Decoding Early Modern Cryptography

Abstract

Decoding Early Modern Cryptography William H. Sherman (bio) Katherine Ellison A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals new york: routledge, 2017 xiii + 218 pages; isbn: 9781472457646 Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim, editors A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers: Cryptography and the History of Literacy new york: routledge, 2018 xii + 285 pages; isbn: 9781138244641 stories about code-breaking are now more popular than ever, but readable and reliable histories of cryptography have always been hard to find. David Kahn's magisterial survey, The Codebreakers (first published in 1967), remains the only attempt to offer a comprehensive account stretching from the ancient world to the advent of the internet.1 Most recent books (as well as popular novels and films) have focused on the work of Alan Turing and other modern mathematicians involved in solving the Enigma code used by the German military and on the development (by Turing and his successors) of computational tools for encryption and decryption.2 For scholars interested specifically in the use of codes and ciphers in the early [End Page 315] modern world, the best available overview is buried in an obscure Dutch handbook on The History of Information Security.3 It may be appropriate that we should remain largely in the dark about the shadowy world of secret communication: the very term cryptography, after all, means "hidden writing." But the lack of literature has made the field seem more obscure than it is and has associated it—more firmly than it deserves to be—with military history and the history of mathematics. Not the least of the achievements in the two books reviewed here are their timely reminder that codes and ciphers played a pervasive role in medieval and Renaissance Europe and their strong suggestion that the topic ought to be of interest to a much wider range of scholars. The titles of the books refer to cultural history and the history of literacy, but their publisher, Routledge, has put them under the subject heading of "Literature," and both Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim teach in the Department of English at Illinois State University. Together, they and the other authors they have assembled make a compelling case for seeing cryptography—like the study of language and literature—as part of the history of communication. Whereas Kim is an expert on Old English and Ellison on the eighteenth century, it is fitting that they should meet in the middle in these volumes. Thanks to the invention of printing, the rapid expansion of global diplomacy, and a series of hot and cold wars, the early modern period witnessed what might be described as a cryptographic renaissance. In all of these areas there were genuine inventions during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, but there were also continuities with the Middle Ages—as the first four essays in Material History explore. It is also appropriate that these volumes should issue from the state of Illinois: as Ellison and Kim explain in the introduction and afterword, there was a veritable renaissance of cryptography in and around Chicago during the first few decades of the twentieth century. The city of Geneva was home to Riverbank Laboratories, founded and funded by textile magnate George Fabyan. Though much of its work was devoted to the then-fashionable argument that Francis Bacon had written the texts attributed to Shakespeare, Fabyan spared no expense in acquiring at least one copy of virtually every key text in the field,4 and his "Department of Ciphers" would come to include the man who would serve as the U.S. government's chief code-breaker from the 1920s to the 1950s.5 Riverbank's intellectual and bibliographical firepower [End Page 316] was such that it served as the freelance cipher bureau for the U.S. government during World War I, earning it the title "Cradle of Cryptology."6 And the University of Chicago was home to the great medievalist John Matthews Manly, who not only became the leading authority on the texts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales but also was widely considered to be the country's greatest civilian expert on codes and ciphers.7 In inviting us to look at the...