Cipher Mysteries

I've had a few recent emails from historical code-breaker Tony Gaffney concerning the Voynich Manuscript, to say that he has been hard at work examining whether Voynichese might in fact be an example of an early Baconian biliteral cipher. This is a method Francis Bacon invented of hiding messages inside other messages, by (say) choosing between two typefaces on a letter-by-letter basis - that is, ...

It's a nice historical detective story, one kicked off by John Dee, Frances Yates' favourite Elizabethan 'magus' (though I personally suspect Dee's 'magic' was probably less 'magickal' than it might appear), when he claimed to have told an angel that his "great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those tables of Soyga". Dee lost ...