Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae libri IX. In quibus et planissima stenographiae à Johanne Trithemio ... magicè & ænigmaticè olim conscriptae, enodatio traditur. Inspersis ubiquè authoris ac aliorum, non contemnendis inventis.
Lüneberg: Johann & Heinrich Stern, 1624. First edition, rare, of this encyclopaedic account of the science of cryptography as it was then practiced. It presents a comprehensive survey of encryption and code-breaking methods, including examples of substitution ciphers, musical ciphers, steganography (the embedding of secret messages in a larger text), graphical encryption in images, and other techniques, with chapters on everything from simple inverted and transposed alphabet codes to accounts of cryptography in music and the visual arts. “In 1624, August II, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (afterwards Hanover) in Germany, issued Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae libri IX under the pseudonym Gustavus Selenus. This was a play on his name, Gustavus being an anagram (with the interchangable u and v of the time) of Augustus, and Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon, which is ‘luna’ in Latin, standing for Lüneburg. The duke, who was cousin to the grandfather of George I of England, is probably the highest-ranking author of a book on cryptology. He prefaced the almost 500 small-folio pages of his volume with 17 pages of tributes from his courtiers (‘As, what night in dusty cloak conceals, bright Cynthia soon with torch full-flaming shows, / So, too, Gustavus now, Selenus called, uncovers things that time has long in shadow held’)” (Kahn, The Codebreakers, p. 154). Duke August, a “Wunder unter den Fürsten” (miracle among princes), was one of the most learned men of his time and founder of the Wolfenbüttel library, where some 180,000 volumes and numerous manuscripts were assembled during his lifetime. At the same time he was the owner and curator of one of the largest cryptological collections of the 17th century. Duke August exchanged coded messages with Johann Valentin Andreae, mystic, utopian writer and the supposed 'founder' of Rosicrucianism. Basing his work on Trithemius’ uncompleted Steganographia, August here presents hundreds of cryptographic systems. The folding table at the beginning is a synoptic diagram of all systems of encryptions contained in the book. “However, it is not this schema but rather the title page that has attracted the most interest in this volume; several scholars have claimed that hidden within the engravings is the key to discovering the real author of the Shakespeare plays. Theories as to the identity of the ‘true’ author of the Shakespeare corpus have long been a part of the study of the poems and plays and have often been expressed by well-respected scholars of Elizabethan literature, especially during the early decades of the 20th century” (https://www.brandeis.edu/library/archives/essays/special-collections/renaissance-cryptography.html). “A good indicator of the state of cryptology in Germany in the first quarter of the century is the 496-page compendium on secret communication that Duke August the Younger of Brunswick-Ltineburg (1579-1666) published in 1624. The young prince, who originally had no hopes of ruling the duchy, devoted his early life to scholarly pursuits, wrote a book on chess in 1616, and in the 1590s laid the foundation to what in 1666 had become one of the largest collections of books and manuscripts of his day. In 1624, he published Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae Libri IX, which was issued under the pseudonym of Gustavus Selenus. It began as a defence and explication of the two works of Trithemius and ended up being the earliest manual of cryptology. With almost two hundred pertinent primary books and manuscripts in his possession, Duke August made use of just about all the authors and analysed the entire body of cryptologic material from ancient times to the 1621 plagiarism of Vigenère’s Traicté … “The Wolfenbtittel duke included the first and second editions of the earliest major cryptologic treatise written in German, Daniel Schwenter’s Steganologia & Steganographia, both editions published under the pseudonym of Resene Gibronte Runeclus Hanedi in the 1610s. Schwenter, a professor of mathematics and Oriental languages at the Altdorf (Nuremberg) Academy, deemed it advisable not to reveal his authorship. He drew heavily on Italian source materials, in particular on Porta; his books focus on optical and acoustic telegraphs and even on telepathy and list various ways of communication by means of sympathetic inks. The two editions included in the Cryptomenytices and a later third one are well structured but do not add much new cryptologic matter. “For well over half a century, Duke August's encyclopedic compendium served as a cryptologic reference in the German area and beyond. Apart from the (mostly) successful elucidation of Books I and II of Trithemius’ Steganographia, its primary value lay in the presentation of cryptologic source materials that simply were not accessible to most individuals, … including the 1593 Scotographia by Abram(o) Colorni. This ‘Jew of Mantua’, as he called himself, was in the service of the Hapsburg emperor Rudolph II at Prague, and his elaborate polyalphabetic substitution systems appealed to Duke August so much that no other author except Trithemius occupies more space in his compendium” (Strasser, pp. 297-298). The full-page engraving on p. 341 is a kind of visual summary of the work. “Selenus uses this illustration as a cumulative exercise for the student who has just worked through numerous examples of ciphers. In a kind of final exam, readers are challenged to notice the sheer volume of ciphers that could possibly be before them in a work of art or, even, out in the world in an everyday landscape. The Duke’s subject is ‘complete,’ he notes, in the scope of a single scheme, expressing the key and the hidden principle of a great cryptographic device … Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence’s 1910 work, Bacon is Shakespeare, devotes a special chapter to Selenus’s work, focusing especially on codes and symbols he finds hidden in the large engraved title page: “The great (i.e., First) Folio of Shakespeare was published in 1623, and in the following year, 1624, there was brought out a great cryptographic book by the ‘Man of the Moon.’ This book was issued as the key to the Shakespeare Folio of 1623, under Bacon’s instructions, and in the year following the publication of the Great Folio. Examine first the left-hand picture, you see a man, evidently Bacon, giving his writing to a Spearman who is dressed in actor’s boots. Note that the Spearman has a sprig of bay in the hat which he holds in his hand. This man is a Shake-Spear, nay he really is a correct portrait of the Stratford house-holder, which you will readily perceive if you turn to Dugdale’s engraving of the Shakespeare bust. In the middle distance the man still holding a spear, still being a Shake-Spear, walks with a staff, he is therefore Wagstaffe. On his back are books – the books of the plays. In the sky is seen an arrow, no, it is not sufficiently long for an arrow, it is a Shotbolt (Shakespeare, Wagstaffe, Shatbolt, of Camden’s ‘Remains’). On the right of the title-page you see that the same Shake-spear, whom we saw in the left-hand picture, is now riding on a courser. Now glance at the top picture on the title page, note that the picture is enclosed in the magic circle of the imagination, surrounded by the masks of tragedy, comedy and farce. The engraving represents a Tempest with Beacon lights; no, it represents ‘The Tempest’ of Shakespeare, and tells you that the play is filled with Bacon lights (in the 16th century beacon was pronounced Bacon); ‘Bacon great Beacon of the State.’ At the bottom of the page in the centre Bacon is sitting at his writing desk composing his dramas; at his side the actor from Stratford with a mask and in Bacon’s clothes being led by strings as Bacon’s puppet. Both are ‘covered by one cap’ which signifies that they have a secret agreement.” Caillet 10114 (“missing from the Bibliothèque Nationale”); Galland p. 166; Faber du Faur 1245; Folger II, p. 84; STC German A1047; Wellcome 545 (four pages supplied in manuscript); not in Jantz. Strasser, ‘The rise of cryptology in the European Renaissance in: TheHistory of Information Security (de Leeuw & Bergstra, eds.), 2007, pp. 277-325.
“The illustration stresses the existence of ciphers in nature. The inhabitants of this image are surrounded by ciphers (and are also ciphers themselves). From the top to the bottom, readers see birds with wings and feet outspread in shapes that indicate meaning; fruits positioned in a tree that may align with an alphabetic key; windows in distant buildings that remind readers of other illustrations in the manuals that use open and closed (and dark and light) windows as signals. The people in the illustration are all moving, bending, and gesturing toward and away from the viewer and one another. Tools are crossed, a cow and a horse raise their hooves in mid-step. A mother holds her children, an index finger outstretched, while a man nearby drinks from a bladder. And across the full scene itself, almost everyone is busy laboring, with the exception of a man lounging in the field taking a break and an undressed child looking bored as his mother milks a cow. The illustration shows the extent to which the multimodality of cryptographic literacy extends into the reader’s everyday life, creating an augmented reality in which the deciphering mind must be constantly at work even when observing a lovely picture or working in the fields” (Ellison, ‘Deciphering and the Exhaustion of Recombination,’ in: A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers, p. 192).
Folio (288 x 181 mm), pp. [xxxvi], 493, [1], engraved illustrated border on title-page, woodcut initials, three engraved illustrations, one full-page by Lucas Kilian and one by Wolf Kilian, folding letterpress table, woodcut diagrams, initials and numerous head- and tailpieces, woodcut printer’s device on final leaf verso. Contemporary vellum with manuscript spine title.
Item #6455
Price: $25,000.00
