BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Folger Shakespeare Library -- Exhibit: Decoding the Renaissance

DC -- Folger Shakespeare Library -- Exhibit: Decoding the Renaissance:

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Description of Pictures: Decoding the Renaissance
500 Years of Codes and Ciphers
November 11, 2014–February 26, 2015
The Renaissance was the first great age of mass communication, but it was also the period when the art of secret writing came into its own. The new science of codes and ciphers produced some of the period’s most brilliant inventions, most beautiful books, and most enduring legacies. It left its mark on virtually every aspect of Renaissance culture, including the development of diplomacy and the waging of war, the creation of the postal system, the invention of sign language, and the search for hidden meanings in literature and the visual arts. And it provided the inspiration for the pioneering modern code-breaker William F. Friedman—chief cryptanalyst for the U.S. government from the 1920s to the 1950s. Friedman’s introduction to ciphers (as well as to his wife Elizebeth, a distinguished code-breaker in her own right) came through his early work on Sir Francis Bacon; and he drew directly on Renaissance texts and technologies throughout his cryptographic career.
Decoding the Renaissance explores some five hundred years of secret communication, introducing the tricks of the trade and revealing the surprising connections between Renaissance texts and technologies and modern methods of cryptanalysis. The exhibition brings together all of the key Renaissance texts on cryptography, many of Friedman’s most influential works, and the most mysterious of all unbroken codes, the so-called Voynich Manuscript, on loan for the first time from the Beinecke Library at Yale.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. FOLDEC_150213_008.JPG: Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers: The Renaissance was the first great age of mass communication, but it was also the period when the art of secret writing came into its own. The new science of codes and ciphers produced some of the period's most brilliant inventions, most beautiful books, and most enduring legacies. It left its mark on virtually every aspect of Renaissance culture, including the development of diplomacy and the waging of war, the creation of a postal system, the invention of sign language, and the search for hidden meanings in literature and the visual arts. The Renaissance, in turn, provided the inspiration for the pioneering modern code-breaker,William F. Friedman -- chief cryptanalyst for the U.S. government from the 1920s to the 1950s and regular researcher at the Folger. Friedman led the team that broke the Japanese code in World War II, wrote many of the field's foundational texts, and coined the very term "cryptanalysis" for the study of secret writing systems. His introduction to ciphers (as well as to his wife Elizebeth, a distinguished code-breaker in her own right) came through his early work on Sir Francis Bacon, and he drew directly on Renaissance techniques throughout his cryptographic career -- many of them learned from the books in this room. Decoding the Renaissance will take you on a tour of some five hundred years of secret communication in the company of the country's first cryptographic couple, revealing the surprising connections between Renaissance texts and modern methods of cryptanalysis.
2. FOLDEC_150213_021.JPG: The first printed cryptographic book was Trithemius' posthumous work on polygraphic (or multiple writing) systems, Polygraphiae libri sex. The title -page, which can be seen below, depicts Trithemius presenting the book to its dedicatee, Emperor Maximilian I. The monk behind him provides the keys to the locked book, whose secrets are central to the exercise of power in church and state.
3. FOLDEC_150213_031.JPG: John Wilkins Mercury; or the secret and swift messenger John Wilkins was Bishop of Chester and ond of the founding fellows of the Royal Society. His interest in language systems and mathematical patterns led him to produce a pioneering introduction to cryptography, named after the ancient god of communication, Mercury. Wilkins provided English readers with their best guide to avoiding suspicion using invisible writing materials, explaining that sal ammoniac dissolved in water will reappear when heated, the "juice of glow-worms" is visible only in the dark, and a "glutinous moisture" such as milk or fat will become legible when sprinkled with dust.
4. FOLDEC_150213_039.JPG: Receipt book Manuscript, compiled ca 1600 This book is a compilation of medical remedies and household secrets. Tucked between a trick for preventing fruit from rotting on the tree and an aid for female dieting, the page on the left includes two recipes for invisible ink; one uses ink made with rock alum that becomes visible when the paper is dipped in water, and the other uses ink made with lemon or onion juice that becomes visible when the paper is held before a flame.
5. FOLDEC_150213_049.JPG: Steganography: Vigenere's steganographic engraving used the stars themselves to pay eloquent (if cryptic) testimony to the presence of God in the heavens. By laying a trellis -- or alphabetical grid -- over an image, and following a prescribed pattern to link elements of the image to letters in a particular order, one could encrypt a message within an image. This image (see the original in the case below this panel) spells out a message from the beginning of Psalm 19 in Vigenere's native French... The message in the image is arranged in vertical groupings of 5 letters (or 5-tuplex). By laying the grid over the image, you can quickly see that a star within a grid square represents a letter [stars in column 1 correspond with the letters L, S, C, E, and I stars in column 2 correspond to N, S/X, U/V, E, and E; and so on]. A second layer to the encryption helps place what appears to be a random set of letters into a sequence that reveals the true message. By using a pattern within each grid square, the correct sequence of the letters can be determined. Don't be fooled by the fact that L is the first letter in the first square -- it is only because L is the first position that it ends up being the first letter of the decoded message.
6. FOLDEC_150213_053.JPG: Johannes Balthasar Friderici Cryptographia, 1685 At first glance, this image simply depicts a building under siege. But there are letters lurking in the window-panes. Variations in their shaded, unshaded, and dotted panels can be matched up with the alphabetical key on the next page, revealing a desperate message -- "Wir haben kein Pulver mehr" [We have have no more (gun) powder].
7. FOLDEC_150213_062.JPG: Gustavus Selenus Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae libri IX, 1624 Building on the system devised by Vigenere, the Duke of Braunschweig-Luneberg explained how a series of lines or dots within an image of any kind could be keyed to an underlying alphabetical grid. In this pastoral scene, each dot -- in the eyes of animals and people, the fruit on trues, and the stars in the sky -- signals through its location a specific letter and encodes an alchemical aphorism.
8. FOLDEC_150213_067.JPG: John Clotworthy, ciscount Maserenne Autograph letter to John Winthrop, Jr. with grille, 1634/35 This is a rare surviving example of a letter accompanied by the grille used to read its secret message. A note on the back of the letter told Winthrop to retrieve the "casement" from a goldsmith named Mr. Allen in Fleet Street: the four notches in its corners lined up with four dots on the letter itself, in the manner described by della Porta, and a note on the top of the grille told him which way was up.
9. FOLDEC_150213_077.JPG: Garpar Schott Schola steganographica In the 1850s, Kirscher invented a series of combinatorial boxes called Cistae or Arcae. Kircher's cryptographic chest -- depicted and described by his student Gaspar Schott in his Schola Steganographica -- anticipated the use of computers for information storage and security.
10. FOLDEC_150213_084.JPG: Kircher's Cryptographic Machines
11. FOLDEC_150213_086.JPG: Did You Know? Cryptology and codes played a role in the 2014/15 Folder Theatre season. The title characters in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart used codes to communicate with their armies on the battlefield and their friends in prison. The Caesar Cipher: The Caesar cipher is a substitution code where each letter in the alphabet is replaced by another letter a certain number of steps down the alphabet. The encryptor and the message's intended recipient would agree to a step of 3, for example, and thus A would shift to D, B to E, C to F, and so on. A Babington Plot: The Babington Plot takes its name from Antony Babington, who wrote a coded letter to Mary Stuart in prison. The letter detailed elaborate plans for a Spanish invasion of England, the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I and a 100-man rescue of Mary from the prison culminating in her ascension to the English throne. Although Mary and Babington believed that the cipher they used to encrypt their letters was secure, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster, Francis Walsingham, held the key to their code and intercepted every word that passed between them. Mary Stuart was convicted of treason and executed in February of 1587. Spymaster Francis Walsingham continued to serve Queen Elizabeth until his death in 1590.
12. FOLDEC_150213_090.JPG: Voynich Study Material: On March 9, 1954 after more than two years of planning, Friedman attended a meeting at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. He went there to talk to two of its most powerful fellows, the mathematician John von Neumann and the art historian Erwin Panofsky. Our only record of the meeting is this questionnaire about the Voynich Manuscript, with exacting questions by Friedman and careful answers by Panofsky.
13. FOLDEC_150213_094.JPG: Disks and Volvelles: In the final section of his short text Of Ciphers (the West's first surviving treatise on the subject), Leon Battista Alberti describes the construction and use of his cipher disk: "I make two similar circles, one larger called stable and the other smaller called mobile. I divide the circumference of each into 24 equal parts. Now I write out the alphabet in capitals in the calls of the larger circle (leaving out H, J, K, U, W, and Y) and the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the remaining four cells. Then a completely random alphabet is written out in small letters on the smaller inner circle. We place a pin through the centers of both circles and fix them on a common axis, around which the inner mobile circle turns. Now in order to use this device, you must have a copy of it, and your friend must also have one with the letters on both circles simlarly arranged an in no wise different. We decide between ourselves the arrangement which we intend as an indicator [i.e. the agreed position of the inner disk]; for an indicator is just like a key which lets us into the secret inner sanctum."
14. FOLDEC_150213_101.JPG: Bacon's Bilateral Cipher: Produced by Elizabeth Wells Gallup's Baconian team at Riverbank, this poster offers an explanation of how Bacon's bilateral cipher works. In the examples here, different permutations of 5-letter combinations of a-types and b-types (black vs. white, large vs. small, dashes vs. slashes, and multiple fonts) are used to make the words "BILATERAL CIPHER" express the word "THE". The example was designed by Friedman, whose signature appears on the lower right corner.
15. FOLDEC_150213_108.JPG: Codebooks: Readers of the first printed book of cryptography, Johannes Trithemius's Polygraphiae of 1518, may have been surprised to find page after page of Latin words arranged by alphabets; at first glance the book looks like a dictionary rather than a guide to secret writing. But the lists are meant to serve as a ready-made codebook and are cleverly arranged so that a sequence of words chosen to spell a particular sequence of letters will always form a coherent sentence -- in the case of Book I, a pious prayer. To take an example from the opening section, if we want to encipher the word "abba" (more commonly "abbas," meaning "abbot"), we would select Deus from the first list, clementissimus from the second, regens from the third, and celos from the fourth, producing "Most merciful God, ruler of the heavens" -- a perfectly plausible utterance for an abbot like Trithemius!
16. FOLDEC_150213_115.JPG: Alphabet as Code: For Friedman, letters themselves were cryptography's secret weapon, and they had as much power to change the course of battles as bullets and bombs. As he put it in his Six Lectures on Cryptology: "[T]he greatest and most powerful instrument or weapon ever forged or improved by man... is the weapon of literacy... and the most important invention, the one that made the weapon of literacy practical, was the invention of the alphabet."
17. FOLDEC_150213_118.JPG: George Digby, Earl of Bristol Coded letter written for King Charles I, April 27, 1645 This autograph letter, written by the Earl of Bristol for King Charles and sent to Prince Rupert or Prince Maurice to report on the progress of the rebel forces under Oliver Cromwell, shows what a document looks like when encrypted and decrypted using an agreed upon key (or "nomenclator"). In sensitive passages, individual letters and whole words are replaced with a set of arbitrary combination of letters and numbers that have then been translated back into plain text by the recipient or his secretary.
18. FOLDEC_150213_123.JPG: Nomenclator: The Key to Unlocking a Code: Using the running translation written above the ciphered text of George Digby's letter, it is possible to reconstruct the simple key that unlocks the message in this letter.
19. FOLDEC_150213_127.JPG: Sir Francis Walsingham Autograph letter, signed, partly in cipher, to unknown recipient Greenwich, May 26, 1574 Widely known and feared as England's first spymaster, Secretary of State Sir Francis Walsingham used every trick in the book to search out secrets among his enemies while keeping his own communications secure. Here he communicates Queen Elizabeth's wishes as the King of France was on his deathbed: he advises "great circumspection" in "the matter" and urges those involved to "beware whom they trust." He is careful to put the most sensitive information into cipher.
20. FOLDEC_150213_131.JPG: The cryptographic book emerged with -- and through -- the invention of moveable type, but people had been using cryptographic means to secure their communication for centuries before the advent of print. Diplomatic and commercial business throughout the medieval and early modern periods depended heavily on handwritten codes and ciphers. Official correspondence and private documents alike are peppered with mysterious symbols designed to be read only by those who had the key to the system.
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2015 photos: I retired from the US Census Bureau in god-forsaken Suitland, Maryland on my 58th birthday in May. Yee ha! Trips this year: a quick trip to Florida. two Civil War Trust conferences (Raleigh, NC and Richmond, VA), and my 10th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Los Angeles). Ego Strokes: Carolyn Cerbin used a Kevin Costner photo in her USA Today article. Miss DC pictures were used a few times in the Washington Post. Equipment this year: I mostly used my Fuji XS-1 camera but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Number of photos taken this year: just over 550,000.
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