A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers

Cryptography and the History of Literacy

Katherine Ellison, Susan Kim, Katherine Ellison, Susan Kim, Katherine Ellison, Susan Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351973076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

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.

1 Medieval Musical Notes as Cryptography

Elsa De Luca and John Haines

For most of the period of scientific research on medieval music, which is to say the last 200 years or so, the music notation of the Middle Ages has been studied primarily to elucidate, decode, or recreate past performances of songs—from the exact pitches of melodies¹ to their general outlines,² from the rhythms used by singers³ to their vocal mannerisms.⁴ In other words, notation has been treated as the medieval equivalent of a modern score. Seldom have these signs been recognized for what they were in the Middle Ages: not just music notes in the modern sense, but also figurae intended to transmit meanings having little to do with the execution of this or that trope or motet.⁵ What we might consider the extra meanings of the nota were in fact primary meanings in medieval semiotics, to use an expression favored by Leo Treitler, meanings that ranged from straightforward symbolism to esoteric ciphering.⁶ True, medieval writers do attest to musical notation being written for the practical purposes usually advocated by musicologists: to cite Guido of Arezzo, so that a “studious person may learn the chant by means of it.”⁷ But medieval writers also speak of musical notes’ other functions, of their being shaped after things divine, for example, of individual notes as lacking perfection (perfectio), or of groups of notes as having different kinds of properties (proprietates)—all three citations, incidentally, found in no less obscure a source than Franco of Cologne’s Ars cantus mensurabilis (c. 1270).⁸ Rather than in some remote medieval corner, then, the “total reading” of the medieval musical note as a fully symbolic and esoteric thing can be found in the mainstream of music writing, and this all through the Middle Ages, from the Carolingian pneuma to Baude Cordier’s heart-shaped puzzle.⁹

Strongly connected to these “other” functions of the nota, musical ciphers of the Middle Ages are regrettably understudied. In this chapter, we begin with a survey of the small body of scholarly literature devoted to the topic, which will help explain exactly why the phenomenon of medieval music ciphers is still relatively unknown. In the second part, we will look at three cases of this writing. Hopefully, future scholars will extend our research on this fascinating medieval phenomenon and, even more hopefully, discover a few more cases of medieval music ciphers. Just how widespread music ciphers were in the Middle Ages, we will never know. Like much secret writing, but unlike the famous deluxe parchment anthologies of the Middle Ages, their written supports were either perishable or never displayed in public, or both, beginning with the ubiquitous medieval wax tablet.¹⁰ Ninety-three sources from the Middle Ages are presently known to contain cryptographic neumes, but likely many more than these were written out on perishable supports like wax tablets or parchment rolls that have not survived.¹¹ For the time being, what we know about medieval musical cryptography is confined to Spain, since the vast majority of extant musico-cryptographic writing is found in Visigothic notarial deeds.¹²

In discussing medieval music ciphers, we must begin with the basic building block of music writing of the Middle Ages: the nota. This term, used often by music writers in the medieval period, retains its basic medieval ambiguity in one of the most famous passages in music history, found in Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis from 789. “So as to have a school of literate boys,” Charlemagne writes, “maintain psalms, notes (notas), songs, computus and grammar in every monastery and restore well the Catholic books.”¹³ The term notas here may mean “musical notes” as usually assumed by music historians, but it could just as easily refer either to the ubiquitous Tironian shorthand notes or to any kind of “sign in writing,” as Paul Dutton translates it.¹⁴ In the Middle Ages, the term nota had a very wide semantic field indeed. In practice, medieval notae included rational writing systems such as the Tironian notes, as well as irrational ones. The latter ranged from smaller characteres such as the signs of the Picatrix to full-blown drawings such as the elaborate figurae of the Ars notoria.¹⁵ It bears emphasizing that the two basic notae of music, the dot-like punctus and the stroke-like virga, were graphically identical to signs used in other systems of notae, most famously the stroke and dot of Tironian notes. Thus, in the Middle Ages, the musical nota belonged to a large family of notes and, in outward appearance at least, was much like any other medieval nota. Into this multifarious tribe of notae was born the cryptographic neume. To date, a proper study of the musical note in this broader notational context has not yet been undertaken.¹⁶

Scholarly Squabbles

As is the case so often in medieval studies, for musical cryptography, we must go back to the work of a handful of late-nineteenth-century researchers. Prominent art historian and director of Madrid’s Museo de Reproducciones Artisticas Juan Riaño¹⁷ would later claim that Manuel de Goicoechea, a librarian at the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, first alerted him to the phenomenon around 1860, even though José Foradada, head librarian at Toledo’s Archivo y Biblioteca Capitular, was the first to publish on it in 1867.¹⁸ Curatorial quibbles aside, Foradada’s 1867 article, published in the wake of the creation of the Escuela Superior de Diplomática in 1856, was a landmark ground-breaking four-page report on a phenomenon that Foradada deemed “of major importance”: the presence in certain tenth- to twelfth-century manuscripts housed in the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid of musical notes (“pneumas ó signos musicales”) used as ciphers.¹⁹ Over a decade after the appearance of Foradada’s four-page notice, in 1881, paleographer Jesús Muñoz provided some examples of these curious inscriptions, including the striking cartouche from MS 22 of the Archive of León Cathedral (Figure 1.1). Muñoz saw a close resemblance of the musical ciphers to the alphabetic letters of Visigothic script, and he laid out ciphers and letters side by side in a comparative table to demonstrate this—the liquescent pes next to the letter L, the torculus next to M, and so on (see Table 1.2 as an example of this).²⁰

It was the aforementioned Riaño who, a few years after this, turned this innocent curiosity about ciphers into a musicological controversy. In the preface and appendix to his Critical and Bibliographical Notes on Early Spanish Music (London, 1887), Riaño built on Foradada’s suggestion by stating that the ciphers, which were clearly Visigothic music neumes, had in fact originated in alphabet letters, and furthermore that this could be said of Visigothic music notation in general: that the entire Visigothic notational system was based on the alphabet letters of Visigothic script. This in turn demonstrated, Riaño maintained, that the scribes of Spain, but not those of Carolingian France as some of his French academic competitors had claimed, were the creators of the earliest music writing system in the West.²¹ Riaño’s patriotic declarations had the effect of hijacking the topic of cryptographic neumes in the service of a question that had been preoccupying music historians for decades before him and that has unfortunately continued to do so to the present day: the genesis of music notation in the West. And, as a result of this, the logical step at the time, making a basic tally of the manuscripts that contained these ciphers, was never accomplished since music historians were too busy countering Riaño’s hypothesis—incidentally, neither provable nor disprovable—of the Spanish origins of notation. Making matters worse, the three authors just discussed had only cryptically alluded to the sources they were consulting. In his landmark article, Foradada had mentioned only one manuscript (Archive of León Cathedral, MS 22, listed in Table 1.1)²² and Muñoz just spoke of “a codex by Saint Isidore from Leon” and unspecified “different documents from the tenth to the twelfth centuries”²³; as for Riaño, the only reference he provided was that his facsimiles were “taken from documents … existing in the Archivo Histórico, Madrid.”²⁴

The few subsequent publications expended their energies on laying waste to Riaño’s assertion of Spanish primacy. Two years after his Critical and Bibliographical Notes appeared, French monk André Mocquereau refuted Riaño in the first volume of the prestigious Paléographie musicale (1889). Mocquereau, the scientific leader of the Solesmes chant movement, reproduced the dozen inscriptions straight out of Riaño’s appendix—remarkably for the famously erudite monk, without consulting or even citing the sources themselves.²⁵ And how could he? No one thus far had provided more than one lone manuscript shelf mark!²⁶ Nevertheless, Pothier and Mocquereau were adamant: neumes did not originate in Visigothic letters, and Spain had not created medieval music writing. A few decades later, in a musical paleography handbook widely read at the time, the Montserrat monk Gregorio (Grégoire) Suñol upheld the two French scholars’ theory of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Ciphers and the Material History of Literacy
• 1 Medieval Musical Notes as Cryptography
• 2 Keeping History: Images, Texts, Ciphers, and the Franks Casket
• 3 Anglo-Saxon Ciphers
• 4 The Cryptographic Imagination: Revealing and Concealing in Anglo-Saxon Literature
• 5 The Printing Press and Cryptography: Alberti and the Dawn of a Notational Epoch
• 6 “That You Are Both Decipher’d”: Revealing Espionage and Staging Written Evidence in Early Modern England
• 7 Out of “Their Covert of Words”: Cipher and Secrecy in the Writing of Early Modern Algebra
• 8 Limited by Their Letters: Alphabets, Codes, and Gesture in Seventeenth-Century England
• 9 Deciphering and the Exhaustion of Recombination
• 10 “What I Write I Do Not See”: Reading and Writing with Invisible Ink
• 11 Real-Life Cryptology: Enciphering Practice in Early Modern Hungary
• 12 Afterword: The Critical Legacy of Medieval and Early Modern Cryptography before and after World War I
• Notes on Contributors
• Index