In older writings, it should probably be no surprise that secret recipes and secret writing often go hand in hand.

Today I was looking through Trinity College Library MS. 1351 (shelfmark O.7.23), a late 15th century manuscript “in an ugly hand”. I was led there by Daniel V. Thompson’s (1935) “Trial index To some unpublished sources for the history of mediaeval craftsmanship” (in Speculum), which contains a long list of unpublished manuscripts, most of which have some “receipts” (recipes) for making colour.

Two nice things about this manuscript are (a) that Trinity College have digitized it and placed it entirely online; and (b) that the manuscript is (the catalogue notes) “likely MS. 34 in the Catalogue of Dr Dee’s library. Experimentorum diversorum liber. De vernisio quo utuntur scriptores. Secreta philosophorum. De usu virgae visoriae et huiusmodi secreta multa: papyro 8vo.

As a result, it links all the usual suspects in an interesting way: which was well worth a blog post, if you ask me. 🙂

Anyway, here’s a simple cipher I found on fol. 10r that I thought you might all particularly appreciate. Even though seeing its basic key is very easy, I think you’ll find it still takes more than a little effort to decrypt it all:

Today’s Simple Cipher

Greek-letter-cipher

(Click on the above if you want a slightly higher resolution image to work from.)

Rather than just giving you the key, I thought it would be more fun to leave it to you all to see how you get on, I hope you don’t mind. Anyway, it’s much more fun than the GCHQ Christmas puzzle (which I actually thought was a bit tiresome).

Shall I give you a clue? Well… I wasn’t planning to, but seeing as you pulled that face… perhaps a small clue, then. Which is: you don’t actually need to be a cryptologist or code-breaker to break this cipher. Enjoy! 🙂

33 thoughts on “A simple cipher for you to decrypt…

  1. Helen Ensikat on February 3, 2016 at 7:41 am said:

    I’m definitely having more trouble parsing the 15th century English than substituting the right letters!

    Apparently I’m supposed to be doing something with some apples, a ‘spittel and pot’ and some ‘meet of whet’ tempered with something else. (Is ‘messe’ ‘serve’?) It’s sounding more like food than ink at this point.

  2. Helen E: but are you having fun with it? 🙂

  3. bdid1dr on February 4, 2016 at 3:58 pm said:

    Peas porridge hot. Peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Actually Helen’s ‘recipe’ for apple cider or mead sounds much tastier !
    hic !
    bd

  4. Helen Ensikat on February 5, 2016 at 2:49 am said:

    Absolutely! I don’t want to eat it until I know what it is though…

  5. A recipe for invisible ink perchance..?

  6. make wet hore (?) pommes (?) with
    spittel (spatel – spatula) and pot « … » the letter
    and the letter (litterally ?) “…”
    take the meal of wheat and
    temper it with the “.?..” of
    a “mix” berry, thyme and “…”
    the plakje “razend ?” therewith and
    let it dry and them “write a memo ?” (write with this ?)

  7. Ok not invisible ink, but maybe Typex? Patent pending. 😉 with a heap of phonetic spelling…
    Make wet your pommes with spittel and pot (put?) owght the letter and the letter being owght. Then take the meal of wheat and temper it with the white of a neseberry thine and anoint the place rassid there with and let it dry and then write anew.

    The berry exists… And rassid obviously means ‘to be erased’… I’m sure I saw it on Call My Bluff… 😉
    Owght needs to mean over I guess, if not ought (as in nought)
    In short, if you make a mistake rub it with a chewed up apple, cover it in berry-soaked flour, let it dry and good as new 😉

  8. Also wondering if the meel of wheat tempering could be with “the white of a negge (an egg) very thin(e)” as Beta is actually pronounced Veta if you’re Greek. And the recipe makes more sense than an obscure berry 🙂

  9. SirHubert on February 6, 2016 at 9:07 am said:

    I’ve enjoyed this – thank you for posting it. Not sure that anyone except maybe Heston Blumenthal would consider this as food, though!

    The writer occasionally confuses mu and nu, hence ‘amd’ for ‘and’ in the last line. There is a similar mistake in the sixth line, I think.

    The letter which looks like a Greek zeta is meant to be a gamma. And te larger ‘H’ is a plaintext ‘h’; the the smaller ‘H’ is presumably meant to be a Greek eta and is a plaintext ‘y’. This is faintly interesting, because while I have no idea how a fifteenth century Englishman would have pronounced ancient Greek, the traditional ‘English’ pronunciation of eta as taught in English schools in the nineteenth century was certainly ‘ee’, like a long ‘i’. (We now know that in antiquity it was probably pronounced something like the ‘ai’ in the English ‘hair’, or ‘ere’ in French ‘Vigenere’). There isn’t a direct equivalent for the semivowel ‘y’ in Greek, and for the writer to have chosen eta to represent this might suggest some familiarity on their part with the Greek language as well as the script. Otherwise, the Greek letter most visually similar to an English ‘y’ would be psi, which the writer could certainly have used as it’s not otherwise needed to write English in this way.

    I also take the liberty to suggest that people who speculate that the Voynich Manuscript might be enciphered by a polyalphabetic or running-key system, or something else equally complicated, might do well to bear this simple fifteenth-century cipher in mind.

  10. It’s a 14th-century Nahuatl song-book, right?

  11. Ken: yes. By which I mean “no, not really”. 🙂

  12. SirHubert: your point about over-complicated cipher explanations is well made, though doubtless will fall on countless deaf ears. 😐

  13. A formula for making corrections:

    Make wet your pumice with spittle, and put out the letter; and the letter being out, then take the meal of wheat, and temper it with the white of an egg, very thin, and anoint the place erased therewith, and let it dry, and then write anew.

  14. Pumice – brilliant. I would never have got that 🙂

  15. Clay: perfect, thanks! 🙂

  16. Nothing to add, Clay is the winner

  17. Ruby: thanks, now I don’t feel so bad admitting that the version I had planned to put up in a few days’ time wasn’t actually a patch on Clay’s. 😉

  18. Clay: Nick has GOT to get you on the ‘team’ for working on that ‘other’ mystery manuscript! (Not that I’m twisting your arm or putting you in headlock — I just really like to read any and all of the discussions which are posted to Nick’s pages, and pages, of fascinating manuscriptorial history ! )

    I’ll let my spell-checker choke on the six-syllable word I’ve just posted……
    See, Nick, I actually closed both parentheses!
    bd

  19. All I did was put together other people’s insights, especially Jay’s. My one real contribution was that “pommes” was “pumice” and not Latin for “apples” (which was my first thought when I read it). I used to play around with a similar Greek letter cipher I made up when I was a teenager, so I found it fairly easy to read.

    On the VM, Edith Sherwood (Google if you’re not familiar with her) suggests that it may have been an adolescent playing around (I once kept a diary in a made-up phonetic alphabet, not the Greek letter one, so I can understand the mindset). The VM looks like it was written rather fluently, which is what one might expect if one was writing one’s own language, but deliberately concealing it. Sherwood suggests Italian with abbreviations and anagrams within each word, which seems to me to make sense. Sherwood goes so far as to suggest it was written by a young Leonardo da Vinci, and even identifies a natal chart for him, but that seems to me to go too far. based on the evidence. My best guess is that the VM is a sort of commonplace book, and the cipher is just something the author was having fun with.

    Those are my thoughts on the VM for now. Comments?

  20. Clay: I struggle with Sherwood’s logic, evidence and presentation – for if there is even one thing that genuinely suggests that Leonardo was the Voynich Manuscript’s author, I have yet to see it. And one of the few things we can tell for sure about the scribe who wrote it was that he/she was right-handed, not left-handed.

    As far as your suggestion that the Voynich was a commonplace book, I’m not yet persuaded by that either. Like it or not, there’s something very driven and upscale about the Voynich: it covers a lot of ground – a lot of pages – and in a fairly sophisticated manner. If it’s fun, it’s certainly a headily intellectual and intense kind of fun. 😉

  21. bdid1dr on February 11, 2016 at 6:52 am said:

    Pomace — Pumice —
    Pomace forms during the wine-making process.
    Pumice is a light weight stone (volcanic) which has many uses for smoothing rough surfaces (leather/suede), carpentry, scrubbing dirty floors……

    So, why not get ‘loaded’ (drunk) while scrubbing those pots, pans, splintery wood …..

  22. SirHubert on February 11, 2016 at 8:17 am said:

    A problem with any claim that an individual X wrote the Voynich Manuscript is that Currier identified two scribes. Not one.

    But maybe there was a forgotten brother, Bruce da Vinci, who was right handed, and who helped Leo out occasionally?

  23. SirHubert: Currier’s multiple hands hypothesis is an interesting angle on the Voynich, which (I think) needs more analysis rather than more inferences just yet. Even 40 years on, the Voynichese hands still haven’t been properly analyzed (as far as I know)… so this is definitely a lacuna in Voynich research.

  24. SirHubert on February 11, 2016 at 10:00 am said:

    Nick: you yourself seem to have gone along with Hand A and Hand B elsewhere on your site, and I had thought that this distinction was generally accepted. But yes, he did suggest there might even be more hands than that involved and that’s something well worth pursuing.

    There are multiple hands in the Rohonc Codex also, incidentally.

    And I seem to remember you once telling Diane that you didn’t think The Voynich Manuscript was an autograph copy penned by Averlino himself, so no need to suggest that Hand B was his forgotten brother Bert.

  25. SirHubert: there is also the suggestion that what we consider two “hands” might instead be the same hand using two different types of quill – so I’d like to know whether a palaeographer would be able to eliminate this possibility, etc etc.

  26. SirHubert on February 11, 2016 at 10:46 am said:

    Oh, a palaeographer probably could. Even from a few minutes looking on the train, it seems that some letters in Hand A and Hand B have their component strokes written from top-down by one scribe and bottom-top by another.

    Because you’re dealing with an unfamiliar/invented alphabet, there would always be the counter-argument that different parts were written at different times, and so the (single) author was more or less used to writing the script fluently, and was using a different pen, with or without acute arthritis, failing eyesight, before or after a few bottles of Chianti…etc.

  27. SirHubert: exactly – though my suspicion is that Hand 1 and Hand 2 were made by two different scribes (and who were perhaps even using two different types of quill, as a matter of preference), I’d far prefer a more definitive and elucidatory answer as to precisely how this is the case, so that I can not only see stuff for myself but also understand the reasoning too.

  28. Let me clarify that what I liked about Sherwood’s hypothesis wasn’t Leonardo (which I stated there wasn’t evidence for), but the idea that it was a precocious adolescent playing around with language (or two friends, writing Hand A and Hand B). The genre inspiring it would be a Zibaldone, a collection of whatever strikes the author’s fancy (see Wikipedia article on commonplace books). The naked women are, well, adolescent male fantasy. It may be an attempt to create a fantasy world, which is why the plants and so on don’t seem to have any direct correspondence in the real world. I doubt that it’s a full fledged invented language, which would be difficult to carry on for that length, more likely Italian with several made up words and names. And when I said “fun” I meant it in an intellectual sense, the “fun” of the challenge of creating something.

  29. Clay: the idea that the Voynich Manuscript might be one or more adolescents’ fake zibaldone certainly seems reasonable on the surface (despite its Sherwood-SantaColoma shared DNA).

    But though their time may have been cheap, the vellum he/she/they used almost certainly wasn’t: and while I would have thought that the sophisticated internal structure of Voynichese would be fun to keep going for a page, sustaining it for hundreds of pages would be very difficult. And why include Quire 20 at all in such a ludibrium? Q20 would seem to be dreary beyond belief to fake just for the sake of it… and so forth.

  30. bdid1dr on February 11, 2016 at 5:09 pm said:

    From Simple Cipher to Simple Simon to Simple Scribes — we end up studiously studying Sahagun’s scribal system sooner than later. He did have several scribes/artists working for him – once he developed severe tremors (palsy?) and could no longer write legibly.
    🙂

  31. Every single page of the “Voynich Manuscript” was written, first by Sahagun while in transit (by ship) from Leon Province Spain. He then taught his Nahuatl students to write about their history and illustrate each and every item of interest. Sahagun also composed the “Psalmodia” which was written in Spanish phrases side-by-side with Nahuatl translations.
    So, can we DROP the Gawdawful name “Voynich” when referring to Benicke manuscript 408, at least? Or at least cross-index the contents of B-408 with the so-called Florentine Manuscript? Actually, the Florentine Manuscript is replete with many of the items in B-408. And every word of the Florentine Manuscript validates every item and discussion on B-408.
    Just so you know why I am able to translate (phonetically) every living thing which appears in B-408.
    Sahagun also included Cortez’ invasion of New Spain and his kidnapping of a young woman to use as a concubine, go-between/translator. Besides Cortez having a wife in Spain there is no mention of Cortez’ wife having any children — at least NOT in
    B-408. The Florentine Mss does discuss some details of Cortez’ extra-marital activities in “New Spain”.
    bd

  32. bdid1dr on February 15, 2016 at 6:28 pm said:

    So much for “Simple Cipher” discussion. Inevitably we end up on the same merry-go-round with ‘Very-Vile-Voiceless-V–nich-Non-Sense.

  33. bdid1dr on February 19, 2016 at 7:59 pm said:

    Malinche / Malintze and Cortez had at least two children.

    Nick et al : can you find any reference to another explorer to New Spain : Sa-a-ved-ra or Savedra . Apparently he was ‘in the explorers’ race for discovery of new lands. I mention him only because a Saavredra was a sponsor for the writing of the novel “Don Quixote’ . The author of the novel spent several months, severely injured, in that dreadful prison (which name has momentarily escaped my mind!

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