Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s papers at the Marshall Foundation…

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Nearly all Voynich researchers (I think) will have heard of William F. Friedman: it was WFF who formed the First Study Group during the Second World War, who set computer transcription and analysis of the Voynich Manuscript in motion, and even got Brigadier John Tiltman involved.

But what of his wife Elizebeth (they married in 1917)? Actually, she was a highly accomplished code-breaker in her own right, and it was she who introduced WFF to cryptology: during the First World War, the pair of them were directors of an unofficial US Government code-breaking team. She moved on to breaking thousands of rum runners’ codes in the 1930s and the famous Velvalee Dickinson “Doll Woman” Japanese spying case in the 1940s, all the while researching, writing and even occasionally lecturing on such cipher mysteries as the Beale Papers and the Voynich Manuscript. There’s a nice summary of her life in the NSA Hall of Honor (she was posthumously inducted in 1999).

Similar to the way Chaucer dominated the relationship between John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert (here, here & here), Shakespeare was a recurrent theme for the Friedmans. The couple first met while employed by Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallop to hunt for the Baconian ciphers allegedly embedded in Shakespeare’s works: while Elizebeth Friedman returned to the theme of Shakespeare in the 1950s, finally concluding that the person masquerading as Shakespeare was none other than – shock horror – William Shakespeare himself.

William Friedman’s papers were donated to the Marshall Foundation in 1969 (WFF died the same year), while Elizebeth Friedman’s papers were donated to the same foundation after her death in 1980.

Anyway, just in case anyone happens to find themselves near the Marshall Foundation in Lexington VA with an unaccountably strong urge to go through her papers relating to cipher mysteries such as the Voynich Manuscript, here’s a brief listing of things I’d be fascinated to read:-

Box 7, File 17 – Philological Quarterly article on W.F. Friedman and the Voynich Manuscript.
Box 8, File 23 – Beale Treasure Material
Box 10, File 30 – Voynich Correspondence
Box 10, File 31 – Voynich Notes
Box 10, File 32 – Voynich Material
Box 10, File 33 – Article: “The Voynich Manuscript: A Scholarly Mystery” (parts 1-3) [by Mary D’Imperio, if I remember correctly]
Box 10, File 34 – Philological Quarterly: WFF and Voynich – October 1970
Box 10, File 35 – Voynich Seminar Proceedings 1976
Box 13, File 22 – WFF – John M. Manly Correspondence
Box 18, File 34 – ESF – Voynich Manuscript Article

The Voynich Manuscript, the ultimate Nigerian scam?

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Greetings, most dearly beloved [insert-name-here],

I bring you a message of great urgency and yet colossal financial benefit. My name is Seko Mugu Alberti, and thanks to ancestry.com I have discovered that I am the sole descendant of Renaissance polymath genius Leon Battista Alberti. This means I am in line to inherit the architectural and consulting fortune he deposited at the Medici Bank long ago. Yes, I do believe I was indeed just as surprised to find this out as you are now.

Through close reading of my ancestor’s published works, I have discovered that he kept a copy of his bank account details hidden in plain sight. All I now need to do is present the proper authentication to the modern successors of the Medici Bank (the Rothschilds, of course) and they will be compelled to give me my rightful inheritance of (with compound interest) 48.9 billion US dollars.

As a result I have been looking for an exceptional historian and code-breaker to assist me – for a modest 15% finder’s fee – in deciphering Alberti’s greatest work, the Voynich Manuscript. (I wasted a lot of time on the disgusting and perverted Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii, and the less said about that monstrosity the better). The nice gentleman at Cipher Mysteries sold me a list of mugus cipher researchers for a thousand US dollars “to put behind the bar in Frascati” (whatever that means), which is how I now find myself with your most excellent contact details.

The ridiculous Voynich Manuscript is, as I am sure you have already worked out, 240 pages of nonsense constructed with the sole purpose of concealing and disguising Alberti’s bank account details. Sadly, when I contacted Rothschilds with the important passphrase “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” to identify myself, the teller refused to hand over even 100 dollars of my staggeringly large inheritance. I tell you, it is a shameful and degrading thing to be escorted from a bank building at gunpoint when you have committed no crime, no crime at all.

So you see, the fate of my inheritance is now in your hands. Research, research, research it! Find my ancestor’s hidden number or identification phrase, and you and I will be rich beyond all Renaissance dreams!

I remain your excellent friend and accomplice in research,
— Seko Mugu Alberti

Like, what is that whole “Voynich Manuscript” thing? I don’t get it.

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So some Jesuit place near Rome ran out of money in 1912 and sold off some rare books to this Polish-British-American bookdealer dude called ‘Wilfrid Voynich’. And like one of them is a handwritten manuscript written in a messed-up language that nobody can read, even though it looks really simple.

Now the bookseller guy thought this had been written by Roger Bacon, a medieval monk who was like Sean Connery in “The Name of the Rose” (but for real), but it turns out it wasn’t so that was a bit of a bummer. Anyway, a hundred years on still nobody knows who made it so people call it “The Voynich Manuscript”, even though all Voynich did was like buy it and send scratchy copies round to professors and stuff.

The weird bit is like everyone goes la-la-la about whether it’s a lost language (yeah right, like some idiot’s going write down a lost language in code? Duh!) or a hoax (yeah right, what kind of an idiot’s going to pretend to write a book in code?), when it’s just written in some kind of special cipher thing but everyone’s way too proud to say that the Voynich is smarter than they are.

Sure it’s got a load of weird drawings but how can you cipher drawings without making them weird too? Like, duh! So, I don’t get it.

Two Italian Voynich novels for you…

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The relatively low level of interest in the Voynich Manuscript in Italy has long puzzled me, when to my eyes (and plenty of other people’s eyes too), it looks to be an artefact grounded in some obscure byway of Italian Quattrocento culture. Perhaps they’re just too busy worrying about the economy or where they’ll find a Prime Ministerial ego extraordinary enough to replace Berlusconi’s to really be that bothered about the Voynich’s centenary this year?

Anyway, I’ve just had a nice email from Anna Castriota telling me about a new Italian Voynich novel she recently stumbled upon by the name of “I Custodi Della Pergamena Proibita” (The Keeper of the Forbidden Parchment), allegedly written by a priest pseudonymously calling himself Aldo Gritti.

As is grimly conventional for this kind of thing, Gritti’s grittily gritty story kicks off with three near-simultaneous murders in Florence, London and New Haven, where (surprise, surprise) “the victims were about to reveal to the world the true, shocking content of the dark Voynich manuscript, which for a century had resisted every attempt to interpret it. But [Inspector Elda Novelli] will be able to decrypt it by following the tracks left by the three dead researchers“.

Apparently Gritti’s story features not only the Titanic and the secrets behind several notable deaths of the early 20th century, but also the final revelation of the Voynich’s real-life secrets, hidden there by, dan dan daaah, Wilfrid Voynich himself. [SFX: Rizzoli’s PR people chortling into their hands] *sigh*

Well… if Gritti’s tiramisu of tragedy didn’t tweak your tarpaulins tighter, here’s another one to curdle your Kindle. “Voynich: Il Segreto Del Barabba (il più grande segreto su Gesù)” by Barbara Cesa wraps a Voynich Manuscript story around a three-chord eternal-guardians-of-the-heretical-secret Barabbas-twin-brother-of-Jesus murderous-conspiracy-brotherhood plot. You can also buy the first ten chapters for 0.92 euros (it says here), though doubtless you’ll then be so eager for The Big Plot Twist at the end that you’ll gladly pay the balance to Find Out What Happens At The End.

Regular Cipher Mysteries readers will already know how I feel: that there’s a corner of my soul that seems to die a little whenever I read yet another dismal Voynich novel plot summary, as if I’m using up one of my spare Chrestomanci lives. One day, though, I’m sure I’ll read a truly great Voynich novel, that will make all this treacle-swimming retrospectively worthwhile…

I can dream, can’t I? 🙂

“Between Vellum and Prague” seminar session…

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I’m just starting to put together my talk for the upcoming Voynich centenary conference. The session is provisionally titled “Between Vellum and Prague”, with a summary along the lines of…

“The Voynich Manuscript first pinged on the cultural radar in Prague circa 1600, yet its vellum has recently been radiocarbon dated to the first half of the 15th century. So… what happened inbetween? Nick Pelling has long been intrigued by this wide-open question, and in this session presents a summary of a wide range of codicological evidence that holds the promise of answering it.”

In many important ways, I don’t care much for Voynich theories (not even my own): the important thing for me has long been developing an evidence base that we can use to eliminate bad theories (long-time Cipher Mysteries readers will no doubt recall various times I’ve ranted about Popperian ‘falsification’, Karl Popper’s notion that theories are there to be knocked down, not puffed up).

But what would such usable ‘evidence’ look like? Mainstream history as currently practised is predominantly based on close reading of original documents within the context of large bodies of parallel evidence – even Art History falls within this methodology, as it places tiny observed details within an overall historical canon of evolving technique and materials.

The Beinecke’s splendid scans have enabled us to closely read the original document’s surface, so in some ways we’re halfway there: but as for “the large bodies of parallel evidence” part of the equation, we have at the same time too many and too few such bodies to choose from – by which I mean too many possible, too few probable.

As a result, the Voynich Manuscript remains an uncomfortable topic for historians, because even after a century of study it resolutely resists being pigeonholed within any cladistic strand or tradition. Basically, it is this core uncertainty about its internal nature and external tradition that dissuades many academics from wading too deeply into the Voynichian swamp… and frankly, I don’t blame them, because you’d need a wetsuit, not wellies.

It therefore seems much more prudent to me to go hunting for evidence than for yet more speculative theories. However, you need to have a really clear research question in mind when you do it, or it is likely that your efforts will be for nothing. For me, the best questions by a mile all relate to the Voynich Manuscript’s life before its apparent appearance at Rudolf’s Imperial Court in Prague: and so the class of evidence to look for is that which helps to bring out this otherwise invisible history.

As a result, I’m not hugely worried about things such as letters hidden in Voynich plants except insofar as they suggest links between the Voynichese hand and the marginalia hand. Similarly, the parallel hatching used in some of the drawings is not in itself important except for the way that it apparently directly conflicts with the radiocarbon dating (and indeed it would seem we have various 15th century hands in play, as John Matthews Manly noted over 80 years ago, which would seem to stop any kind of 16th century theory dead in its tracks).

The Voynich’s unusual quire numbers are puzzling too, and perfectly consonant with a mid-to-late 15th century dating. Yet frustratingly nobody has yet discovered a single example of another document with the same abbreviated longhand Latin ordinal numbering scheme: finding even one document using that same numbering style would surely open up a fascinating door into the manuscript’s early past.

But personally, I think there’s a high chance that the final page (f116v) marginalia will turn out to be some kind of scrappy French Secretary Hand, with “michiton oladabas” perhaps even saying nichil or even nichil obstat. The top marginalia line of f116v could also be a dedication or note to a “Simon Sint”, it’s hard to tell. These offer such tangible promise of connecting the Voynich to real people or places, yet so many speculative readings have been proposed that it’s all too easy to just ignore them.

And yet all the same, perhaps the richest vein to tap has been the raw internal codicology of the Voynich drawings themselves. If we could only find some ingenious way of connecting pages together (comparing DNA fingerprints of different bifolios, multispectral scans of inks or vellum, mapping the varying thicknesses of pages along their edges, etc), we could make a really great stab at reconstructing the original page order.

As examples, I discussed Q9 (“Quire 9”), Q13 and various out-of-order herbal pages at length in “The Curse of the Voynich”, while I’ve also discussed Q8 and Q20 here (as well as Q20’s paragraph stars), and indeed on Glen Claston’s thoughts on the nine-rosette foldout Q14 as well the ‘chicken scratch’ marginalia on its back.

But as should be apparent from the constellation of links strung through the preceding paragraphs like fairy lights, this remains an utterly fragmented research area. In each individual case, I can tell a speculative story about what I think happened to the manuscript to leave a particular set of details in the curious manner we find them arranged today, but I’m completely aware that that’s simply not good enough, even if I do try to take the totality of evidence into consideration at each point.

All the same, I continue to be of the opinion that it may not be to everyone’s tastes but studying the Voynich Manuscript’s codicology is pretty much as good as we can get – that finding historical parallels for individual drawings or indeed matching the roots of individual plants will never be enough to snip through its Gordian knot. Finding out what happened is the most pragmatic stepping stone back in time we have – so we should try harder to make what we have solid enough to step on, right?

The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher…

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While writing about Julian Bunn’s carroty crib ‘otaldy’ yesterday, it struck me that I haven’t properly posted much about the mystery of the Voynich’s cipher for some time.

To which the right reply is: errr, what mystery are you talking about, Nick? I’ll explain…

At the start of “The Curse of the Voynich”, I noted that the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher…

…appears almost childishly simple, the kind of thing any competent code-breaker armed with pencil and paper would expect to crack in a summer afternoon.

All the same, despite a century’s worth of lazy summer afternoons since Wilfrid Voynich swooshed it out of the Villa Mondragone, none of the legions of cryptologers who has tried to crack it has found so much as a vowel, a consonent, a digit, a comma or a full stop. So much for it being simple!

To a modern cryptogram solver’s eyes, the Voynich appears to be an aristocrat (i.e. with the ciphertext divided up into words) rather than a patristocrat (i.e. with the ciphertext unhelpfully divided up into fixed blocks): and its relatively small number of high frequency symbols makes it seem very much like a simple substitution cipher, with a handful of occasional special symbols creeping in. Really, there seems no reason that it should be anything but a simple substitution cipher. But it’s not! Pause for a second to think what the presence of a phrase such as page f78r’s “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” implies… yup, if that’s written in a cipher, it’s definitely not a simple cipher.

From an historian’s point of view, if the radiocarbon dating of the vellum accurately reflects the age of the cipher itself, it would predate the first known polyalphabetic cipher (Alberti 1467) by 25 or more years. The famous castles in the Voynich’s nine-rosette page clearly seem to have the swallow-tail merlons familiar from 14th and 15th century, pointing to a European (possibly even Northern Italian) origin. Historical logic would therefore seem to imply that that it could only use the kind of simple cipher tricks found in European ciphers in the 14th or early 15th century. But it doesn’t!

To a manuscript historian, words written in the Voynichese alphabet contain a number of shapes familiar from medieval manuscripts: for example, aiir and aiiv are page references to the third (‘ii-recto’) and fourth (‘ii-verso’) page of the first (‘a’) quire, and we see these appear throughout the text. Similarly, the letter pattern ‘4o’ (which I’m sure was a scribal shorthand used in 14th century Northern Italy, possibly in legal documents) appears at the start of many Voynichese words. But their curious usage statistics (-iv words massively outnumber -ir words, for example) tell us whatever these letter groups are, they are not what they seem!

The mystery of the Voynich’s cipher, then, is that everything obvious about it is just plain wrong.
* It looks simple to crack, but it isn’t!
* It looks like an ‘aristocrat’ simple substitution cipher, but it’s not!
* It looks too early to be particularly sophisticated, but it is!
* It looks like a mid-to-late 14th century European technical text, but it’s not!

So, what we have here is a right old Gordian knot, exactly the kind of thing you’d have thought Intellectual Historians such as Professor Anthony Grafton would be queuing around the block to bring their Massive Historical Brains to bear upon. They love historical paradoxes, because all it normally requires is subtlety, nerve and quickness of mind to bring whatever unspoken assumption or presumption happens to be blocking the logic to the surface – the fine hairstrand holding the whole knot in place. “The merest of snips and my work is done! Bwahaha… and back to Princeton I go“.

At least, that’s how the Intellectual History script is supposed to go. In reality, the Voynich Manuscript laughs at people’s puny attempts to untie its cipher’s tangly knot: it’s smarter – in fact, much smarter – than that.

Specifically, anyone who tries to pitch the whole postmodernist it’s-a-hoax-so-it-is brick at the Voynich’s shiny windows deserves to be shot, basically for not taking something so clever seriously. Look, guys, Voynichese has so much structure on so many levels, it’s almost fractal: only gibberish generated by a computer could ever exhibit such a convoluted set of rules.

Ultimately, then, the mystery of the Voynich is why any explanation has to satisfy such an apparently paradoxical set of multidimensional constraints. Lord knows I’ve tried to do this (and I remain convinced that what I presented in “The Curse of the Voynich” will turn out to have got 90% of the way to the right answer, even if the last 10% is still unbelievably hard), but it’s a rare Voynich researcher who faces these full on and still manages to be productive.

Do you? 😉

The Carrot Museum takes on the Voynich Manuscript…

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Errrm…. yes, really. A few days ago, I discovered that the online Carrot Museum has a page dedicated to early depictions of carrots in manuscripts and paintings, which also includes a rather disbelieving section referring to alleged depictions of carrots in the Voynich Manuscript.

To add to the confusion, it turns out that medieval writers often got carrots and parsnips confused, so even if a Voynich root does look somewhat carrot-like to you, it might actually still be a parsnip and yet be referred to as a carrot. Or vice versa. All we can be certain of is that if the linked text does turn out to encipher some kind of carrot-related secret, it won’t be about ‘seeing in the dark’ (that came courtesy of the second world war’s Dr Carrot).

I ought to point out that the Carrot Museum’s virtual curators didn’t sprout this whole leafy conjecture on their own: rather, they relied heavily on Julian Bunn’s Voynich Attacks website, which has its own carrot-related page. The backstory there was that, while hunting for cribs in the Voynich Manuscript, Julian noticed that one particular label appears beside three separate plants all with carrot-like roots (one of which is helpfully painted orange), and wondered whether the label might somehow encipher “carota”. (Note that though Julian labels the label “okae89”, it’s “otaldy” in EVA).

It’s a good observation, particularly because the carrot-like plants are in the pharmacological section of the Voynich Manuscript which historically has attracted the least research interest (don’t ask me why, I don’t know). Anyone who wants something to work on within the Voynich sphere really should put some time into going over the two pharma quires, I’m sure there’s plenty else there that nobody has yet noticed.

However, at this point I have to caution any Voynich newbie rubbing their thighs with cryptological excitement at the thought of a carroty crib, that we currently have… zero evidence that Voynichese text is a simple letter-for-letter substitution cipher. So, even if ‘otaldy’ does genuinely encipher ‘CAROTA’ in some way, we can be pretty certain that ‘o’ does not simply encipher ‘C’, ‘t’ does not simply encipher ‘A’ etc.

All the same, Julian’s carrot crib may well prove to be a step in the right direction, you never know. You might even say that the past’s bright – the past’s orange! 😉

Esther Molen’s Voynich Manuscript f116v theory…

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I recently received a note from independent Dutch researcher Esther Molen describing her Voynich theory: she was happy to see it given a post of its own, so… here it is!

* * * * * *

Here is my [Esther Molen’s] translation and ideas.

The Voynich Manuscript is mainly written in medieval Latin in combination with medieval French and medieval Italian. I conclude this from the research I did on the last page (f116v).

In order to make it easier for the reader to understand this translation I decided to transliterate the words into Latin and add the missing letters between brackets, followed by a translation in English.

Transliteration in Latin:

po(ti)s Leber fomen(to) a(d)iutas sero

michi con(atus) ola labo d(e) mil(le) cod(ex) e(t) c(e)t(e)ru(s) ceu e(t) poi cad(o) m(i)

sis magic(u)s myst(i)c(u)s uis alch(imi)a magica

arar(e) cust(o)s rus valde n(ae) ubi er(o) is(t)o n(a)m us(u)a(r)is mi quaestio

Translation in English:

Cherish Liber for he has the power to help you with sowing.

In an attempt to accomplish a desire, I worked on the book of a thousand vegetables and then the rest of the remaining part fell into my hands and

exists of magic, mystic, the magical properties of alchemy.

Everywhere you plough the fields intensely, you will truly keep me in a good condition for that I may be used by someone for inquiries.

Conclusions:

From the first sentence of the transliteration and of the translation we can see that the writer speaks about Leber, an archaic form of the Roman deity Liber, and that he tells readers to cherish him for he has the power to help with sowing. If we look at the references on pages 231 and 232 of Llewelyn Morgan’s book Deity of Patterns of redemption in Virgil’s Georgics, we can read that both Diodorus and Plutarch identified Liber with the God Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Persephone. This Dionysus was believed to be the pioneer of both ploughing and sowing which is also consistent with the last sentences where the writer speaks about ploughing the fields.

From the second sentence we can conclude that since the writer is talking about ‘the book of a thousand vegetables’ all the plants or part(s) of the plants in this manuscript can be used as food. We can also conclude that since the writer had the intention to write about a thousand vegetables he wanted to add more vegetables than the ones that are currently included in the manuscript or there are quite a few pages missing from this manuscript. Either way this means that the writer must have been well known with sowing – perhaps he was a farmer.

If we have a closer look at the idea that this manuscript was written for inquiries concerning sowing and ploughing in combination with the illustrations of the ten months in the manuscript, starting with March and ending with December, we can conclude that this represents the Roman calendar which is attributed to Romulus. This calendar was ten months long beginning with March and ending with December. The winter months were not included because there was no agricultural work due to the weather conditions. This would be consistent with the Roman deity Liber.

From the third sentence we can conclude that the remaining part of the manuscript exists of magic, mystic and the magical properties of alchemy and not the six sections as many researchers thought. We can also conclude that the variation in handwriting style throughout the entire manuscript is due to the fact that this part fell into the hands of the writer and therefore was written by someone else.

If we look at the last sentence then we can conclude that the writer had the intention to share his knowledge with others. Something most ancient and medieval writers wanted. They wished to pass on their knowledge.

Another fact according to the translation is that since the writer knew what the content of the total manuscript was, this last page is part of the total manuscript and was not added at a later stage.

Unfortunately we can also conclude that the writer did not leave his name or the place of his origin on this page but if we look closely at the language the writer used than there are two things that stand out, which are:
– the use of the letter q in magiques (magicus) and mystiques (mysticus)
– the use of the words aiuti (adiutas) and chesta (quaestio)
While the use of the letter q as mentioned above is clearly of French origin, the second two words are obviously Italian. This narrows down the origins of the writer.

Please let me know what you think!

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An obfuscation of Voynich novels…

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A few days ago, I hurried my seven year old son to the back door to see a crowd of twenty or more crows spectacularly circling and cawing furiously at a pair of magpies who had presumably transgressed some unwritten bird law. Of course, though, the correct collective noun isn’t a ‘crowd’, but (rather delightfully) a ‘murder‘ of crows.

What, I wonder then, would be the right collective term for a set of Voynich novels? Though I’ve settled for “an obfuscation” here, doubtless you’ll have your own ideas. 🙂

Anyway, here are five relatively new Voynich novels I’ve been meaning to mention to you for a short while…

* (2011) The Cadence of Gypsies – Barbara Casey

“On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written in an unknown language left to her by her birth mother. After years of research she travels to Italy on a mission to find the truth about her past.”

* (2012) The Book of Blood & Shadow – Robin Wasserman

“Desperate to prove [her boyfriend Max’s] innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine…”

* (2012) Vaults of Power – Diane Echer

“When her twin is kidnapped in Southern France, Robyn Gabriel has six days to steal the precious Voynich manuscript from a bunker-like library at Yale University and break its code– […] The Federal Reserve can’t allow that. Now, they want her dead.”

* (2011) In a Celandine World – Catherine Thorpe

“The truth is going to come out. A truth that has long been forgotten. A truth that was concealed in a manuscript in the 12th century. An impossible truth. A dangerous truth that will blow Willow’s secret wide open—leaving her scrambling to save the only man she could ever love.”

* (2012?) The Voynich Cypher – Russell Blake [announced but not yet released]

“When a sacred relic is stolen from its subterranean guarded vault, Dr. Steven Cross, amateur cryptologist living in Tuscany, becomes embroiled in a deadly quest to decipher one of history’s most enigmatic documents…”

I already have the first two to read & review, though I must confess I’m finding it difficult to get into the Cadence of Gypsies, possibly because it’s aimed at a Teen / Young Adult audience. Oh well – I’ll let you know how I get on. Wish me luck! 🙂

Incidentally, I just noticed that the ebook version of In a Celandine World is free at SmashWords until February 15th 2012, so if you’d like to be entertained by Catherine Thorpe’s Victorian Knot-garden-inspired time-shifting paranormal Voynich romance, feel just as free to click on the link! 🙂

London Rare Books School 2012 – including a session on historical ciphers…

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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!