy (steganography), brevity (shorthand) and speed (tachygraphy). It uses examples ranging from antiquity through to the 17th century. It also discusses practical issues of transcription and decryption that historians and researchers may well need to tackle if presented with an unusual historical text. It concludes with discussion of some well-known unbroken historical ciphers.”
Over the next few months, I’ll be assembling (both physically and conceptually) the source material for this, and so will blog here about various aspects as they take shape. One particular thing that has already struck me is that few people grasp the difference between privacy and secrecy: for example, what happens in a marital bed is private (i.e. not public, but condoned – it’s ok that others broadly know that it’s going on, even though they don’t know the precise details), while a spouse’s illicit affair is secret (not public, but condemned – knowledge of its existence is what needs to be concealed, far more than the precise details).
This also (roughly speaking) helps conceptually differentiate between cryptography (private writing) and steganography (secret writing): with crypto, the core model is that others know of a crypto-text’s existence but are technically unable to read it, while stego’s core model is that people aren’t even aware of a stego-text’s existence [even if they can see the document carrying it], and so aren’t even trying to read it.
How does this help us? Well, my position on the inscrutable Voynich Manuscript has long been that its drawings (such as its plants and nymphs) are intended to misdirect and distract us, rather than to inform us: it is therefore at least as much a stegotext as a cryptotext. Hence using industrial-strength statistical tools to try to cryptologically crack its crabby carapace is probably futile: ultimately, Voynichese is an array of simple ciphers carefully folded inside a steganographic blanket, much as Brigadier John Tiltman said decades ago, and it was designed for showing as much as for concealing. Something to think about.
Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to giving my session, and may even see one or two of you there!
Oh my, I wish! Misfortunately I don’t operate well in groups of three persons or more. Being hearing impaired (but not obviously so) I am usually left out of the dynamics of spoken communications within a group of more than three people. Please keep us all posted (in between group sessions, maybe?).
ciao! (Now there’s a Voynichese combination!)
Nick, there’s a basic paradox here. If it’s a steganographic text, then the whole point was that no-one should ever see it. And whether or not the nymphs and plants are ‘misleading’ they are so very, very, curious that they would draw more, not less attention to the text if it was ever seen. And this has been the case, hasn’t it? Noone who clamps eyes on images or text forgets what they’ve seen. Hardly the purloined letter, is it?
But if it were basically a shorthand, perhaps closer to the short forms of the accountant than anything else, and meant for sharing, but not with everyone, then the pictures are explicable as part of the original material copied for its information and memorability. So I’d go with privacy, brevity and speed – which forms together make any final text obscure enough. And the original language, script or system has a fair chance of having been lost without trace somewhere between the thirteenth/fifteenth and seventeenth century what with Mongols,plague and so forth.
And it would be delightful to hear your talk; no chance of my travelling then, alas.
Nick, just in case this reference may have slipped by you:
In D’Imperios’ VM “Elegant Enigma” –Her bibliography notes Currier, Prescott 1970-76, Transcription Alphabet…(there’s more, but here’s the thing: It apparently was only privately circulated etc, etc. Get back to me if you don’t have her Ms, and I’ll give you the full reference. A couple of gentlemen, Jacques Guy and Jim Reeds transcribed his work in 1992.
I was able to google a pdf of Currier’s doc. Oh boy, why this document was not published, post-seminar, I’ll never understand. Beg your pardon — I do understand, having worked for Feds, Postal Service Regional Hdqtrs, County Health Services at height of AIDS epidemic, and City Records and Attorneys.
It is a fine, well-written document: some 20 pages packed with his clearly written and occasionally emphatic declarations of his “take” on the ciphers.
So, just google Captain Prescott H. Currier, if you’re short on time. A brief “OK” from you will keep me “silent” for a while so you can concentrate on your other ciphers!
g’night!
bdid1dr: Currier’s document is indeed the starting point of modern statistical study of the Voynich Manuscript – yet for all the people who cite it, very few manage to properly grasp its implications, and (no less importantly) the specific questions it leads on to. Why should a (so-called hoax) use multiple interleaved dialects? Why should the labels have a different structure again? How did the language change? Why did the language change? What is going on? etc etc 🙂
Diane: steganography isn’t about [concealment of message] so much as [concealment of existence of message]. Given that five centuries on we’re still debating whether or not the Voynich manuscript is a cipher or a hoax, I’d say it has almost certainly surpassed its original steganographical aims!
“the art or practice of concealing a message, image, or file within another message, image, or file” – agreed?
But since the point is that the casual viewer should feel no particular interest in what they see, and not (for example) wonder if these curious diagrams aren’t heretical/foreign/curious/valuable or just so interesting they’re worth taking from you ‘on spec’ as it were, then one would expect unremarkable covering text and imagery.
The Voynich is just too noticeable and too memorable to be a safe cover for anything secret – imo. Why not disguise it as a psalter, or an accounts book or something which would make the guard at the gate yawn as he let you through with it?
Oh – I’ve just thought of a novel. Will put on appropriate post.
Diane: herbals were much more commonplace back then, so perhaps it was exactly as boring to most people we saw it as you seem to be saying it should have been? 🙂
Nick, I don’t know if this is the right place to post this but I’d like to give you my impression of this manuscript as a non-academic. It seems to me that it may be a hoax, or not real, in the sense that it could have been written by someone who couldn’t read or write.
I had an uncle with the mental age of a child who, somewhere along the way, learnt how to form some letters of the alphabet without any comprehension of their meaning. Over the years he must have spent hours filling notebooks with meaningless made up words. Why would he use his time in that way? Who knows? But perhaps it provided him some pleasure or satisfaction. Could the writer of the manuscript been similarly afflicted and derived satisfaction from it’s creation?
Or perhaps a youth, in an age where most were illiterate, had access to materials to create the manuscript and copied or adapted symbols he’d seen to impress peers with his writing abilities. The onset of puberty might even explain the sudden appearance of rosy cheeked and pert nymphs.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but what made me think of this is simply the appearance of it. It looks like it’s written in a way that is balanced and aesthetically pleasing. As if the writer was unconsciously creating it as much to look good, as to look like convincing writing. I also noticed that in parts there is repetition of adjacent words on a line and also, again maybe unconscious, repetition of words or parts of words from the line above. How often that would happen by chance, only a linguist like yourself might know. Lastly, there is a symbol like a letter H with high crossbar and two loops, don’t know what you call it. On many lines that symbol, or variations of it, seem to be spaced out almost evenly, as though the writer has a fondness for it and has to sometimes consciously resist putting it on lines too often, in order not to give the game away.
Alan: thanks for commenting! Over the last decade I’ve heard what must be virtually every conceivable permutation of human nature and historical quirk to explain Voynich, from mental illness to glossolalia to alien channelling, never mind anything so prosaic as codes and ciphers. What is historically interesting about Voynichese is that it appropriates a number of shapes from 14th century Italian peninsula high-class scribal practices: aiiv & aiir (page references), 4o (which I’m pretty sure is late 14th century legal shorthand), the ‘ch’ shape (from Beneventan), gallows shapes (from charter calligraphy), etc. If you take all this on board, I think you’ll see that it sharply limits the kind of explanation that will actually work.
Nick, I’m aware that the focus of the “Rare Books” meet will be rare books. Will you be discussing cryptography as part of your presentation? If so, would you be mentioning Turing’s invention? I just checked today’s news; it appears that there was quite a convening of University professors, in Turing’s honor (today, your time)?
bdid1dr: the focus of the LRBS week is the history of writing, so my lecture is about the history of hidden writing, specifically cryptography and shorthand. Turing’s war contribution was more to do with code-breaking, which is a different sort of thing.