If solving a riddle involves returning the obscured referent to a state of clarity, then what are we to do when we encounter in the margin of Aldhelm of Malmesbury’s Aenigma 100 a scribe’s solution that looks like this: ut hkskdkxt? Such playful cryptography was quite common in early medieval manuscripts, particularly in the context of didactic texts and riddles, but there is something peculiar about this example (and several of the others that surround it in Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 5. 35): it contains an error, a slip that has made it all but impossible for modern editors and scholars to decrypt it accurately. But that error and others like it give us a new way to understand the nature of early medieval cryptographic inscriptions. By recognizing such mistakes and errors as an integral feature of scribal cryptography, we discover that that some of them may have actually involved tremendous ingenuity.

Anglia, 2014

This article publishes and contextualises three mantic alphabets in English from fifteenth-century medical manuscript miscellanies. Mantic alphabets are a form of bibliomantic dream divination that first arose in the twelfth century and disappeared in the sixteenth century. From their four-hundred-year period of transmission, mantic alphabets were hitherto not known to exist in English, though texts in other British vernaculars, such as Anglo-Norman and Welsh, had been identified and published before. Even so, this form of oneiromancy is virtually unknown to scholars of practical science (Fachliteratur, artes) in late medieval England, probably because it occupied a peripheral position in practical science, and indeed in medieval dream divination in general. To remedy this shortcoming, the English mantic alphabets are here printed side by side and situated in a corpus of over ninety texts in Latin and a range of European vernaculars, assembled in the course of several years of archival research in historical libraries in Europe and the United States.

The kingdom of error in early modern Europe was as vividly real as the Kingdom of Satan. It was located not in the bowels of the earth but on its surface, in the shops of printers. The most learned and painstaking writers, printers, and correctors found themselves constantly embroiled, like modern Laocoons, in struggles with error-ridden copy, type, proofs, and finished books. 'I am learning' , Balthasar Moretus wrote in 1602 to his favourite author, Justus Lipsius, 'that if error is the normal condition in any area, it is certainly so in correcting printed books'' Even extraordinary efforts could not prevent mistakes from taking place. In the 1730S, the engraver John Pine set out to produce an edition of Horace that would be not only handsome, but impeccable. Following precedents that had been adopted in Asia for quite different reasons, he took the text of a 1701 edition by James Talbot, one of Richard Bentley's many enemies at Trinity College, Cambridge, and engraved each page, to prevent the errors caused by the use of moveable type.^ As Pine explained in his short preface. The form of printing carried out with fixed letters cut into brass plates is more handsome than that produced by moveable metal type. It also has another advantage: so long as the plates are engraved without errors, whatever they depict on the paper must be immaculately corrected. The course of events in the printing house is different. There, while the press is being worked, letters are commonly pushed down or fall out.' * Balthasar Moretus to Justus Lipsius, 12 February 1602, Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus, Arch. 12, fols 198,14: 'et si usquam in re alia, in typographica hac correctione labi hominis proprium esse disco.' Pine followed the text in Quinti Horatii Flocci Opera ad optimorum exemplarium fidem recognita,

Reading Runes. Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions, Nyköping, Sweden, 2–6 September 2014. Ed. by MacLeod, Mindy, Marco Bianchi and Henrik Williams. Uppsala. (Runrön 24.) Pp. 225–232., 2021

Whilst the runica manuscripta of English tradition, the Scandinavian rune poems, and the occasional use of runes as writers’ signatures and in the Old High German glosses have been comparatively well-researched, this does not apply to the same extent to the use of runes in late medieval (German) manuscripts. Runes and runic alphabets are found far less frequently in these, for example in the foreign alphabets in the Voyages by Sir John Mandeville or in a manuscript with medical remedies and an invocation of the devil; finally also in a magical treatise relating to the hermetic tradition. However, the use of runes in late medieval manuscripts cannot properly be explained by the functions usually attributed to the runica manuscripta. On the understanding that discussion of runica manuscripta is not just a runic problem in the narrow sense, but can also contribute to an understanding of medieval culture, the specific implications of the use and pragmatics of the late medieval runica manuscripta will be explored. The function of runes in late medieval manuscripts should be determined at the same time with reference to secret written forms, readability and illegibility.

Modern Philology, 2013

Bibliomancy, the art of divination through the random consultation of books, has a long tradition of both practice and prohibition in late antiquity and the medieval period. Scriptural sortilege played a role in the life of Saint Augustine of Hippo, for whom a passage of the New Testament read at random gave the divine direction that led to his conversion. Augustine later rejected judicial sortilege, but not pragmatic sortilege (e.g., for the division of goods). Yet bibliomancy continued to be practiced throughout theMiddle Ages, as is evident from its mention by Gregorius of Tours, and the frequent condemnations of superstitious sortilegi in medieval canons, synods, capitularies, and penitentials. Straddling the boundaries of religious denunciation and acceptance, bibliomancy was practiced on a large scale, which can be demonstrated with the case ofmantic alphabets. Mantic alphabets are divinatory devices that make use of the random consultation of books to obtain a letter that forms the key to future events. These devices are poorly understood in modern scholarship, even though they have been transmitted in large numbers in medieval Western manuscripts and early printed books. This article offers a set of parameters that define mantic alphabets and begins to explore the textual tradition underlying the dissemination of these alphabets in medieval and early modern Europe.

2021

This book seeks to provide the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary guide into the complex relationship between textual production in print, technical and human faults and more or less successful attempts at emendation in the print shop. The 24 carefully selected contributors present new evidence on what we can learn from misprints in relation to publishers' practices, printing and pre-publication procedures, and editorial strategies between 1450 and 1650. They focus on texts, images and the layout of incunabula, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century books issued throughout Europe, stretching from the output of humanist printers to wide-ranging vernacular publications.

Secret Writing or a Technology of Discretion? Dry Point in Tudor Books and Manuscripts, 2019

This article reconsiders the under-examined technology of dry point (inkless impressions made with a stylus) by way of three Tudor manuscripts: British Library Additional MS 17492 (the Devonshire Manuscript); British Library Additional MS 18752; and Folger V.b.280 (the Dowland Lutebook). Aside from its use for ruling pages, this technology was previously unrecorded in both British Library manuscripts. Discoveries introduced here include a new poem and marks on or beside 54 of the estimated 194 other works in Devonshire. Dry point, I argue, is best understood as a technology of discretion, a means for scribes and their overseers, as well as readers, owners, copyists, compositors and casual annotators in manuscripts and printed books, to write, signal, or comment without marring the appearance of the page. 'Secret Writing or a Technology of Discretion?' suggests that historical references to dry point have been widely misunderstood, and it demonstrates the ways in which this technology can provide guidance to modern editors and critics. I argue that the relative invisibility of dry point may have disproportionately affected our understanding of the women who read and collected writing in this era. Obscured by modern lighting in libraries and by a limited awareness of its use, dry-point writing exists in many archives today, undiscovered in plain sight.

Scribes and the Presentation of Texts (from Antiquity to c. 1550). Proceedings of the 20th Colloquium of the Comité international de paléographie latine, 2021

Apart from glosses, illuminations and diagrams, the margins of medieval manuscripts commonly feature annotation symbols – signs that were used to perform routine operations with text or provided a framework for its use. Two annotation symbol certainly familiar to anyone handling a medieval manuscript are the nota monogram, used in the Middle Ages to mark points of interest, and the r-shaped siglum, used to mark passages in need of rechecking because they contained an error or corruption. In this paper, I show that these two annotation symbols originated as elements in a particular package of late antique Christian annotation practices. From humble origins in Late Antiquity, the nota and the require rose to become the dominant forms of annotation symbols in the early medieval Latin West, surpassing in popularity other signs that came into being in the same period and context or which had even older and nobler pedigree. The prestige that the two signs attained by the Carolingian period is not self-explanatory, but rather points to the influence that specific late antique Christian practices had on the early medieval intellectual life.

ARV Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 2014. Ane Ohrvik and Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir (eds.). Volume 70. Pp. 101-124., 2014

This article explores how the concept of secrecy is applied and understood in a selection of Norwegian Black Books and, specifically, how secret writings are used in two Norwegian Black Books from the eighteenth century. In this reading, I apply Eamon’s concepts of epistemological and social secrecy and posit that both notions of secrecy are at play in the Black Books. The main goal of this study is to explore the methods behind the encryptions and the motivations that possibly created them. My initial question is why specific words and text stanzas are subject to the active use of encryption. First, the question requires an investigation of the semantic meaning of the encrypted text, and secondly, it invites a cultural and social study of what might have been the writers’ motivation for encrypting specific parts of the text. Magical beliefs and practices are explicitly or implicitly expressed in the texts. By a close reading of both encrypted and unencrypted texts in these books, I suggest a possible answer to the question: does the encrypted text reveal a hidden magical universe?

The phenomena of secrecy have been presented in contextualizing and socially sensitive publications that rarely mention the phenomena of cryptography and code breaking. The secondary literature of cryptography focuses exclusively on enciphering methods, which are hardly contextualized as far as the wider social and intellectual environment is concerned. Furthermore, the use of early modern cryptography is rarely researched outside the political sphere of diplomacy, even though noblemen, medical doctors, scientists, university students, engineers, and everyday members of society used enciphering methods for their own purposes. This article presents a comprehensive and contextualizing history of cryptography based on the rich source material of early modern Hungary. Cryptography is contextualized in a wide range of social strata, integrated in the larger intellectual milieu of secrecy. The article surveys the most important source types of research in the field of diplomacy, inclding conspiracies, private correspondence, espionage, student handbooks, and personal diaries.

2014

Crafting the Knowledge in the Early Medieval Book, ed. Sinéad O'Sullivan and Ciaran Arthur, 2023

This volume would not have been possible without the collective effort of many individuals-especially my co-editor, Ciaran Arthur, and the contributors, who were genuinely collegial against the backdrop of considerable challenges. The book was originally planned as the proceedings of a colloquium (Belfast, June 2020), which, due to the pandemic, became an online event (July 2021). I am enormously grateful to Michael Herren, a tireless supporter of the book throughout, to the editors of PJML (Michael Herren, Alexander Andrée, Robert Getz, and Gregory Hays), the scrupulous editorial care and expert guidance of Julian Yolles at Brepols, as well as to numerous librarians in supplying digital images. Many readers generously gave of their time and expertise to comment on the papers in this volume, often going above and beyond

In the fifteenth century, the art of secret writing was dramatically transformed. The simple ciphers typical of the preceding century were rapidly replaced by complicated cipher systems built from nulls, nomenclators, homophones and many other tricks. Homophones – where individual plaintext letters were enciphered by one of a set of different shapes – were, according to David Kahn's influential interpretation, added specifically to defend against frequency analysis attacks. Kahn interprets this as a sign of the emergence of cryptanalysis, possibly from Arab sources, and also of the growing mathematization and professionalism of cryptology. However, by closely examining key ciphers and cipher-related texts of this period, this paper instead argues that homophones were instead added as a steganographic defence. That is, the intention was specifically to disguise linguistic weaknesses in Italian and Latin plaintexts that rendered ciphertexts vulnerable to easy decryption. Building on this analysis, a new account of the history of fifteenth century cryptography is proposed, along with a revised model charting the flow of ideas influencing cryptographic practice during this fascinating period.

The Review of English Studies, 2011

This article introduces and prints two charms from the fifteenth-century English manuscript Nijmegen, Universiteitsbibliotheek, HS 194. Nijmegen 194 is little studied, which is presumably why most of the English items remain unnoticed. Some of these items are hitherto unknown in Middle English scholarship, including the first of the two charms printed here. This first charm is a type of Heavenly Letter that we have termed the Letter of Joseph of Arimathea. The second is a Latin verbal charm that protects its user from a wide range of dangers. After a discussion of the charms as protective devices in the context of accompanying prayers and directions in the manuscript, we analyse their textual traditions and publish the charms from Nijmegen 194.

2013

An unknown author translated the Old English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (OEB) around the ninth century. Previous research focused on issues of authorship, and specifically with the Mercian linguistic features in the text’s earliest manuscript, rather than the reception and transmission of these manuscripts (Miller, 1890; Whitelock, 1962; Kuhn, 1972). This thesis concentrates on the scribal performances involved in the OEB, and uses the framework developed for Middle English manuscripts by Benskin and Laing (1981) to assess each manuscript’s scribal behaviour. A detailed linguistic comparison of the four main OEB witnesses combined with a close examination of the physical manuscripts reveals the working methods of scribes involved in their production. The manuscripts examined are: Oxford, Bodleian Library Tanner 10 (T) Oxford, Corpus Christi College 279B (O) Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41 (B) Cambridge, University Library Kk.3.18 (Ca) Each chapter analyses a particular scribal performance. O’s scribe creates a Mischsprache text, with coexisting Mercian and West-Saxon forms; however, the text was extensively corrected, both from the exemplar and according to the linguistic norms of the scribes overseeing the project. While B has been recognised as the product of an independent scribe (Grant, 1989), relict forms shed new light on its exemplar and the methods employed by the scribe to overcome the problems he encountered. Many scholars posit Ca as a direct copy of O, however a detailed comparison of the two manuscripts questions this supposition. Finally, some previously unnoticed and unpublished drypoint annotations to O’s text are presented and explored in the context of other scratched material in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and reasons suggested for their presence in that manuscript. The thesis shows the advantages of approaching medieval texts from a scribal viewpoint, identifying common modes of scribal behaviour across the medieval period, and proposing features that may have belonged to the original translation.

The Ars Edendi lecture I was invited to give in October 2012 at Stockholm University is now published! It sets the stage of my five-year research into practices of annotating books in the Early Middle Ages.

Phi. ph. x x xl Chi.ch. irr pfl.pf. neo OmegJt o.magnum. Dediuifioncfiterarutn gra'carum, Diuiduntur hxquatuor & uigintiliters induasparteis in uocaz Icis & confonanteis. Vocalesfuntfeptctn. Ax. E t* H M« 1 (. y u. o 0. n-«• Diuiduntur feptemuocal^fntreisparteiSjin femperlongas, fem perbreuciSj& cotnmuneis. rre>r T'^pae^rap/yi Vocales Temper breues dus < Vocales fetnpet longs dus« Vocales communes ties. Ct u <• PRINTINGS MISPRIMTINC A Companion to Mistakes and In-House Corrections in Renaissance Europe (i4yo-i6p) o X Tl o X) □ EDITED BY

Cryptologia

In Meister's 1906 landmark study, "Die Geheimschrift im Dienste der p€ apstlichen Kurie von ihren Anf€ angen bis zum Ende des XVI Jahrhunderts", the 16th Century papal cryptographic service is described as a vibrant, highly professional organization, at the forefront of the science of cryptography in the Late Renaissance. In his work from 1993, Alvarez concluded that by the 19th Century, "the reputation of papal cryptography, once so lustrous, has sadly faded." However, until now, very little was known about the evolution of papal cryptography from the 16th to the 18th Century. In this article, we describe how we obtained a large collection of original papal ciphertexts from the Vatican archives, transcribed them, and how we were able to recover most of the keys, and to decipher the original plaintexts using novel cryptanalysis methods and the open-source e-learning CrypTool platform. The recovered keys and decipherments provide unique insights into papal cryptographic practices from the 16th to the 18th Century. The 16th Century is characterized by innovation and a high level of sophistication, with a primary focus on cryptographic security. From the 17th Century, only the simpler but also less secure forms of ciphers remain in use, and papal cryptography significantly lags behind other European states.

The paper considers two items from the Anglo-Norman collection of technical and medical recipes. The first one reveals an interesting method of healing the illness caused by consumption of the cat’s brain by means of cooking owls. The second one, which provides a description of a mixture for erasing letters from parchment, contains a curious example of cryptography. They are put into context with other texts and recipes of this type in order to evaluate the differences which may point to a local tradition. Both recipes are presumably latter additions made by an owner who was a practising physician, and thus offer an insight into the popular knowledge of the 14th century Britain.

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