“The Roger Williams Code” cracked (the old-fashioned way)…

A fulsome hat-tip to Flavia H for bouncing this rather nice Slate article on in my direction. It tells the story of how Brown’s student Lucas Mason-Brown managed to crack a 17th century shorthand system, one that had been used to squeeze a whole load of notes for an unpublished religious book on antipedobaptism (“opposing infant baptism”, if you’re interested) into the margins of a 240-page printed book after about 1679.

Its author was the theologian Roger Williams (as you may have guessed from the title), who was one of the founders of Rhode Island (hence the interest from Brown’s University, and in whose library the book sits). Incidentally, Williams was best known for his books “A Key Into the Language of America” (1643) [a little dictionary of Native American words], and “The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience” (1644) [which persuasively espoused the principle of absolute liberty of conscience], the latter of which caused Parliament to order “the public hangman to burn the book”. Really, anyone who can be that annoying in print is more than OK by me.

As to the importance of all this, I’d fully agree it’s hard to talk up unpublished 17th century notes on antipedobaptism: all the same, it’s still a nice slice of research, with history and sleuthery in equal measures – so what I want to say is “well done, Lucas, great job!” Next stop the Anton Transcript? =:-p