Cipher Mysteries

Yet another interesting comment from Rene Zandbergen yesterday (to my flying potions post) sparked off a furious flurry of bloggery here at Cipher Mystery Mansions. While browsing through a large set of online manuscripts digitized (and hosted) by the University of Heidelberg, he found Cod(ex) Pal(atinus) Germ(anicus) 597 - an alchemical manuscript where a large amount of it is written ...

A new day dawns, bringing with it a nice email from Augusto Buonafalce in response to my post on Leonardo da Vinci's 'x'-like abbreviation for 'ver' (as recently mentioned by Edith Sherwood). Augusto points out that if you remove ...

In the 1564 printed edition of his cryptography manual, Giovan Battista Bellaso included seven challenge ciphers for his readers to break, along with a set of clues: these all remained unbroken and in obscurity until Augusto Buonafalce wrote about them in 1997, 1999, and 2006 in the journal Cryptologia. But that's all changed now! Tony Gaffney - who Cipher Mysteries regulars should remember from his ...

In a comment to a recent post on Alberti & Averlino, 'infinitii' asks what my recommendations would be for a Voynich Manuscript reading list... a deceptively hard question. Apart from the direct literature on the subject (Mary D'Imperio's "An Elegant Enigma", my "The Curse of the Voynich", and perhaps even Kennedy & Churchill's "The Voynich Manuscript"), probably the best first ...

A huge thanks to the indefatigable Tony Gaffney who very kindly took the time recently to double-check my transcriptions (some of them derived from Augusto Buonafalce's transcriptions) of Bellaso's various challenge ciphers against the copies held in the British Library. Of the twelve corrections he suggested, roughly half were typos on my part, while the remainder were places where I had transcribed punctuation-like marks ...

After I recently mentioned Bellaso's set of seven challenge ciphers from 1564 on this blog, Augusto Buonafalce very kindly emailed me with scans of Bellaso's three challenge ciphers from 1555. I've now transcribed these (as best I can) and have added them to the existing Bellaso cipher transcriptions page. I do acknowledge that the font that my theme currently uses for ...

A little while back, I asked Augusto Buonafalce about Renaissance cryptographer Giovan Battista Bellaso's challenge ciphers, completely unaware that he seems to have published more articles on them than anyone else on the planet. (Shame on me for not subscribing to Cryptologia, I really ought to.) In fact, Bellaso published two sets of challenge ciphers in his cryptography manuals: a set ...