Ellison / Kim A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers

Cryptography and the History of Literacy
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-1-351-97308-3
Verlag: Taylor & Francis
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 298 Seiten

Reihe: Material Readings in Early Modern Culture

The first cultural history of early modern cryptography, this collection brings together scholars in history, literature, music, the arts, mathematics, and computer science who study ciphering and deciphering from new materialist, media studies, cognitive studies, disability studies, and other theoretical perspectives. Essays analyze the material forms of ciphering as windows into the cultures of orality, manuscript, print, and publishing, revealing that early modern ciphering, and the complex history that preceded it in the medieval period, not only influenced political and military history but also played a central role in the emergence of the capitalist media state in the West, in religious reformation, and in the scientific revolution. Ciphered communication, whether in etched stone and bone, in musical notae, runic symbols, polyalphabetic substitution, algebraic equations, graphic typographies, or literary metaphors, took place in contested social spaces and offered a means of expression during times of political, economic, and personal upheaval. Ciphering shaped the early history of linguistics as a discipline, and it bridged theological and scientific rhetoric before and during the Reformation. Ciphering was an occult art, a mathematic language, and an aesthetic that influenced music, sculpture, painting, drama, poetry, and the early novel. This collection addresses gaps in cryptographic history, but more significantly, through cultural analyses of the rhetorical situations of ciphering and actual solved and unsolved medieval and early modern ciphers, it traces the influences of cryptographic writing and reading on literacy broadly defined as well as the cultures that generate, resist, and require that literacy. This volume offers a significant contribution to the history of the book, highlighting the broader cultural significance of textual materialities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ellison, Katherine

Kim, Susan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Ciphers and the Material History of Literacy Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim

1. Medieval Neumes as Cryptography John Haines

2. Keeping History: Images, Texts, Ciphers, and the Franks Casket Susan Kim and Asa Simon Mittman

3. Anglo-Saxon Substitution Ciphers Stephen J. Harris

4. The Cryptographic Imagination: Disguise and Display in Anglo-Saxon Literature E.J. Christie

5. Discourse Network 1466: Alberti’s Invention of Polyalphabetic Encryption and the Succession of Print Quinn Dupont

6. Were John Dee’s Conversations with Angels a Cover for Trithemian Steganography? Exploring the Interplay of Cryptology and the Occult through Trithemius Redivivus Alexander Boxer

7. Alphabets and Barbarians Michael C. Clody

8. Out of "their covert of words": Cipher and Secrecy in the Writing of Early Modern Algebra Lisa Wilde

9. Decoding the Legible Image: Picture as Puzzle in Contemporary Popular Texts on Renaissance Art Jarrell D. Wright

10. Ciphering and Deciphering as the Materialization of Intelligence Katherine Ellison

11. Linguistic Subjectivity and Linguistic Utopia in Francis Lodwick’s A Country not Named Dan Mills

12. "What I write I do not see": The Place of Invisible Ink in English Civil War Correspondence Karen Britland

13. "That you are both decipher’d": Revealing Espionage and Staging Written Evidence in Early Modern England Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw

14. Real Life Cryptology: The Uses of Enciphering Techniques in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Hungary Benedek Láng

Afterword: John Matthews Manley and the Legacy of Medieval and Early Modern Cryptography in World War I Susan Kim and Katherine Ellison

Über Autor(innen)

Katherine Ellison is Professor of English at Illinois State University, USA.

Susan Kim is Professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University, USA.